The Evolution of Self - Esteem

Evolutionary psychology seeks to synthesize fundamental principles of evolutionary biology with modern psychological theories, leading to testable hypotheses about the design of the human mind. This synthesis has proved useful in guiding the discovery of previously unknown phenomena, generating new predictions not produced by prior psychological models, and providing cogent theories about entire domains of importance—has recently come under the theoretical lens of evolutionary psychology Evolutionary reasoning about psychological aspects of the self began when Barkow hypothesized that the self-concept is a composite of internal representations of individual characteristics that affect reproductive fitness (Barkow, 1989). Attributes expected to influence individuals' self-concepts are many, such as health, physical prowess, prestige, status, attractiveness, alliances, and resources, all of which have been integral to solving adaptive problems throughout human evolutionary history. Evolutionarily informed work on the self continued when Leary and Downs (1995) 2 proposed a sociometer theory of self-esteem. The sociometer theory depicts self-esteem as an internal gauge designed to monitor individuals' successes in interpersonal relationships, particularly the degree to which they are being included or excluded from social groups, and to motivate corrective actions when one's level of social inclusion gets dangerously low. Kirkpatrick & Ellis (2001), in an important conceptual elaboration, extend the sociometer theory by proposing that what is currently referred to as " self-esteem " is actually a collection of sociometers or self-esteems, each designed to monitor inclusion and motivate behavior in functionally distinct social domains such as mating, Each of the multiple self-esteem mechanisms is hypothesized to have been designed by natural selection to monitor information about the self that corresponds to solving a specific and recurrent adaptive problem faced by our evolutionary ancestors. The information so gained is hypothesized to activate psychological and behavioral processes designed to calibrate the information acquired through such monitoring and use it to solve specific adaptive problems (Kirkpatrick et al., 2002). These proposed functions of self-esteem are similar to resource holding potential (RHP) assessment, the hypothesized mechanism by which non-human animals gauge their competitive ability relative to their peers in order to facilitate optimal competitive behavior (for comparisons of self-This essay, building on the work of these previous authors, offers two proposals for the eventual goal of developing a comprehensive evolutionary psychological model of self-esteem. The first involves clearly separating the distinct psychological mechanisms 3 hypothesized to be involved in self-esteem experiences based on their function. That is, we propose that …