I’m still struggling with exactly what you mean when you talk about ‘self-esteem’. You seem to be saying something like this:
There is a somewhat objective property called ‘status’ that we can observe people having more or less of in a given situation. Many social interactions serve to raise or lower relative status positions. There is a hidden variable called ‘self-esteem’ which is the thing that is actually being manipulated in social interactions and it is more fundamental than status.
Is that roughly what you are saying or am I misunderstanding?
By somewhat objective I pretty much just mean what I suggested earlier: you could ask a group of observers or participants in a social situation to rank people by status and there would be broad agreement. You indicated you might agree with that. I think this property would correlate with things like wealth, class, physical attractiveness, power and achievements but I don’t think they are sufficient on their own to explain it—there are other factors. I also think the issue is complicated by the fact that some of these ‘other factors’ are things that assist people in acquiring money, power and recognition for their achievements.
It seems like you might be using ‘self-esteem’ as a catch all term for the factors that explain status that are not covered by wealth, class, power and achievement. I don’t find that a useful application of the term. If you mean something narrower than that then I think you’re missing out on other important explanatory factors.
Not a catch-all, but a specific disposition, which would show up in, say, psychometric tests asking people questions such as the ones I mentioned above.
Again, I don’t really care whether we name a particular variable “status” or “self-esteem”—just so long as we’re not mistaking it for another variable (e.g. class, power, prestige), and “status” does have the unfortunate ambiguity with these others.
But my inquiry is more into how many variables are in play, what the causal relationships between them might be, and so on.
Well ‘status’ seems to me to be somewhat like ‘intelligence’ - most people have an intuitive conception of what it means and could rank order others in a way that would tend to match the rank ordering of other observers. It also correlates to some extent with a number of other traits such as wealth, power and prestige. It is not clear however to what extent a unitary g) exists for intelligence and similarly it is not clear whether a unitary ‘s’ might exist for status.
My understanding of ‘self-esteem’ is a factor that probably correlates with status but it is not clear which direction causation works. In other words reducing discussion of status to discussion of self-esteem is a bit like reducing discussion of intelligence to discussion of logic puzzles. Focusing too narrowly on this one factor ignores many other important factors that contribute to the broader idea of status.
I’m still struggling with exactly what you mean when you talk about ‘self-esteem’. You seem to be saying something like this:
There is a somewhat objective property called ‘status’ that we can observe people having more or less of in a given situation. Many social interactions serve to raise or lower relative status positions. There is a hidden variable called ‘self-esteem’ which is the thing that is actually being manipulated in social interactions and it is more fundamental than status.
Is that roughly what you are saying or am I misunderstanding?
That feels close, yes. I might quibble over the “somewhat objective”.
By somewhat objective I pretty much just mean what I suggested earlier: you could ask a group of observers or participants in a social situation to rank people by status and there would be broad agreement. You indicated you might agree with that. I think this property would correlate with things like wealth, class, physical attractiveness, power and achievements but I don’t think they are sufficient on their own to explain it—there are other factors. I also think the issue is complicated by the fact that some of these ‘other factors’ are things that assist people in acquiring money, power and recognition for their achievements.
It seems like you might be using ‘self-esteem’ as a catch all term for the factors that explain status that are not covered by wealth, class, power and achievement. I don’t find that a useful application of the term. If you mean something narrower than that then I think you’re missing out on other important explanatory factors.
Not a catch-all, but a specific disposition, which would show up in, say, psychometric tests asking people questions such as the ones I mentioned above.
Again, I don’t really care whether we name a particular variable “status” or “self-esteem”—just so long as we’re not mistaking it for another variable (e.g. class, power, prestige), and “status” does have the unfortunate ambiguity with these others.
But my inquiry is more into how many variables are in play, what the causal relationships between them might be, and so on.
Well ‘status’ seems to me to be somewhat like ‘intelligence’ - most people have an intuitive conception of what it means and could rank order others in a way that would tend to match the rank ordering of other observers. It also correlates to some extent with a number of other traits such as wealth, power and prestige. It is not clear however to what extent a unitary g) exists for intelligence and similarly it is not clear whether a unitary ‘s’ might exist for status.
My understanding of ‘self-esteem’ is a factor that probably correlates with status but it is not clear which direction causation works. In other words reducing discussion of status to discussion of self-esteem is a bit like reducing discussion of intelligence to discussion of logic puzzles. Focusing too narrowly on this one factor ignores many other important factors that contribute to the broader idea of status.