Self-Esteem Test

The thing this test is built against

For about thirty years, the popular position was that self-esteem is a cause: raise it and school results, behaviour, relationships and mental health improve. Programmes were built on it. A great deal of children’s education was reorganised around it.

It did not hold up. The large reviews found that self-esteem is much more often a consequence of doing well than a cause of it, that the correlations with real outcomes are modest and largely explained by other things, and that deliberately raising it produces little. Some of the interventions produced nothing at all, and a few made performance worse.

So a test that just tells you how high your self-esteem is has measured the least useful available quantity. What does predict things is what your regard rests on, and how much it moves — which is why those are two of the five scales here.

Contingent self-esteem behaves like a debt

The most useful idea on this page.

Self-worth that depends on achievement, approval, comparison or appearance has to be re-earned. It goes up when things go well and is withdrawn when they do not, which means it is permanently at risk from events outside your control.

That produces a specific and recognisable pattern: someone whose self-esteem scores high, who is nonetheless anxious before every evaluation, defensive about criticism, and unable to rest without having earned it. From the outside they look confident. From the inside they are servicing a debt.

This is why raising self-esteem is the wrong target for a lot of people. If it is contingent, raising it just increases the amount that can be lost. The work is decoupling it — which is what the compassion scale is about.

Stability matters more than height

A second finding that inverts the usual advice.

Unstable self-esteem — the kind that swings on a piece of criticism or a bad morning — is associated with more anger, more defensiveness and more distress than low but steady self-esteem is. People whose regard for themselves moves a great deal are, on average, having a harder time than people whose regard is modest and does not move.

If your stability scale is low, that is more worth addressing than the level.

Self-compassion is the better target

The alternative that came out of the same research, and the one with the evidence behind it now.

Self-compassion is treating yourself as you would treat somebody you cared about who was going through the same thing. It is not self-esteem: it does not require a favourable comparison, it does not require you to be doing well, and it cannot be lost by failing at something.

On most of what self-esteem was supposed to deliver — resilience after failure, motivation to try again, lower anxiety, less defensiveness — self-compassion performs better, and it does so without the contingency problem, because there is nothing to earn.

It is also the most trainable scale here. The entry point is a single question, asked at the moment it is least welcome: would I say this, out loud, to somebody I cared about?

About the items

The baseline scale follows the structure of the widely used global self-esteem measures. The other four follow the constructs that the research on contingency, stability and self-compassion identifies. The statements are written for this test rather than reproduced from a copyrighted scale.

The free run takes the first five statements of each facet, giving you a real reading on all five rather than a precise reading on two.

If your self-regard is very low and it has been for a long time, that is worth raising with a doctor — persistently low self-worth is one of the recognised features of depression, and this test does not distinguish between the two.