Copyright 1992 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/92/S3.00
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1992, Vol. 63, No. 3, 391-402
Gender and Self-Esteem Robert A. Josephs
Hazel Rose Markus
University of Texas at Austin
University of Michigan
Romin W Tafarodi
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
University of Texas at Austin Where does self-esteem (SE) come from? Three experiments explored the idea that men's and women's SE arise, in part, from different sources. It was hypothesized that SE is related to successfully measuring up to culturally mandated, gender-appropriate norms—separation and independence for men and connection and interdependence for women. Results from Study 1 suggested that men's SE can be linked to a individuation process in which one's personal distinguishing achievements are emphasized. Results from Study 2 suggested that women's SE can be linked to a process in which connections and attachments to important others are emphasized. Study 3 demonstrated that failing to perform well on gender-appropriate tasks engendered a defensive, compensatory reaction, but only in subjects with high SE. Thesefindingsare discussed with regard to their implications for the structure and dynamics of the self.
Do women and men have different self-concepts? To the limited extent that social psychologists have asked this question, it has been answered by comparing women and men on measures of self-esteem. And here the answer has been no. Although there are a few reports of higher self-esteem scores for men, the majority of studies do not find reliable differences in self-esteem between women and men (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974; Wylie, 1979). As theorists have begun to provide a detailed analysis of gender as a social construction, some are now arguing that the self-concepts of women and men are indeed likely to differ in some important respects (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986; Block, 1984; Gilligan, 1982; Markus & Oyserman, 1988; Miller, 1986; Stewart & Lykes, 1985). This divergence will arise as a consequence of the different patterns of social interaction and interpersonal experience that characterize men and women from their earliest years and throughout their lives. It is plausible then, that although men and women do not differ in the level of their overall self-esteem, the basis of their self-es-
The research and preparation of this article were supported in part by a grant from the University Research Institute of the University of Texas to Robert A. Josephs, National Science Foundation Grant BNS9010754 and National Institute on Aging Grant RO1 AG 08279-02 to Hazel Rose Markus, and a predoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Romin W. Tafarodi. We thank Fred Askari, Susan Cross, Steven Fein, Bill von Hippel, Steve Spencer, Claude Steele, and Bob Zajonc for their support and helpful comments. In addition, we wish to thank Mechelle Edwards, Carrie Proske, Rick Sanchez, and Becky Turner for their assistance with data collection. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Robert A. Josephs, Department of Psychology, 330 Mezes Hall, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712. Electronic mail may be sent to Robert A. Josephs at josephs@utxvms. 391
teem may well diverge markedly. The studies reported here are an initial step in the exploration of this hypothesis. One contention of theorists exploring the construction of gender is that the self-definitional project is somewhat different for men than it is for women, and thus men and women may develop different types of self-concepts. Specifically, men and women are likely to diverge in what they come to believe about the relation between the self and others, and the degree to which they see themselves as separate from or connected with others. Women are more likely than men to have what is called a collectivist, ensembled, or connected schema for the self. In such a self-schema, relations with other people, especially valued and important others, are crucial elements, and thus others are represented as part of the self, or included within the self. In contrast, men are relatively more likely to develop what is called an individualist, independent, or autonomous schema for the self. In this type of self-schema, others are represented not as part of the self, but rather as distinct from it (see Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Sampson, 1989; Triandis, 1989). The origins of these hypothesized differences in the self-definitional projects of men and women are a matter of considerable debate. Chodorow (1978), for example, argued that whereas mothers and sons will typically experience some difference, and thus a separation from each other, mothers and daughters will experience mainly similarity, and thus a continuity with one another. As a consequence, in the process of selfdefinition, sons will learn to emphasize and value difference and individuation, whereas daughters will learn to emphasize and value connection and relationships. From a different vantage point, Miller (1986) contended that women, because of their relatively powerless position in society, must be constantly attuned to and responsive to others, especially to the dominant others who control their fate. Relationships and interdependence with others will then be necessarily more central to the self-concepts of women, whereas positive individuation and
