Ctrl+F "spirit level", "anxiety", "social status", "social evaluative threat" = 0 results I feel like you cannot really discuss the "self-esteem craze" without

Ctrl+F "spirit level", "anxiety", "social status", "social evaluative threat" = 0 results I feel like you cannot really discuss the "self-esteem craze" without the larger underlying societal forces at play. When psychologists observe high self-esteem scores you roughly notice two categories of people: 1. a healthier kind linked to positive outcomes: it centers on a fairly well-founded sense of confidence, with a reasonably accurate view of one's strengths in different situations and an ability to recognize one’s weaknesses. 2. an unhealthy, insecure narcissism: it is primarily defensive and involved a denial of weaknesses, i.e. an internal attempt to talk oneself up and maintain a positive sense of oneself in the face of threats to self-esteem. At the same as we saw a rise in self-esteem scores, we see a surge in anxiety and depression. This apparent paradox is solved by considering that the second kind and the rise in anxiety are linked to an increase in social evaluative threat: threats which created the possibility for loss of social esteem. They are the main source of stress in experiments since they are closely linked to the primary sources of stress in modern society: low social status, lack of friends, and stress during one's early life. In short, our social status is closely linked to how we define our worth and how much we are valued. In our increasingly-mobile world where we do not have settled communities but are surrounded by strangers, our social status becomes even more important. The greater the social status differentials in our society, the bigger the potential social evaluative threat. Hence, greater inequality seems to heighten people’s social evaluation anxieties by increasing the importance of social status. And our society has only become more unequal. This is one of the reasons why higher social inequality among rich nations is so closely linked to a range of health and social problems and is uncorrelated to the average income among those rich nations. This is discussed much more cogently in The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.