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In the 1980s, Californian politician John Vasconcellos set up a task force to
promote high self-esteem as the answer to all social ills. But was his science
based on a lie?
In 2014, a heartwarming letter sent to year 6 pupils at Barrowford primary
school in Lancashire went viral. Handed out with their Key Stage 2 exam
results, it reassured them: These tests do not always assess all of what it is
that make each of you special and unique They do not know that your friends
count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the
dreariest day. They do not know that you write poetry or songs, play sports,
wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother
or sister.
At Barrowford, people learned, teachers were discouraged from issuing
punishments, defining a child as naughty and raising their voices. The school
s guiding philosophy, said headteacher Rachel Tomlinson, was that kids were to
be treated with unconditional positive regard .
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A little more than a year later, Barrowford found itself in the news again.
Ofsted had given the school one of its lowest possible ratings, finding the
quality of teaching and exam results inadequate. The school, their report said,
emphasised developing pupils emotional and social wellbeing more than the
attainment of high standards . Somehow, it seemed, the nurturing of self-esteem
had not translated into higher achievement.
The flawed yet infectious notion that, in order to thrive, people need to be
treated with unconditional positivity first gained traction in the late 80s.
Since then, the self-esteem movement has helped transform the way we raise our
children prioritising their feelings of self-worth, telling them they are
special and amazing, and cocooning them from everyday consequences.
One manifestation of this has been grade inflation. In 2012, the chief
executive of British exams regulator Ofqual admitted the value of GCSEs and
A-levels had been eroded by years of persistent grade inflation . In the US,
between the late 60s and 2004, the proportion of first year university students
claiming an A average in high school rose from 18% to 48%, despite the fact
that SAT scores had actually fallen. None of this, says Keith Campbell,
professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and expert on narcissism,
serves our youngsters well. Burning yourself on a stove is really useful in
telling you where you stand, he says, but we live in a world of trophies for
everyone. Fourteenth place ribbon. I am not making this stuff up. My daughter
got one.
Campbell, with his colleague Jean Twenge at San Diego State University, has
argued that this kind of parenting and teaching has contributed to a measurable
rise in narcissism: witness the selfie-snapping millennials. Although their
findings are disputed, Twenge points to other research done in the US and
beyond twenty-two studies or samples [that] show a generational increase in
positive self-views, including narcissism, and only two [that] do not .
To get ahead in the 1980s, you had to be ruthless, relentless. You had to
believe in yourself
How did we get here? To answer that, you have to go back to 1986 and the work
of an eccentric and powerful California politician, John Vasco Vasconcellos.
That year, the Democrat Vasconcellos managed to persuade a deeply sceptical
Republican state governor to fund a three-year task force to explore the value
of self-esteem. Vasco was convinced that low self-esteem was the source of a
huge array of social issues, including unemployment, educational failure, child
abuse, domestic violence, homelessness and gang warfare. He became convinced
that raising the population s self-esteem would act as a social vaccine ,
saving the state billions.
But Vasco s plan backfired spectacularly, with the fallout lasting to this day.
I spent a year trying to find out why and discovered that there was, at the
heart of his project, a lie.
John Vasconcellos grew up an obedient Catholic, an altar boy, the smartest kid
in his class, whose mother swore that he never misbehaved. But, being such a
devout Catholic, he knew that no matter how good he was, he could only ever be
a sinner. At primary school, he ran for class president. I lost by one vote.
Mine, he later said. He didn t vote for himself because I d been drilled
never to use the word I , never to think or speak well of myself.
After a spell as a lawyer, Vasco entered politics. In 1966, aged 33, he was
elected to the California state assembly. But there was a problem: his
professional success was at odds with how he thought of himself; he felt he
didn t deserve it. At 6ft 3in and over 200lb, he would stalk the Capitol
building in Sacramento, glowering and anxious in his smart black suit, perfect
white shirt and arrow-straight tie, his hair cropped with military precision.
I found my identity and my life coming utterly apart, he later said. I had to
go and seek help.