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
392
R. JOSEPHS, H. MARKUS, AND R. TAFARODI
dominance may be more central to the self-concepts of men (see also Swap & Rubin, 1983, for a similar perspective). In a related perspective, Eagly (1987) contended that from birth, men and women are assigned different roles to play in the hierarchical social structure and that it is these divergent social roles that give rise to different concerns and commitments. Alternatively, Bakan's (1966) relation of "agency" and "communion" to the sexes is predicated on biological differences. According to his treatment, women are inherently disposed toward a social (communal) "centering" of the self, whereas men are inherently disposed toward a egoistic (agentic) "centering" of the self. Regardless of the source of the difference, if women and men differ in their self-definitional projects, that is, connecting or relating for women and separating or individuating for men, then the basis of their self-esteem should also vary. What constitutes a positive view of self—a "worthy" or a "good" self—is notfixedor standard. Instead, it depends on the nature of one's self-definitional project and on what is central, salient, or important to the self. In the theoretical work on self-esteem, relatively little attention has been devoted to the basis of self-esteem. According to James (1890), self-esteem is the ratio of one's successes to one's pretensions. More recent views have contextualized James' early formula and have suggested that self-esteem derives from succeeding at what is valued in a given social-cultural niche (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, in press). For example, Hare and Castenell (1985) found that black and white fifthgrade students had equal levels of self-esteem. Yet on closer analysis, the self-esteem of these two groups of students was revealed to have different correlates. For the white students, self-esteem was related equally well to academic success and social success, whereas for the black students, self-esteem was related primarily to social success. Crocker and Major (1989) have argued that the absence of low global self-esteem among members of stigmatized groups is due, in part, to a selective devaluation of those dimensions on which the group performs poorly and a concurrent value placed on those dimensions on which the group excels. To the extent that men and women inhabit somewhat different social-cultural niches because of a divergence in their socialization experiences, and in their ongoing normative demands and expectations, differences in the correlates of their self-esteem may also be observed. For men, evaluating the self positively and feeling good about one's self should derive, in part, from fulfilling the goals ascribed to their gender—being independent, autonomous, separate, and better than others. For women, feeling good about one's self, or believing one's self to be of worth should derive, at least in part, from being sensitive to, attuned to, connected to, and generally interdependent with others. Accordingly, men with high self-esteem should differ from men with low self-esteem in the extent to which they separate or individuate themselves from others. Women with high self-esteem should differ from women with low self-esteem in the degree to which they are connected to others and others are included in their self-definition. The notion that others may be incorporated into the self has considerable theoretical precedent (e.g., Baldwin & Holmes, 1987; Mead, 1934; Sullivan, 1940; for a recent review see Markus & Cross, 1990). In a recent empirical exploration of such ideas, Aron, Aron, Tudor, and Nelson (1991) suggested that in
some close relationships, there may be a type of self-other merging in which others are included in the self. To examine whether men and women with varying levels of self-esteem indeed differ in their self-concepts, we explored the degree to which high-self-esteem (HSE) men, in contrast to low-self-esteem (LSE) men, see themselves as separate and different from others, and the degree to which HSE women, in contrast to LSE women, see themselves as interdependent and connected with others. Because it is likely that individuals do not have immediate or unobstructed access to the information or processes that generate self-esteem, we wanted to avoid using a questionnaire in which respondents were asked directly for self-reports about the importance of others to self-definition, or about the nature of their relationships with others. Instead, we sought to assess variation in how connected or separate the self is from others in a somewhat more indirect fashion. To this end, we used three different tasks: one in which respondents compared their abilities to those of others in important, self-relevant domains, a second in which they were asked to recall stimuli judged with relevance to self or others, and a third in which the effects of manipulating the proposed antecedents to male and female self-esteem were investigated.
