Many people have thought for decades that low self-esteem causes aggression. There are many authors who have cited this belief or who have used it as an implicit assumption to explain their findings regarding other variables. It is difficult to establish the origins of this idea. Many have searched the literature without finding any original theoretical statement of that view and there is no real investigation that can provide strong empirical evidence that low self-esteem causes aggression. It seems that the theory entered into conventional wisdom without ever being empirically establish.

However, many studies show that the view of low self-esteem does not easily reconcile with the theory that low self-esteem causes aggression. Many study findings show that people with low self-esteem are uncertain and confused about themselves and that they are oriented toward avoiding loss and risk and they are modest, shy, lacking confidence in themselves and submitting readily to other people’s influence. It is not very likely that these patterns increase aggression and some even seem likely to discourage it. People with low self-esteem want to avoid risk and loss and attacking someone is eminently risky. The people with low self-esteem lack confidence of success, but aggression is usually undertaken in the expectation of defeating the other person. People with low self-esteem usually submit to influence, but aggression is often engaged to reject and resist external influence. People with low self-esteem are confused about who they are, but aggression is likely to be an attempt to defend and assert a strongly held opinion about oneself.

Violent men

If you look at violent individuals, than you’ll probably not find them to have low self-esteem. Most studies have focused on violent men, but it seems reasonable to assume that violent women conform to similar patterns. Violent people have a strong sense of personal superiority and their violence often stems from a sense of wounded pride. When someone questions their view of self, they lash out in response. One review showed that favourable self-regard is linked to violence in one sphere after another. Rapist, wife beaters, gang members and murderers are all marked by strongly held views of their own superiority. When you have two groups and these two differ in self-esteem, the group with the higher self-esteem will be more violent than the other. People with manic depression tend to be more aggressive and violent during their manic stage (favourable views of self) than during the depression phase (self-esteem low). Alcohol intoxication also boosts self-esteem temporarily and it also boosts aggressive tendencies. There are many more examples that show that aggressive, violent people hold highly favourable opinions of themselves. When the favourable opinions are disputed or questioned by other people, aggressions seems to show. It therefore seems plausible that aggression results from threatened egotism.

Aggression and self-regard

The low self-esteem theory is not plausible. What if scientists go to the opposite conclusion, namely that high self-esteem causes violence? The writers think that they shouldn’t hold the opposite view without knowing whether many non-violent individuals also have high self-esteem. What seems surprising is that controlled studies linking self-esteem to aggression are almost non-existent. It seems unlikely that no one has ever bothered to study the question. It seems more plausible that such investigations have been done, but that they have not been published because they failed to find any clear link. There are a few studies that looked at the link between self-esteem and hostile tendencies and they found that people with high self-esteem tended to cluster at both the hostile and non-hostile extremes.

The difference between these two was the stability in self-esteem. The researchers assessed this by measuring self-esteem on different occasions and computing how much variability each individual showed over time. People whose self-esteem was high and stable (people whose favourable view of self was impervious) were the least prone to hostility. People with high and unstable self-esteem scored highest on hostility. It seems that violent individuals are one subset of people with high self-esteem. High self-esteem contains several different kinds of people. One of those kinds is non-aggressive and the other is aggressive. More researchers are agreeing that individuals with high self-esteem form a heterogeneous category. More researchers have begun to focus on self-esteem. Other scientists are beginning to use related constructs, like narcissism. Narcissism is holding a grandiose view of personal superiority, an inflated sense of entitlement, fantasies of personal greatness, low empathy. Its quit plausible that these traits are linked to aggression and violence. This is especially the case when somebody disputes their assessment of self. Research has also found that narcissism is linked to high and unstable self-esteem. Narcissism seems a promising candidate to study.

The writers of this text have done laboratory tests of links among self-esteem, aggression and narcissism. In some studies, participants were insulted by a confederate posing as another participant and they were later given the opportunity to aggress against that person (or another person) by means of sounding an aversive blast of loud noise. In both studies, the highest levels of aggression were exhibited by people who had scored high on narcissism and had been insulted. Self-esteem had no effect on aggression by itself, and high or low self-esteem didn’t either in combination with receiving the insult. These results confirm the link between threatened egotism and aggression. It also contradicts the theory that low self-esteem causes violence. It is not fair to depict narcissists as generally aggressive. In the writers’ research, narcissists’ aggression did not differ from that of other people as long as there was no insulting provocation.

Narcissism is not directly a cause of aggression and can be better understood as a risk factor that can contribute to increasing a violent response to provocations. When the narcissists were insulted, they were no more aggressive than anyone else toward an innocent third person. Narcissists are heavily invested in their high opinion of themselves and they also want others to share and confirm this opinion. When someone questions their self-portrait, the narcissists turn aggressive in response to those people. The aggression of narcissists is a means of defending the grandiose self-view.

But can laboratory studies really capture what happens out in the real world, where violence takes a more serious and sometimes even deadly form? To answer this question, the writers conducted another study in which they obtained self-esteem and narcissism scores from incarcerated violent felons. The researchers thought that being held in prison and the failure experience of having been arrested, convicted and sentences would push the scores toward low self-esteem and low narcissism. But, the prisoners’ scores pointed toward high narcissism as the major cause of aggression. The self-esteem scores were comparable to the scores of published samples. The narcissism scores were significantly higher than the published norms from all other studies. The prisoner group outscored other groups on superiority and entitlement. These findings show that the dangerous aspects of narcissism are the inflated sense of being superior to others and being entitled to special privileges.

Deep down inside

Many researchers have raised the question whether the egotism of aggressive people is a superficial form of bluster that is put on to conceal deep-rooted insecurities and self-doubts. This question suggests that aggressive people do have low self-esteem but simply act as if they do not. Maybe wife beaters really perceive themselves as inferior beings, and their aggressive assertion of superiority is just a cover-up. Researchers have sought to find this inner core of self-doubt and they reported that they could not do so. Basically, all studies that have studied the links between narcissism and self-esteem have found a positive correlation, so indicating that narcissists have high self-esteem. Even if such evidence could be found, the view that low self-esteem causes aggression would still be wrong. By now it should be clear that overt low self-esteem does not cause aggression. Hidden low self-esteem can’t cause aggression if non-hidden low self-esteem has no such effect. But when you focus the theory on the hidden quality of low self-esteem requires one to consider what it is that is hiding it. This brings the analysis back to egotism. It would be the sense of superiority that is responsible for aggression. This is even the case if one could show that the sense of superiority is only on the surface and conceals an underlying low self-esteem. No one has shown that.

According to the writers, it is time to abandon the quest for simple links between self-esteem and aggression. Low self-esteem doesn’t cause violence and the opposite seems to be true, but too simple. High self-esteem is a characteristic of highly aggressive individuals and non-aggressive ones, so direct prediction tends to be inconclusive. Researchers have looked at other patterns and patterns of narcissism and instability of self-esteem have proven successful in recent investigations. Of course, more research is needed. The evidence best fits the view that aggression is most likely when people with a narcissistically inflated view of their personal superiority encounter someone who disputes that opinion. Aggression is then a means of defending a favourable view of self against someone who seeks to deflate it. It seems that threatened egotism and not low self-esteem is the most explosive recipe for violence. Research should also look into what aggressive people hope to accomplish by responding violently to an insult. There should also be looked into emotion processes involved in egotistical violence. Does aggression really make the aggressor feel better?