Violent Pride - Term Paper Example

On the contrary, as Baumeister will conclude, egotism and feeling of superiority are the major reasons of violence towards others. The researcher writes that counselors, teachers and social worker of the US have always had a wrong and groundless view on the reasons of violence. As a result, what they, together with the parents of aggressive or violent yang people, were doing is trying to improve the kids’ opinion of themselves and their self-esteem. For this reason, as Baumeister observes, many competitions give awards to all the participants, parents and teachers are afraid to criticize children and social institutions encourage youth to perform various kinds of feel-good exercises. Roy F. Baumeister considers such behavior inappropriate since, as he claims, no one has ever proved that low self-esteem is the cause of aggressiveness.

The very first statement that helps the author in his research is that self-esteem is relatively stable. Though small fluctuations may take place every day, they are not significant enough to influence the overall picture. However, the correlation between self-esteem level and manifestations of violence exist. While reviewing literature, the author finds out that people with high but unstable self-esteem are the most aggressive. This and other findings lead Baumeister to the conclusion the low self-esteem theory is faulty.

The scientists gather a group of people and gather data on the participants’ self-concepts and level of narcissism. The results showed that though people with high-self esteem are not necessarily narcissistic, those with a high level of narcissism have, in most cases, high self-esteem. They also measured the people’s aggression and, finally, evaluated threatened-egotism responses. Finally, the major conclusion of the studies stated that narcissists who receive insulting criticism are the most aggressive individuals.

The scientists also point out that high opinions of themselves shown by aggressive people do not hide low self-esteem behind them. They also outline that a narcissist is not aggressive by nature. One becomes such only if gets an external stimuli – an insult. So the theory of threatened egotism takes into account both internal peculiarities and external situations. In general the article is rather well written. The author uses clear and simple language, explains the major concepts that might be not easy to understand for a person not related to the field of psychology.

The report is well structured, has an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. The subheadings that divide the content into smaller parts cannot, however, be said to explain the content of the parts following them. ‘Take a Swig, Take a Swing’ subheading, for instance, does not tell much about what the subpart of the report will be about. The same can be said about the ‘What about Deep Down’ and other subheadings used by the writer. In the general, the ideas of the author are presented in a rather clear and concise manner.

Baumeister explains why he decided to conduct such a study, what the implications were, and how the study itself was conducted. At the same time, it can be noticed that the results of the literature review of the author show that there are not works that discover the relation between low self-esteem and aggressiveness.