Overview of Experiments If high self-esteem for men requires maintaining independence and some separation from others, it should be associated with a strategy of trying to individuate one's self from others in areas or domains of importance and value (e.g., Tesser, 1988). To explore whether men are more likely than women to individuate themselves from others, the first study involved a social comparison task in which respondents were asked to indicate the percentage of other people like themselves who are as good as they are with respect to various skills or abilities. The typical finding with this type of task is a marked false uniqueness in which respondents claim they are better than most other people in important abilities (e.g., Felson, 1981; Marks, 1984; McFarland & Miller, 1990).1 This type of distortion in social perception has been seen as reflecting a need for self-validation. In support of this point of view, Campbell (1986) found that LSE subjects were more likely to overestimate equality with others on their abilities than HSE subjects. We anticipated that the false uniqueness bias, reflecting a tendency to construe the self as different from others, would be especially pronounced among HSE men, that is, HSE men would be those who were successful in completing the culturally mandated, gender-appropriate task. In contrast, we did not anticipate such marked differences between HSE and LSE women because separation from others is not, for them, as important and highly valued a self-definitional task. The second study involved a task that had been previously ' This false uniqueness bias has been found in individuals asked to estimate the percentage of others who are perceived as performing similar and desirable health-relevant behaviors (Suls, Wan, & Sanders, 1988), and in subjects who were categorized as "low-fear" after filling out a fear survey (Suls & Wan, 1987). This lastfindingseems to be the only demonstration of an individual difference in the false uniqueness literature.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
GENDER AND SELF-ESTEEM
used to make inferences about the nature of the structure of the self-concept. In this task devised by Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker (1977), subjects made one of several types of judgments— phonemic, semantic, other referent (e.g., Walter Cronkite or a friend), or self-referent—about a list of words and then were given an incidental free-recall test. Studies using this task (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1989; Klein & Kihlstrom, 1986) found that respondents had the best recall for those words for which they made self-descriptive judgments. Generally, once stimuli were encoded with respect to the self, they were remembered better than stimuli judged for meaning, or for how well they described another person. Such findings have been used to suggest that the self-concept, as compared with other concepts in memory, is a very complex and elaborate structure. For men, particularly HSE men, encoding with reference to the self should produce the observed memory advantage. If, however, women are expected and encouraged to maintain an interdependence with others, they are likely to develop a strategy of construing the self in terms of others and through their connections to others. Thus, important others will be, by definition, self-relevant. For these women, self and important others may be encoded, not separately, but rather interdependently as part of the self-concept. The self-structure of HSE women may well include representations of important others, and conversely, the structures of these important others are likely to include representations of the self. As a consequence, for HSE women, encoding with respect to self (self-reference) or encoding with respect to important others (other reference) should produce similar effects on recall.2 The third study was designed to provide a direct test of the idea that men and women derive self-esteem, in part, from fulfilling gender-appropriate goals. Information that serves to promote or obstruct these goals will be provided to subjects in the form of personality test feedback. After the feedback, a measure of self-regard will be taken. We predict that defensive changes in self-regard will occur after the receipt of negative feedback, but only if the feedback serves to obstruct the goals ascribed to the person's gender.
Study 1 Method Subjects. Approximately 6 weeks before the start of the experiment, the introductory psychology subject pool (N ~ 1,500 students) was prescreened on a variety of psychological measures, including the 10item Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965). A random sample of subjects whose scores on this scale were between the bottom 1 Oth and 20th percentiles or between the top 10th and 20th percentiles of the subject pool were selected to participate in the experiment. In all, 43 men and 47 women participated in the study. Subjects were run in groups ranging in size from 4 to 8. The experimental session took approximately 20 min. Procedure. After reading and signing an informed consent form, subjects were given a 6-page questionnaire, entitled Abilities Survey. This questionnaire asked subjects to write down their best overall skill or ability as well as their best skill or ability in four different domains (athletic, academic, social, and creative), assess the importance of the skill with respect to their overall view of themselves on a 7-point scale anchored at not important and extremely important, and estimate the
393
percentage of students at the University of Michigan who were very good at the skill. Subjects were then fully debriefed and dismissed.
