Global self-esteem and specific self-views as determinants of people's reactions to success and failure.

Abstract

A critical question in self-esteem research is whether people's reactions to success and failure are guided by their global self-esteem level or by their more specific beliefs about their abilities and attributes. To address this issue, the authors led participants to experience success or failure on an alleged test and then assessed their cognitive and emotional reactions to these outcomes. In Experiment 1, specific self-views predicted participants' cognitive reactions to their performance outcomes, whereas global self-esteem predicted participants' emotional reactions to their performance outcomes. In Experiment 2, global self-esteem predicted participants' emotional reactions to their performance outcomes even after participants' beliefs about their more specific abilities and attributes were taken into account. These findings suggest that when it comes to understanding people's emotional reactions to success and failure, the effects of global self-esteem are not reducible to the way people think about their constituent qualities. Few statements are as incontrovertible as this: The way people feel about themselves is an important aspect of psychological life. Laypeople and professionals alike refer to these feelings as indicative a person's level of self-esteem. Through the years, self-esteem has been linked to a wide variety of social psychological phenomena, including conformity (Brockner, 1984), persuasion (Rhodes & Wood, 1992), cognitive dissonance (Steele, Spencer, & Lynch, 1993 ), subjective well-being (Diener & Diener, 1995), and social comparison processes (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1993; Gibbons & Gerrard, 1991; Wood, Giordano-Beech, Taylor, Michela, & Gaus, 1994),just to name a few. Self-esteem also appears to influence people's reactions to valenced outcomes. High self-esteem (HSE) people make more self-serving attributions for performance outcomes (Blaine & Crocker, 1993) and suffer less emotional distress when they fail than do low self-esteem (LSE) people (Brown & Dutton, 1995). The purpose of this article is to examine the source of these differences. One possibility is that these tendencies stem from differences in how the two self-esteem groups think about their particular abilities and attributes. HSE people generally think they have high ability and expect to do well when undertaking an achievement-related task. These perceptions could guide their reactions to failure. After all, if one thinks one has high ability, it is only logical to assume that success is due to one's ability but failure is not (Blaine & Crocker, 1993; Marsh, 1986; Miller & Ross,