Until January 1996, I believed that self-esteem was merely a meter with little, if any, causal efficacy. The lead article in the Psychological Review convinced me that I was wrong, and that self-esteem is causal: Roy Baumeister and his colleagues (1996)3 reviewed the literature on genocidal killers, on hit men, on gang leaders, and on violent criminals. They argued that these perpetrators have high self-esteem, and that their unwarranted self-esteem causes violence. Baumeister’s work suggests that if you teach unwarrantedly high self-esteem to children, problems will ensue. A sub-group of
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