Results Subjects' self-esteem was measured using the Rosenberg SelfEsteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), a 10-item Likert-type scale with each item having five possible responses indicating strength of agreement with the item. The higher the numerical score, the higher the self-reported level of self-esteem. Therefore, a score of 40 represented the highest level ofself-esteem an individual could have, whereas a 0 represented the lowest level. Men had a mean score of 27.5, whereas women had a mean score of 24.1. This difference, although small, was significant, F(\, 88) = 4.14, p< .05. The mean Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale score (range 0-40) was 18.77 for LSE subjects and 32.04 for HSE subjects. Estimates of uniqueness. Subjects indicated the percentage of students at the University of Michigan who were thought to be very good at the skill the subject thought he or she was best at. So, for example, if a subject thought his or her best athletic skill was tennis, that subject would indicate the percentage of other students he or she believed to be very good at tennis. The lower the percentage, the better the subject believed himself or herself to be, relative to the comparison group. Subjects were asked to perform this judgment for their skills in the academic, athletic, creative, and social domains, as well as the one skill they felt they were best at, regardless of the domain. Table 1 depicts the mean percentage of University of Michigan students that subjects felt performed the subject's best ability very well, categorized by domain, gender, and level of selfesteem. An overall 2 (gender) X 2 (self-esteem) X 5 (domain) analysis of variance, (ANOV\) in which ability domain was a within-subject factor, revealed a main effect for gender, F(l, 86) = 4.24, p < .05, and a main effect for ability domain, F(l, 86) = 15.82, p < .01. In addition, when we averaged across all five ability domains, a planned comparison revealed that HSE men rated themselves as significantly more unique on their best abilities relative to LSE men and to HSE and LSE women, F(\, 84) = 4.99, p < .05. We proceeded to test the effect of gender and self-esteem on judgments of uniqueness within each ability domain. Social ability. A simple effects analysis (planned comparison) revealed that HSE male subjects thought that their best social abilities were shared by fewer of their classmates than did LSE subjects. Male HSE subjects were significantly different from the other three groups, F(L, 84) = 5.24, p < .03. The other three groups were not significantly different from each other. Athletic ability. Just as for social ability, HSE men thought their best athletic ability would be performed well by fewer students than subjects in the other three groups, F(l, 84) = 3.41, p < .07. The other three groups did not differ significantly from each other. 2
In support of the idea that differences in the self-concept may produce recall differences, Kuiper and Derry (1982; see also Derry & Kuiper, 1981) found that depressives showed enhanced self-referent recall, relative to other referent recall, but only for adjectives containing depressive content. Nondepressives did not show this difference.
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R. JOSEPHS, H. MARKUS, AND R. TAFARODI
Table 1 Mean Percentage of University of Michigan Students That Subjects Felt Performed the Subjects Best Ability Very Well, Categorized by Domain, Gender, and Level of Self-Esteem Ability domain and measure Social M
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
SD
n Athletic M SD n Academic M SD n Creative M SD n Overall M SD n
Men
Women
HSE
LSE
HSE
LSE
36 26.1 26
50 26.7 25
48 24.9 21
52 18.6 18
29 21.5 26
37 24.1 25
34 22.4 21
48 25.4
44 24.5 26
54 24.3 25
57 26.5 21
59 25.7 18
25 15.2 26
35 25.4 25
37 18.1 21
32 29.7 18
34 26.1 26
44 30.3 25
45 27.2 21
49 33.6 18
18
Note. All means and standard deviations are percentages. HSE = high self-esteem; LSE = low self-esteem.
Academic ability. Once again, HSE men thought of their best athletic ability as being shared by fewer of their peers than did any of the other three groups, F(l, 84) = 4.39, p < .04. The other three groups did not differ significantly from each other. Creative ability. As in all other ability domains, HSE men thought of their best creative ability as being shared by fewer of their peers than any of the other three groups, F(l, 84) = 3.57, p < .06. The other three groups were not significantly different from each other. Overall ability. We found that for the skill judged as their best overall, men thought of themselves as marginally significantly more unique than did women, F(l, 84) = 3.25, p < .08. Although HSE men did think of their best skill as being more unique than any of the other groups thought of theirs, this difference between HSE men and the other groups was not statistically significant (p < .15). The explanation for this weaker effect lies not in the pattern of means, but rather in the within-cell variances. It is not clear why there should be more variance for this item relative to the items that tap a specific domain. Because men had significantly higher self-esteem than women, and because HSE men were significantly higher in self-esteem than HSE women (M = 42.7 for men vs. M= 41.3 for women), r(47) = 2.5, p < .05, it may be the case that the interaction between gender and self-esteem on uniqueness estimates may simply be a function of the higher levels of self-esteem possessed by men. In other words, the tendency to exhibit false uniqueness may be a function of high self-esteem, regardless of one's gender. To test this possibility, we compared the 10
women with the highest self-esteem scores (M = 44.2) with all HSE men (M = 41.3)—the mean difference was significant, f(34) = 3.57, p < .01—and we compared these two groups on estimates of uniqueness (see Table 2). If our false uniqueness findings were simply an effect of high self-esteem, then these "super" HSE women would show a false uniqueness effect that was even stronger than that shown by HSE men. This was not the case. Indeed, the means for these selected subjects within each ability domain were indistinguishable from those of all HSE women (all ft
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1992, Vol. 63, No. 3, 391-402
Gender and Self-Esteem Robert A. Josephs
Hazel Rose Markus
University of Texas at Austin
University of Michigan
Romin W Tafarodi
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
University of Texas at Austin Where does self-esteem (SE) come from? Three experiments explored the idea that men's and women's SE arise, in part, from different sources. It was hypothesized that SE is related to successfully measuring up to culturally mandated, gender-appropriate norms—separation and independence for men and connection and interdependence for women. Results from Study 1 suggested that men's SE can be linked to a individuation process in which one's personal distinguishing achievements are emphasized. Results from Study 2 suggested that women's SE can be linked to a process in which connections and attachments to important others are emphasized. Study 3 demonstrated that failing to perform well on gender-appropriate tasks engendered a defensive, compensatory reaction, but only in subjects with high SE. Thesefindingsare discussed with regard to their implications for the structure and dynamics of the self.
