Pastoral Abstracts

Ray F. Baumeister Scientific American (2001) 28(4) pp.96-101 Do people turn violent out of an underlying sense of self-hate, or just the opposite, a strong sense of self-love? The common wisdom in psychology has always been that the answer is self-hate, and low self-esteem. Consequently many counselors have based their work with persons prone to violence on trying to improve their self-esteem and encouraging social and academic success. Baumeister, social psychologist at Case Western has long had doubts about this explanation and in the early 1990s started looking for the research which supported that accepted explanation. He found there was no support for it. He and his colleagues now offer a different theory, supported by research theirs and others. Their hypothesis is that, often, violence arises from persons when their inflated self-esteem ("egotism") is threatened. Baumeister describes how they did their research specifically, how to identify levels of self-esteem and aggression so they could be correlated, in different groups of people, students, criminals , gangmembers, in both natural and laboratory settings. They report that it is a myth that gang members have "soft" interiors. Nor is there any evidence that aggressors do not have a hidden core of "self-doubt". A healthy triangle: the use of ritual in the dying process