Baumeister and Bushman are quick to point out that not all high self-esteem is bad. They often find themselves needing to explain, palms in the air, that high self-esteem can be great! High self-esteem, they say, can make you freakishly peaceful (or “exceptionally nonaggressive,” as they put it), because you’re so comfortable with yourself that criticism does not threaten your self-worth. They believe it’s the very small subset of people with easily threatened high self-esteem that are the dangerous ones. “In plainer terms,” Baumeister and Bushman write, “it is not so much the people who
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