Self-esteem test

Liking yourself and being good at things are separate

All ten statements ask how you feel about yourself as a whole, not how good you are at cooking, maths or making friends.¹ You can know you’re a great cook and still not like yourself much, or the other way round.

Five of the statements are kind and five are harsh. Agreeing with a harsh one pulls your result down. The set was first written in the 1960s for about 5,000 high school students in New York State.^{1, 2}

Does being left out change how you see yourself?

For a while, yes. In five studies, one research team found that people felt worse about themselves right after being left out and better after being included. The team compared this feeling to a fuel gauge that shows how accepted you feel by other people.³ In everyday life, that could be a group chat that goes quiet when you join, or an evening with people who are glad you came.

That feeling in the moment moves up and down. Your result on these ten statements is steadier: people who answer twice, a few weeks apart, mostly land close to where they were the first time.²

High scorers rate themselves higher than others do

Thinking well of yourself comes with some real benefits. A large review found that people at the high end are happier, more willing to speak up in a group and more likely to keep trying after things go wrong.⁴

The same review found a gap between what high scorers believe and what other people see. They said they were more likeable, better looking and better at making a good impression, but when other people did the rating, most of those differences disappeared. A high score also mixes two quite different groups: people who are simply comfortable with themselves, and people who are quick to feel slighted and a bit full of themselves.⁴

So your result here tells you how you see yourself. It can’t tell you how other people see you.

Building up children’s self-esteem didn’t lift their grades

For years, schools tried to raise pupils’ self-esteem in the hope that better marks would follow. When researchers looked at the evidence, those efforts had not been shown to improve school results, and some may have backfired. Good marks seemed to raise self-esteem more than the other way round.⁴

Where most people land

Your answers are set against nearly 17,000 people in 53 countries who answered the same ten statements, most of them university students. In every one of those countries, the typical person landed on the kind side of the middle, the UK included. The countries also sat close together, so where you grew up changes the picture only a little.⁵

So most people agree with more of the kind statements than the harsh ones, and you can sit below most people and still be on the kind side of the middle. Because so many people bunch up near the top, a small gap between you and a friend means very little.