Personality and Individual Differences
Self-Esteem Stability Tracker
Four fictional people with the same average self-esteem and four completely different six weeks.
Simulated — fictional people, illustrative values, nothing diagnostic
Learning objective
By the end you should be able to separate the four things a single self-esteem score collapses into one.
About 25 minutes. Nothing you do here is saved or sent anywhere.
What this will not do
It asks you nothing about yourself, offers no questionnaire and produces no score for anybody. The four people are invented and the scale is arbitrary. Low or variable values here are characteristics that differ between people, not symptoms, and nothing on this page is a clinical statement, a screening instrument or a basis for interpreting anyone's wellbeing — your own included.
First, a prediction
Four fictional people complete a self-esteem measure once. All four score the same.
Six weeks, one observation a day
Key terms
- Level
- Where somebody's self-esteem typically sits.
- Variability
- How much it moves from day to day, which is independent of its level.
- Contingency
- Which domains it moves in response to. Two people can be equally variable and contingent on quite different things.
- Recovery
- How quickly it returns after a knock — a third property, not implied by either of the other two.
Four fictional people
All four share the same baseline. Deliver events and watch volatility, contingency and recovery come apart.
Level, variability and recovery
| Person | Average | Day-to-day SD | Biggest move | Range | Return to baseline |
|---|
Events delivered
What makes each person different
| Person | Work or study | Friendship | Appearance | Volatility | Recovery rate |
|---|
Contingency is how strongly events in that domain move the person at all. Volatility is day-to-day movement with nothing happening. Recovery rate is how much of an event's effect carries to the next day — higher means slower return.
Challenge — tell them apart
What this demonstrates
Four characteristics, one number
Level, volatility, contingency and recovery are separable, and a single self-esteem score reports only the first — badly, because it is a sample of one occasion from a moving series. Two people with the same score can differ on all three of the others, which is what the four fictional people here are built to show.
Instability is not low level
Ari and Bea share a baseline. One barely moves and the other swings widely, and neither is lower than the other on average. These are independent dimensions, and the research that separated them found they predict different things — which they could not do if one were a proxy for the other.
Contingency is about what, not how much
Cal is steady until something happens at work. The same event elsewhere barely registers. That is not greater sensitivity in general; it is self-evaluation staked on a particular domain. Someone can be highly contingent and, in a period when that domain is going well, look entirely stable.
Recovery is a third thing again
Dee reacts no more strongly than average and takes far longer to return. Measured once, a fortnight after an event, she would look like a person with lower self-esteem rather than a person still coming back from something. One observation cannot distinguish between a level and a position on a trajectory.
For teaching elsewhere: take this activity as one self-contained block of HTML, on the clipboard or as a file. Either way it is styled so that it will not disturb the page you put it into.