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The Link Between Self-Esteem and Social Relationships: A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies

DOI:10.1037/pspp0000265
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Michelle A. Harris Lucas at The Holdsworth Center
Michelle A. Harris Lucas
  • The Holdsworth Center
Ulrich Orth at Universität Bern
Ulrich Orth
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Theorists have long assumed that people's self-esteem and social relationships influence each other. However, the empirical evidence has been inconsistent, creating substantial uncertainty about whether relationships are in fact an influential factor in self-esteem development and vice versa. This meta-analysis synthesizes the available longitudinal data on the prospective effect of social relationships on self-esteem (48 samples including 46,231 participants) and the prospective effect of self-esteem on social relationships (35 samples including 21,995 participants). All effects controlled for prior levels of the outcomes. Results showed that relationships and self-esteem reciprocally predict each other over time with similar effect sizes (β = .08 in both directions). Moderator analyses suggested that the effects held across sample characteristics such as mean age, gender, ethnicity, and time lag between assessments, except for the self-esteem effect on relationships, which was moderated by type of relationship partner (stronger for general relationships than for specific partners) and relationship reporter (stronger for self-reported than for informant-reported relationship characteristics). The findings support assumptions of classic and contemporary theories on the influence of social relationships on self-esteem and on the consequences of self-esteem for the relationship domain. In sum, the findings suggest that the link between people's social relationships and their level of self-esteem is truly reciprocal in all developmental stages across the life span, reflecting a positive feedback loop between the constructs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
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The Link Between Self-Esteem and Social Relationships:
A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies
Michelle A. Harris
The University of Texas at Austin
Ulrich Orth
University of Bern
Theorists have long assumed that people’s self-esteem and social relationships influence each other.
However, the empirical evidence has been inconsistent, creating substantial uncertainty about
whether relationships are in fact an influential factor in self-esteem development and vice versa. This
meta-analysis synthesizes the available longitudinal data on the prospective effect of social rela-
tionships on self-esteem (48 samples including 46,231 participants) and the prospective effect of
self-esteem on social relationships (35 samples including 21,995 participants). All effects controlled
for prior levels of the outcomes. Results showed that relationships and self-esteem reciprocally
predict each other over time with similar effect sizes (␤⫽.08 in both directions). Moderator
analyses suggested that the effects held across sample characteristics such as mean age, gender,
ethnicity, and time lag between assessments, except for the self-esteem effect on relationships,
which was moderated by type of relationship partner (stronger for general relationships than for
specific partners) and relationship reporter (stronger for self-reported than for informant-reported
relationship characteristics). The findings support assumptions of classic and contemporary theories
on the influence of social relationships on self-esteem and on the consequences of self-esteem for
the relationship domain. In sum, the findings suggest that the link between people’s social
relationships and their level of self-esteem is truly reciprocal in all developmental stages across the
life span, reflecting a positive feedback loop between the constructs.
Keywords: longitudinal studies, meta-analysis, prospective effects, self-esteem, social relationships
A longstanding assumption in psychology is that social rela-
tionships play a key role in shaping individuals’ self-esteem
(e.g., Leary, 2012), or the subjective evaluation of their overall
worthiness as a person (e.g., see Robins, Tracy, & Trzesni-
ewski, 2008;Rosenberg, 1965). Although there is abundant
empirical support for the concurrent association between vari-
ous relationship characteristics and self-esteem (e.g., Cameron
& Granger, 2019;McArdle, Waters, Briscoe, & Hall, 2007;
Murberg, 2010;Neff & Geers, 2013;Poulsen, Ziviani, &
Cuskelly, 2006;Rosario, Schrimshaw, & Hunter, 2011;Schuen-
gel et al., 2006), longitudinal research has produced mixed
findings, with some studies finding evidence for longitudinal
effects of social acceptance on self-esteem (e.g., Wagner,
Lüdtke, Robitzsch, Göllner, & Trautwein, 2018) but other stud-
ies finding no support for the effect of close relationships on
self-esteem development (e.g., Harris et al., 2015). Adding to
the complexity of this empirical association, when individuals
are asked to explain the sources of their self-esteem, social
relationships are mentioned infrequently, compared with other
sources (e.g., achievements, personality traits; Harris, Donnel-
lan, Beer, & Trzesniewski, 2019). As it stands, the inconsis-
tency of the current state of knowledge creates substantial
uncertainty about whether social relationships in fact are an
influential factor in self-esteem development.
