This should be read as a story about belief versus data. Forty years of naked dogma resulted in massive social impact. It took a challenger to go through the data, and show that the ideas weren't true. And from the data, had been known to be not true for decades.
The social damage done by that dogma is likely severe.
The better approach is a scientific one. Measure. Question. Be sure that your beliefs are based on evidence, not theory.
Too bad that these things are very difficult, if not impossible, to do in the domain of psychology. How do you measure someone's self confidence? Their degree of narcissism? All you can do is ask them questions, and then argue over which set of questions are more accurate. There is no way to evaluate personality traits other than subjective observation.
Data is indeed the answer. Please, for the love of god, measure, question and quantify. But when it comes to social studies real data is very difficult to come by. Self reporting is the antithesis of empiricism. Baumeister does good work, given the field that he works in, and his ideas are powerful and useful. But at the end of the day, it's just a matter of social fashion. People prefer his ideas, or other ideas, or whatever suits them at the time. Anyone can come up with an experiment that shows that one psychological disposition is superior to another, or that kids should be taught this over that. These things change with the times. By comparison, F will always equal ma. There's no way to argue with real science. Everything else, is open to debate.
Not entirely. The article talks about this. The theory was that low self-esteem led to violence. The facts are that self-reports of high self-esteem are correlated with increased violence.
You might disregard the "self report" aspect of the studies. But the main conclusion is that the original theory is wrong.
For Branden, the violent people Baumeister wrote about might have appeared confident, but underneath all that bluster they actually had low self-esteem.“One does not need to be a trained psychologist to know that some people with low self-esteem strive to compensate for their deficit by boasting, arrogance, and conceited behavior,” he wrote.
It's all a game of he said/she said. The bottom line is that the human mind is opaque. There's nothing easier than theorizing about something that can't be measured, or even directly observed.
With some work, a computer can determine the video a person is watching in an MRI. It's not perfect, but it's amazingly close.
Saying "the human mind is opaque" is wishful thinking. It's magical thinking that somehow people (and thought) is different from everything else in the world.
You act as if disregarding the self-report component is minor, but surely it is fundamental.
The original theory is that bullying is a way for someone with low self-esteem to make themselves feel superior. By the definition of the theory, a bully so motivated not to see themselves as having low self-esteem that they will resort to violence. Someone who will resort to violence to avoid acknowledging something, is unlikely to self-report accurately on that same topic.
Self-report is therefore clearly an invalid measure by which to test this theory.
The social damage done by that dogma is likely severe.
The better approach is a scientific one. Measure. Question. Be sure that your beliefs are based on evidence, not theory.