Personality and Individual Differences
Four fictional people with the same average self-esteem and four completely different six weeks.
Simulated — fictional people, illustrative values, nothing diagnostic
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.
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.
Four fictional people complete a self-esteem measure once. All four score the same.
All four share the same baseline. Deliver events and watch volatility, contingency and recovery come apart.
| Person | Average | Day-to-day SD | Biggest move | Range | Return to baseline |
|---|
| 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.