A related question is whether self-esteem has an influence on
characteristics of social relationships (e.g., see Murray, Hol-
mes, & Collins, 2006;Srivastava & Beer, 2005;Swann & Read,
1981). According to dynamic interactionism (Asendorpf & Wil-
pers, 1998;Magnusson, 1990), there are likely to be reciprocal
effects between individuals’ self-esteem and quality of social
relationships. Previous research has found a small meta-analytic
effect of self-esteem on social relationships, based on longitu-
dinal studies examining self-esteem at one time point and social
relationships at a later time point (Cameron & Granger, 2019).
However, the effects included in the Cameron and Granger
Editor’s Note. Kate C. McLean served as the handling editor for this
article.—MLC
This article was published Online First September 26, 2019.
XMichelle A. Harris, Department of Psychology, The University of
Texas at Austin; Ulrich Orth, Department of Psychology, University of
Bern.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant 1650042. Any
opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views
of the National Science Foundation. Data and code are available at https://
osf.io/xt3u6/.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michelle
A. Harris, Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin,
108 Dean Keeton Street, Stop A8000, Austin, TX 78712. E-mail:
michelleaharris@utexas.edu
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
Content may be shared at no cost, but any requests to reuse this content in part or whole must go through the American Psychological Association.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
Personality Processes and Individual Differences
© 2019 American Psychological Association 2020, Vol. 119, No. 6, 1459–1477
ISSN: 0022-3514 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000265
1459
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... Identifying such individual differences in self-esteem reactivity might be one important step forward in developing SELF-ESTEEM REACTIVITY AND TRAIT DEVELOPMENT 27 interventions to promote momentary self-esteem across the life span. Finally, previous theoretical and empirical work has demonstrated reciprocal associations between self-esteem and social interaction variables (Harris & Orth, 2019). Accordingly, future research might extend models to investigate reciprocal effects in daily life. ...
... This implies a causal link from social interactions on momentary self-esteem that we cannot directly test in our data, but which has been tested in experimental settings . Whereas this direction of effects represents the primary focus of the present study, we are aware that the opposite direction of effects is also possible (i.e., a reciprocal effect between selfesteem and social interactions; Harris & Orth, 2019;Hutteman et al., 2015). 3 In addition to the analyses with the complete sample reported in the Results, we estimated all final models using only data of those participants from who we know with certainty that they have experienced a transition (i.e., graduation or retirement) until T3 (N = 166). ...
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When Parents’ Praise Inflates, Children's Self‐Esteem Deflates
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Western parents often give children overly positive, inflated praise. One perspective holds that inflated praise sets unattainable standards for children, eventually lowering children's self-esteem (self-deflation hypothesis). Another perspective holds that children internalize inflated praise to form narcissistic self-views (self-inflation hypothesis). These perspectives were tested in an observational-longitudinal study (120 parent–child dyads from the Netherlands) in late childhood (ages 7–11), when narcissism and self-esteem first emerge. Supporting the self-deflation hypothesis, parents’ inflated praise predicted lower self-esteem in children. Partly supporting the self-inflation hypothesis, parents’ inflated praise predicted higher narcissism—but only in children with high self-esteem. Noninflated praise predicted neither self-esteem nor narcissism. Thus, inflated praise may foster the self-views it seeks to prevent.
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Self-Esteem Development in the School Context: The Roles of Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Social Predictors
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Objective: When considering that social inclusion is a basic human need, it makes sense that self-esteem is fueled by social feedback and the sense of being liked by others. This is particularly true with respect to early adolescence, when peers become increasingly important. In the current paper, we tested which components of social inclusion are particularly beneficial for the development of self-esteem by differentiating between intrapersonal components (i.e., self-perceptions of social inclusion) and interpersonal components (i.e., perceiver and target effects of liking). Method: Using longitudinal data from N=2,281 fifth graders and N=1,766 eighth graders (TRAIN; Jonkmann et al., 2013), we tested mean-level self-esteem development and the role of intrapersonal components in this development. Using classroom round-robin data on liking from subsamples of n=846 (n=689) fifth-(eighth-)grade students nested in 46 (39) classes, we tested effects of interpersonal relationship components on self-esteem development in the classroom context. Results: The three major findings demonstrated, first, no consistent trends in mean levels of self-esteem in early to middle adolescence; second, constant positive effects of intrapersonal components between-students and within-students across time; third, no stable effects of interpersonal components. Conclusions: The discussion highlights the role of intrapersonal components and the methodological challenges of our study. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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