Do women and men have different self-concepts? To the limited extent that social psychologists have asked this question, it has been answered by comparing women and men on measures of self-esteem. And here the answer has been no. Although there are a few reports of higher self-esteem scores for men, the majority of studies do not find reliable differences in self-esteem between women and men (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974; Wylie, 1979). As theorists have begun to provide a detailed analysis of gender as a social construction, some are now arguing that the self-concepts of women and men are indeed likely to differ in some important respects (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986; Block, 1984; Gilligan, 1982; Markus & Oyserman, 1988; Miller, 1986; Stewart & Lykes, 1985). This divergence will arise as a consequence of the different patterns of social interaction and interpersonal experience that characterize men and women from their earliest years and throughout their lives. It is plausible then, that although men and women do not differ in the level of their overall self-esteem, the basis of their self-es-
The research and preparation of this article were supported in part by a grant from the University Research Institute of the University of Texas to Robert A. Josephs, National Science Foundation Grant BNS9010754 and National Institute on Aging Grant RO1 AG 08279-02 to Hazel Rose Markus, and a predoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Romin W. Tafarodi. We thank Fred Askari, Susan Cross, Steven Fein, Bill von Hippel, Steve Spencer, Claude Steele, and Bob Zajonc for their support and helpful comments. In addition, we wish to thank Mechelle Edwards, Carrie Proske, Rick Sanchez, and Becky Turner for their assistance with data collection. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Robert A. Josephs, Department of Psychology, 330 Mezes Hall, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78712. Electronic mail may be sent to Robert A. Josephs at josephs@utxvms. 391
teem may well diverge markedly. The studies reported here are an initial step in the exploration of this hypothesis. One contention of theorists exploring the construction of gender is that the self-definitional project is somewhat different for men than it is for women, and thus men and women may develop different types of self-concepts. Specifically, men and women are likely to diverge in what they come to believe about the relation between the self and others, and the degree to which they see themselves as separate from or connected with others. Women are more likely than men to have what is called a collectivist, ensembled, or connected schema for the self. In such a self-schema, relations with other people, especially valued and important others, are crucial elements, and thus others are represented as part of the self, or included within the self. In contrast, men are relatively more likely to develop what is called an individualist, independent, or autonomous schema for the self. In this type of self-schema, others are represented not as part of the self, but rather as distinct from it (see Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Sampson, 1989; Triandis, 1989). The origins of these hypothesized differences in the self-definitional projects of men and women are a matter of considerable debate. Chodorow (1978), for example, argued that whereas mothers and sons will typically experience some difference, and thus a separation from each other, mothers and daughters will experience mainly similarity, and thus a continuity with one another. As a consequence, in the process of selfdefinition, sons will learn to emphasize and value difference and individuation, whereas daughters will learn to emphasize and value connection and relationships. From a different vantage point, Miller (1986) contended that women, because of their relatively powerless position in society, must be constantly attuned to and responsive to others, especially to the dominant others who control their fate. Relationships and interdependence with others will then be necessarily more central to the self-concepts of women, whereas positive individuation and
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
392
R. JOSEPHS, H. MARKUS, AND R. TAFARODI
