Self-Esteem And Self Esteem Essay

A person’s self-esteem affects whom he or she chooses to associate with, and how they look at different social groups. This is important because then depending on our level of self-esteem, it essentially tells us how we choose to associate with certain groups and not others, or that we choose to not choose at all. This affects how the population develops relationships with one another. Those who think more highly of themselves (in terms of aspects such as race, socioeconomic status, intelligence, etc.) tend to be very protective of those within their social group, and discriminatory against those who are not, so it is harder as a society to develop relationships unless someone meets certain qualities. This could lead to conflict amongst social groups.
Self-esteem and social dominance orientation are related because people who think lowlier of themselves think that they should not associate with social groups that would make them look bad. Cast (2002) states “when individuals are able to verify group-based identities by altering or maintaining meanings in the situation that match the meanings in their identities, self-esteem increases”.

Hypothesis: people who have very low self-esteem will prefer to have inequalities within groups because they are more insecure about who is within their social group.

People with low self-esteem will be threatened by a person’s social status, whether it is of high status or low status, and will want to stick within a group of people that are within the same status. High status people could take advantage of low status people, and low status people could ruin the reputation of high status people. “People seek opportunities (and the groups that provide them) to verify their identities and avoid situations (and groups) where self-verification is problematic (Cast,

2002)