Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem

Conventional wisdom has regarded low self-esteem asan important cause of violence, but the oppo-site view is theoretically viable. An interdisciplinary review of evidence about aggression, crime, and violence contradicted the view that low self-esteem is an important cause. Instead, violence appears to be most commonly a result of threatened gotismwthat is, highly favorable views of self that are disputed by some person or circumstance. Inflated, unstable, or tentative beliefs in the self's uperi-ority may be most prone to encountering threats and hence to causing violence. The mediating process may involve directing anger outward as a way of avoiding a downward revision of the self-concept. Only a minority of human violence can be understood as ra-tional, instrumental behavior aimed at securing or protecting ma-terial rewards. The pragmatic futility of most violence has been widely recognized: Wars harm both sides, most crimes yield little financial gain, terrorism and assassination almost never bring about he desired political changes, most rapes fail to bring sexual pleasure, torture rarely elicits accurate or useful information, and most murderers oon regret heir actions as pointless and self