Chapter 6: Self-Esteem = Success/Pretensions: Assessing Pretensions/Importance in Self-Esteem

William James (1890) argued that our self-worth “depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do” (p. 201), and that thus, global self-esteem was the ratio of one’s successes to one’s pretensions or aspirations toward success in the various domains of one’s life: self-esteem = success/ pretensions. Hence we can increase self-esteem by diminishing the denominator (increase our success) or by increasing the numerator (reduce the importance of our goals/ideals) . James further argued that we combine our various dimensions of success and pretensions according to importance: “in an hierarchical scale according to their worth” (p. 202). Over the past century since James’s writings, we have been most successful at measuring and understanding the numerator, know somewhat less about the denominator, and have had little success at combining the two together. This notion that we weight various conceptions of self to form an overall or general self-worth according to the relative importance of each dimension has been one of the more enduring but least supported claims in the psychological literature.