Matt Kielty

And what you see is that, you know, self-esteem is correlated with...

Grades in school.

It's correlated with how attractive people find you.

But these are tiny associations.

So basically it turned out a lot of what had been claimed in that task force report was just really not true.

Like all the claims that they were making about self-esteem being a social vaccine, that it was a cure for drug use, alcohol use, crime, violence, teen pregnancy, poor academic performance.

This research showed that whether you had high or low self-esteem, it wasn't causing these problems.

Right, right.

Huh.

It's weird because even though you're telling me the science of this and that it's this huge study, as I'm hearing this, the story logic of it holds so hard.

It makes such intuitive sense.

It makes such intuitive sense that it's like...

Why wouldn't a kid be better if they... Why wouldn't my relationships be better?

Like, I... It's so hard to, like, dislodge it even when you're literally telling me it's wrong.

Okay, well, I can tell you one thing that the research showed about a meaningful difference between people with high self-esteem and people with low self-esteem.

Which is that high...

high self-esteem people think they're smarter, more successful, more attractive, better liked, more popular than low self-esteem people think they are, in spite of the fact that they're not really any different from low self-esteem people in these objective ways.

So basically, for people with high self-esteem... Life feels good to them.

They're generally happier.

That seems good.