dominance may be more central to the self-concepts of men (see also Swap & Rubin, 1983, for a similar perspective). In a related perspective, Eagly (1987) contended that from birth, men and women are assigned different roles to play in the hierarchical social structure and that it is these divergent social roles that give rise to different concerns and commitments. Alternatively, Bakan's (1966) relation of "agency" and "communion" to the sexes is predicated on biological differences. According to his treatment, women are inherently disposed toward a social (communal) "centering" of the self, whereas men are inherently disposed toward a egoistic (agentic) "centering" of the self. Regardless of the source of the difference, if women and men differ in their self-definitional projects, that is, connecting or relating for women and separating or individuating for men, then the basis of their self-esteem should also vary. What constitutes a positive view of self—a "worthy" or a "good" self—is notfixedor standard. Instead, it depends on the nature of one's self-definitional project and on what is central, salient, or important to the self. In the theoretical work on self-esteem, relatively little attention has been devoted to the basis of self-esteem. According to James (1890), self-esteem is the ratio of one's successes to one's pretensions. More recent views have contextualized James' early formula and have suggested that self-esteem derives from succeeding at what is valued in a given social-cultural niche (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, in press). For example, Hare and Castenell (1985) found that black and white fifthgrade students had equal levels of self-esteem. Yet on closer analysis, the self-esteem of these two groups of students was revealed to have different correlates. For the white students, self-esteem was related equally well to academic success and social success, whereas for the black students, self-esteem was related primarily to social success. Crocker and Major (1989) have argued that the absence of low global self-esteem among members of stigmatized groups is due, in part, to a selective devaluation of those dimensions on which the group performs poorly and a concurrent value placed on those dimensions on which the group excels. To the extent that men and women inhabit somewhat different social-cultural niches because of a divergence in their socialization experiences, and in their ongoing normative demands and expectations, differences in the correlates of their self-esteem may also be observed. For men, evaluating the self positively and feeling good about one's self should derive, in part, from fulfilling the goals ascribed to their gender—being independent, autonomous, separate, and better than others. For women, feeling good about one's self, or believing one's self to be of worth should derive, at least in part, from being sensitive to, attuned to, connected to, and generally interdependent with others. Accordingly, men with high self-esteem should differ from men with low self-esteem in the extent to which they separate or individuate themselves from others. Women with high self-esteem should differ from women with low self-esteem in the degree to which they are connected to others and others are included in their self-definition. The notion that others may be incorporated into the self has considerable theoretical precedent (e.g., Baldwin & Holmes, 1987; Mead, 1934; Sullivan, 1940; for a recent review see Markus & Cross, 1990). In a recent empirical exploration of such ideas, Aron, Aron, Tudor, and Nelson (1991) suggested that in
some close relationships, there may be a type of self-other merging in which others are included in the self. To examine whether men and women with varying levels of self-esteem indeed differ in their self-concepts, we explored the degree to which high-self-esteem (HSE) men, in contrast to low-self-esteem (LSE) men, see themselves as separate and different from others, and the degree to which HSE women, in contrast to LSE women, see themselves as interdependent and connected with others. Because it is likely that individuals do not have immediate or unobstructed access to the information or processes that generate self-esteem, we wanted to avoid using a questionnaire in which respondents were asked directly for self-reports about the importance of others to self-definition, or about the nature of their relationships with others. Instead, we sought to assess variation in how connected or separate the self is from others in a somewhat more indirect fashion. To this end, we used three different tasks: one in which respondents compared their abilities to those of others in important, self-relevant domains, a second in which they were asked to recall stimuli judged with relevance to self or others, and a third in which the effects of manipulating the proposed antecedents to male and female self-esteem were investigated.
