we thought these ideas were tremendous and we thought that they were very interesting
and we were very eager to share them.
And we went to a psychology conference and all of the famous psychologist in America
were at this conference and I started talking just like I am today and
there were like 200, there's more than 200 of us here but
they were like 200 people in the room and within ten minutes like all but
12 of them were running out of the room and my buddy Tom and Jeff they're
just like oh I don't think they liked it and I was like no they fucking loved it.
>> [LAUGH] >> They were just rushing out to get
the paper that we've not yet written where we will describe these ideas and
so we wrote a paper a year later and
we sent it to a journal called the American Psychologist and
this is one of the most prestigious journals in psychology and
we got a review back and it had one sentence where somebody wrote I have no
doubt that these ideas are of no interest whatsoever to any psychologist alive or
dead, and my buddies Tom and Jeff, they're like I don't think they liked it and
I'm like no, they're being coy they want us.
But evidently they weren't being coy because we then sent
this paper to every journal in
the world including like Parade magazine and Good Housekeeping and
every time it would just get rejected.
So anyway I was at a conference and I was standing next to
the American Psychological Association who was the editor of the American
psychologist and it was a cocktail party so just energized and
encouraged by an overindulgence in ethanol I was like, hey,
yo dude, you should publish our paper and he was like hey that's Dr.
Dude to you show some respect but you guys should get some evidence.
These ideas are indeed provocative they may even be true but
you got to do more than just put the ideas out there you have to
demonstrate by the traditional standards of scientific discourse that
they have empirical merit and that's what my buddies and I have been doing for
the last 30 years and Dan has helped out Florette give a little wave here's
Florette Cohen, she was a PhD student like here at Rutgers, and we've been together
since her undergraduate days and we now have 30 years of
evidence that I would argue provides relatively strong support for these ideas.
I just want to give you a little overview of what we know at
the top of this piece of paper we've got self esteem as anxiety buffer and
I'm not going to spend too much time on this except to tell you that our first
round of studies we just wanted to establish that self esteem
reduces anxiety, remember a couple of minutes ago I said that the primary
function of self esteem Is to reduce anxiety and
so what we did this was back in the good old days before ethics.
We brought people into the laboratory in the late 1970s,
early 1980s and
we hooked them up to a physiograph machine do you all know what that is?
That's just a machine that measures things like your heart rate and
your blood pressure like you see on the programs that have medical
things where there's like graphs and pieces of paper and stuff so
we measured people's physiological arousal and
what we did was to manipulate self esteem temporarily either by giving people
false feedback about their personality in one experiment we told some people
that they have very positive personality attributes who reads your horoscope?
Any horoscope readers?
And it's easy to raise people's' self esteem when you tell them something good
about themselves in another condition we just left self esteem
unaltered by giving people neutral but not overly positive feedback.
In another version of this study we made people feel good about themselves by
giving them what appeared to be like an SAT test who remembers taking the SATs?
Do they still have the booklets where you have to break the seal with your
pencil before you start?
Well, I have a printer friend in Union, New Jersey, and he printed up these fake
booklets and we had people take the little test and we told some of them that they
did very well and others that they just done moderately okay and
that was just done to either raise self esteem or leave it alone and
then what we did was to tell half of the participants that we
were interested in studying their physiological reactions to
different kinds of physical stimuli, and that we wanted to have them
look at colored light bulbs that they were going to look at yellow light bulbs and
red light bulbs while we measured their physiological reactions.
Would that bother any of you if you just had to look at a light bulb for
the most part we meant that not to bother you.
The other half of the people we said you're going to look at these light bulbs
and while you look at them for the next two minutes you're going to get a series
of painful electrical shocks and that smell, don't worry about that,
that's just the hair on your arm burning but we can assure you that you'll be fine.
Who might be bothered by that?
Now that may seem sadistic, and indeed it's pushing the line although in fairness
we did give participants the opportunity to withdraw from the study at any time but
we wanted to make people very anxious who might be anxious if you thought you were
going to get an electrical shock?
In fact, just expecting a shock makes you so anxious that we never ever
actually gave one what we wanted to see was how aroused
people would be in anticipation of the shocks, as a function of whether or
not their self-esteem had been elevated that's as tough as it's going to get today
in terms of complexity head shakes if that makes a little sense.
If self-esteem reduces anxiety does it make sense that people whose
esteem has been boosted should be less aroused in anticipation of the shocks?
That's precisely what we found let's move on there's dozens of studies
that have since corroborated that basic notion.