Self-Esteem & Pride

Pride is what compels us to aim high rather than simply get by, and in this sense, it is a virtue. Yet pride also has a darker side, a facet that has earned it a billing as a deadly sin. I discovered in a series of psychological studies, people can feel pride in two very different ways.

One type of pride motivates the hard work and creative thinking. Another kind involves arrogance and egotism—thinking “I am the greatest (Mohhamad Ali). Depending on which kind of pride we feel, this emotion can have almost opposite effects on our thoughts and behavior. One brings out the very best in human nature, and the other elicits the worst. By understanding pride's two-sided nature, we can learn to harness this emotion to make the most of our goals and aspirations.

What Is Pride?

Pride is a pleasurable emotion that arises when people feel good about themselves, often in response to success. An extreme form of price is narcissism, which promotes aggression, hostility and conflict. As the emotion underlying self-esteem, pride should spur achievement, perseverance and caring for others. Superficially, these two sets of behaviors could not seem farther apart. Nevertheless, we had good reason to believe they are indeed two facets of the same emotion—psychoanalytic researchers studying narcissism and social psychologists investigating high self-esteem assume that pride is a central emotion driving both personality profiles.

To solve this puzzle, we set out to learn what, exactly, pride is. Robins and I conducted a study in which we asked undergraduates to list the feelings and behaviors they associate with pride. We then analyzed the associations and dissociations among all the words in our collection—for example, “achieving” versus “successful” or “accomplished” versus “egotistical.” These associations revealed to us that college students think of pride as both the destructive emotion that underlies narcissism and the achievement-promoting emotion that underlies self-esteem.

A similar analysis of how people react when they say they are proud of themselves netted complementary results. Judging by the emotions people reported, we determined, for example, that feeling productive tended to occur with feelings of self-worth but not arrogance. It seemed clear that we were looking at two types of pride, a distinction that helps us answer the age-old question of whether pride is a sin or a virtue. It can be either, and we have dubbed the two hubristic pride and authentic pride.

We and other researchers have further learned that the two types promote different behaviors. We found that individuals who frequently feel authentic pride have high self-esteem and tend to be extroverted, agreeable, creative and popular. These individuals also report wanting to help and advise others. They are generally communally oriented and more likely to engage in volunteer activities. In contrast, people who frequently feel hubristic pride have low self-esteem. They tend to be disagreeable, aggressive, manipulative, socially anxious and even clinically depressed, and more interested in derogating others than helping them.

Should You Seek Pride?

Yes and no. The trick lies in recognizing the inherent riskiness of certain prideful feelings. Research has yet to clarify how we cross from one kind of pride to the other, but we have some early hints. When we become too dependent on our pride; when it goes beyond being motivating and becomes a crutch for our sense of self—it can become dangerous. For example, finding ourselves more interested in basking in the glow of a compliment than taking pleasure in a hard-earned success can be a clue that our pride has become hubristic and potentially damaging. Given that prestige reaps the same benefits as dominance, those who have the self-awareness to choose one over the other can attain all the benefits of pride, without the costs.

Editor's Note: Big words, that are not self-explanatory, are hard to remember, so I have adopted the word, "self-esteem" to describe the middle ground between hubristic pride and authentic pride.

The Story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears "Author Christopher Booker characterizes this as the "dialectical three" where "the first is wrong in one way, the second in another or opposite way, and only the third, in the middle, is just right." Booker continues: "This idea that the way forward lies in finding an exact middle path between opposites is of extraordinary importance in storytelling".