Overview of Experiments If high self-esteem for men requires maintaining independence and some separation from others, it should be associated with a strategy of trying to individuate one's self from others in areas or domains of importance and value (e.g., Tesser, 1988). To explore whether men are more likely than women to individuate themselves from others, the first study involved a social comparison task in which respondents were asked to indicate the percentage of other people like themselves who are as good as they are with respect to various skills or abilities. The typical finding with this type of task is a marked false uniqueness in which respondents claim they are better than most other people in important abilities (e.g., Felson, 1981; Marks, 1984; McFarland & Miller, 1990).1 This type of distortion in social perception has been seen as reflecting a need for self-validation. In support of this point of view, Campbell (1986) found that LSE subjects were more likely to overestimate equality with others on their abilities than HSE subjects. We anticipated that the false uniqueness bias, reflecting a tendency to construe the self as different from others, would be especially pronounced among HSE men, that is, HSE men would be those who were successful in completing the culturally mandated, gender-appropriate task. In contrast, we did not anticipate such marked differences between HSE and LSE women because separation from others is not, for them, as important and highly valued a self-definitional task. The second study involved a task that had been previously ' This false uniqueness bias has been found in individuals asked to estimate the percentage of others who are perceived as performing similar and desirable health-relevant behaviors (Suls, Wan, & Sanders, 1988), and in subjects who were categorized as "low-fear" after filling out a fear survey (Suls & Wan, 1987). This lastfindingseems to be the only demonstration of an individual difference in the false uniqueness literature.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
GENDER AND SELF-ESTEEM
used to make inferences about the nature of the structure of the self-concept. In this task devised by Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker (1977), subjects made one of several types of judgments— phonemic, semantic, other referent (e.g., Walter Cronkite or a friend), or self-referent—about a list of words and then were given an incidental free-recall test. Studies using this task (e.g., Greenwald & Banaji, 1989; Klein & Kihlstrom, 1986) found that respondents had the best recall for those words for which they made self-descriptive judgments. Generally, once stimuli were encoded with respect to the self, they were remembered better than stimuli judged for meaning, or for how well they described another person. Such findings have been used to suggest that the self-concept, as compared with other concepts in memory, is a very complex and elaborate structure. For men, particularly HSE men, encoding with reference to the self should produce the observed memory advantage. If, however, women are expected and encouraged to maintain an interdependence with others, they are likely to develop a strategy of construing the self in terms of others and through their connections to others. Thus, important others will be, by definition, self-relevant. For these women, self and important others may be encoded, not separately, but rather interdependently as part of the self-concept. The self-structure of HSE women may well include representations of important others, and conversely, the structures of these important others are likely to include representations of the self. As a consequence, for HSE women, encoding with respect to self (self-reference) or encoding with respect to important others (other reference) should produce similar effects on recall.2 The third study was designed to provide a direct test of the idea that men and women derive self-esteem, in part, from fulfilling gender-appropriate goals. Information that serves to promote or obstruct these goals will be provided to subjects in the form of personality test feedback. After the feedback, a measure of self-regard will be taken. We predict that defensive changes in self-regard will occur after the receipt of negative feedback, but only if the feedback serves to obstruct the goals ascribed to the person's gender.
Study 1 Method Subjects. Approximately 6 weeks before the start of the experiment, the introductory psychology subject pool (N ~ 1,500 students) was prescreened on a variety of psychological measures, including the 10item Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965). A random sample of subjects whose scores on this scale were between the bottom 1 Oth and 20th percentiles or between the top 10th and 20th percentiles of the subject pool were selected to participate in the experiment. In all, 43 men and 47 women participated in the study. Subjects were run in groups ranging in size from 4 to 8. The experimental session took approximately 20 min. Procedure. After reading and signing an informed consent form, subjects were given a 6-page questionnaire, entitled Abilities Survey. This questionnaire asked subjects to write down their best overall skill or ability as well as their best skill or ability in four different domains (athletic, academic, social, and creative), assess the importance of the skill with respect to their overall view of themselves on a 7-point scale anchored at not important and extremely important, and estimate the
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percentage of students at the University of Michigan who were very good at the skill. Subjects were then fully debriefed and dismissed.
