Hard-Wired to Be an Optimist?

Identity, Self, Needs, And Motives Exploring Personality What about Identity, Self, Needs and Motives was of interest to you? I found the work on self-esteem and identity to be of the most interest. As I read the articles, I tried to clarify my thinking and not just react to the work. What emerged was a strong curiosity about how the attributes related to self-esteem and identity were related to socio-economic status, and secondarily, to levels of attained education.

I've read an occasional article in major popular periodicals that address the way people misperceive their own abilities, skewing them heavily in a positive direction. Naturally, my very next thought is: "Do I do that?" But what was most interesting about this information was that, the less able someone was (intellectually or with respect to skills), the more they were likely to overestimate their capabilities.

If this is so, then under what conditions do the two perspectives coalesce? Why was Identity, Self, Needs and Motives of interest to you? I remember sitting in a class once and overhearing another student talking about blue-collar workers: her word for them was "losers." My classmate was a member of a well-to-do family and had spent some time in private schools. Her opinion of herself seemed over the top, and the reverse held true.

I am curious about how people who clearly live privileged lives see themselves as better than others -- deserving of their good fortune or the many opportunities they have to make their own luck, as the saying goes. The differences between the way that high self-esteem people and the low self-esteem people react to misfortune and try to repair or protect their self-esteem are fascinating. From a behavioralist perspective, these reactions seem fairly depicted as stimulus-response.

When the big-bad-ugly comes calling, it is natural to avoid the unpleasant situations or life to return to the status quo -- if it was pleasant -- or to reconstruct the buffer zone, if it was not pleasant. What are your thoughts about the area/topic/issue? I tend to be an optimist and a bit of a risk-taker, so my frame of reference is going to trend positive. The topic makes me wonder how many of the decisions I have considered rational were actually self-protective measures.

Sometimes our reasoning is readily available to us, and other times, it seems we have to really dig and dig to see how it is that we arrived at some choice. When the stakes associated with decision-making are high, the anguish we experience over our decisions can be also be high. I think it would be interesting -- perhaps even fun -- to review many of my life choices to see if I can reconstruct the reasoning (or lack thereof) that let to each decision.

I'd like to better understand how high esteem people and low esteem people respond to job loss. This is a particularly timely inquiry and I'd like to know how far conventional wisdom misses the mark in this area. Does it have any relevance.