Results Subjects' self-esteem was measured using the Rosenberg SelfEsteem Scale (Rosenberg, 1965), a 10-item Likert-type scale with each item having five possible responses indicating strength of agreement with the item. The higher the numerical score, the higher the self-reported level of self-esteem. Therefore, a score of 40 represented the highest level ofself-esteem an individual could have, whereas a 0 represented the lowest level. Men had a mean score of 27.5, whereas women had a mean score of 24.1. This difference, although small, was significant, F(\, 88) = 4.14, p< .05. The mean Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale score (range 0-40) was 18.77 for LSE subjects and 32.04 for HSE subjects. Estimates of uniqueness. Subjects indicated the percentage of students at the University of Michigan who were thought to be very good at the skill the subject thought he or she was best at. So, for example, if a subject thought his or her best athletic skill was tennis, that subject would indicate the percentage of other students he or she believed to be very good at tennis. The lower the percentage, the better the subject believed himself or herself to be, relative to the comparison group. Subjects were asked to perform this judgment for their skills in the academic, athletic, creative, and social domains, as well as the one skill they felt they were best at, regardless of the domain. Table 1 depicts the mean percentage of University of Michigan students that subjects felt performed the subject's best ability very well, categorized by domain, gender, and level of selfesteem. An overall 2 (gender) X 2 (self-esteem) X 5 (domain) analysis of variance, (ANOV\) in which ability domain was a within-subject factor, revealed a main effect for gender, F(l, 86) = 4.24, p < .05, and a main effect for ability domain, F(l, 86) = 15.82, p < .01. In addition, when we averaged across all five ability domains, a planned comparison revealed that HSE men rated themselves as significantly more unique on their best abilities relative to LSE men and to HSE and LSE women, F(\, 84) = 4.99, p < .05. We proceeded to test the effect of gender and self-esteem on judgments of uniqueness within each ability domain. Social ability. A simple effects analysis (planned comparison) revealed that HSE male subjects thought that their best social abilities were shared by fewer of their classmates than did LSE subjects. Male HSE subjects were significantly different from the other three groups, F(L, 84) = 5.24, p < .03. The other three groups were not significantly different from each other. Athletic ability. Just as for social ability, HSE men thought their best athletic ability would be performed well by fewer students than subjects in the other three groups, F(l, 84) = 3.41, p < .07. The other three groups did not differ significantly from each other. 2
In support of the idea that differences in the self-concept may produce recall differences, Kuiper and Derry (1982; see also Derry & Kuiper, 1981) found that depressives showed enhanced self-referent recall, relative to other referent recall, but only for adjectives containing depressive content. Nondepressives did not show this difference.
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R. JOSEPHS, H. MARKUS, AND R. TAFARODI
Table 1 Mean Percentage of University of Michigan Students That Subjects Felt Performed the Subjects Best Ability Very Well, Categorized by Domain, Gender, and Level of Self-Esteem Ability domain and measure Social M
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SD
n Athletic M SD n Academic M SD n Creative M SD n Overall M SD n
Men
Women
HSE
LSE
HSE
LSE
36 26.1 26
50 26.7 25
48 24.9 21
52 18.6 18
29 21.5 26
37 24.1 25
34 22.4 21
48 25.4
44 24.5 26
54 24.3 25
57 26.5 21
59 25.7 18
25 15.2 26
35 25.4 25
37 18.1 21
32 29.7 18
34 26.1 26
44 30.3 25
45 27.2 21
49 33.6 18
18
Note. All means and standard deviations are percentages. HSE = high self-esteem; LSE = low self-esteem.
Academic ability. Once again, HSE men thought of their best athletic ability as being shared by fewer of their peers than did any of the other three groups, F(l, 84) = 4.39, p < .04. The other three groups did not differ significantly from each other. Creative ability. As in all other ability domains, HSE men thought of their best creative ability as being shared by fewer of their peers than any of the other three groups, F(l, 84) = 3.57, p < .06. The other three groups were not significantly different from each other. Overall ability. We found that for the skill judged as their best overall, men thought of themselves as marginally significantly more unique than did women, F(l, 84) = 3.25, p < .08. Although HSE men did think of their best skill as being more unique than any of the other groups thought of theirs, this difference between HSE men and the other groups was not statistically significant (p < .15). The explanation for this weaker effect lies not in the pattern of means, but rather in the within-cell variances. It is not clear why there should be more variance for this item relative to the items that tap a specific domain. Because men had significantly higher self-esteem than women, and because HSE men were significantly higher in self-esteem than HSE women (M = 42.7 for men vs. M= 41.3 for women), r(47) = 2.5, p < .05, it may be the case that the interaction between gender and self-esteem on uniqueness estimates may simply be a function of the higher levels of self-esteem possessed by men. In other words, the tendency to exhibit false uniqueness may be a function of high self-esteem, regardless of one's gender. To test this possibility, we compared the 10
women with the highest self-esteem scores (M = 44.2) with all HSE men (M = 41.3)—the mean difference was significant, f(34) = 3.57, p < .01—and we compared these two groups on estimates of uniqueness (see Table 2). If our false uniqueness findings were simply an effect of high self-esteem, then these "super" HSE women would show a false uniqueness effect that was even stronger than that shown by HSE men. This was not the case. Indeed, the means for these selected subjects within each ability domain were indistinguishable from those of all HSE women (all ft