That help came from an unusual Catholic priest: Father Leo Rock was a
psychologist who had trained under the pioneer of humanistic psychology, Carl
Rogers, a man who believed that the Catholics had it absolutely wrong. At their
core, he thought, humans weren t bad; they were good. And in order to thrive,
people needed to be treated with unconditional positive regard (Rogers coined
the phrase). Vasco began studying under Rogers himself, a man he later
described as almost my second father . Through intense group therapy workshops
at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Vasco became a devotee of the human
potential movement, based partly on the Rogerian idea that all you need to do
to live well is discover your authentic inner self.
Around the state capitol, Vasco s colleagues began to notice the buttoned-up
Catholic was unbuttoning. He grew his hair and wore half-open Hawaiian shirts
on the floor of the senate, a gold chain nestled in his chest hair. One
reporter described him as looking like a cross between a rock star and a drug
smuggler . He became a human potential evangelist, preaching the innate
goodness of humans and handing long book lists to colleagues. His self-hating
Catholic self had washed away, and in its place was a great, glowing letter I
.
Vasco knew he was in a unique position. As a politician, he could take
everything he d learned about human potential and turn it into policy that
would have a real effect on thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. He decided
to campaign for a state-financed task force to promote self-esteem: this would
give the movement official affirmation and allow politicians to fashion
legislation around it. Best of all, they could recruit the world s finest
researchers to prove, scientifically, that it worked.
In the mid-80s, the notion that feeling good about yourself was the answer to
all your problems sounded to many like a silly Californian fad. But it was also
a period when Thatcher and Reagan were busily redesigning western society
around their project of neoliberalism. By breaking the unions, slashing
protections for workers and deregulating banking and business, they wanted to
turn as much of human life as possible into a competition of self versus self.
To get along and get ahead in this new competitive age, you had to be
ambitious, ruthless, relentless. You had to believe in yourself. What Vasco was
offering was a simple hack that would make you a more winning contestant.
Vasco s first attempt at having his task force mandated into law came to a halt
in 1984, when he suffered a heart attack. His belief in positive thinking was
such that, in an attempt to cure himself, he wrote to his constituents asking
them to picture themselves with tiny brushes swimming through his arteries,
scrubbing at the cholesterol, while singing, to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your
Boat: Now let s swim ourselves/ up and down my streams/Touch and rub and warm
and melt/the plaque that blocks my streams. It didn t work. As the senate
voted on his proposal, Vasco was recovering from seven-way coronary bypass
surgery.
After a second attempt was vetoed by the state governor, Vasco decided to
enhance the name of his project, upgrading it to the Task Force to Promote
Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility. He reduced the proposed
budget from $750,000 a year to $735,000 over three, to be spent on academic
research and the gathering of evidence in the form of public testimony. On 23
September 1986, Assembly Bill 3659 was signed into law.
The response from the California media was immediate and savage. One editorial,
in the San Francisco Chronicle, called Vasco s task force naive and absurd .
Nothing made Vasco more angry than his ideas not being taken seriously, but he
was about to become the joke of America.
Until Monday 9 February 1987, Vasco s task force had been largely state news.
But on that morning, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who had been tickled by the
politician s crusade, began an extraordinary two-week run of his popular
Doonesbury strip devoted to it. By the end of that day, reporters were crowding
Vasco on the floor of the assembly chamber. Rival politicians gave dismissive
briefings You could buy the Bible for $2.50 and do better while the Wall
Street Journal s story bore the headline Maybe Folks Would Feel Better If They
Got To Split The $735,000.
Vasco's credibility turned on a single fact: that the professors had confirmed
his hunch. The only problem? They hadn t
Vasco was livid. The media, he complained, were terrible, cynical, sceptical
and cheap . Their problem? Low self-esteem.
Meanwhile, something remarkable seemed to be happening. The response from the
people of California had been great. Between its announcement and the task
force s first public meeting in March 1987, the office received more than 2,000
calls and letters, and almost 400 applications to volunteer. More than 300
people came forward to speak in support of self-esteem at public hearings
across the state. And even if the media s tone wasn t always respectful, Vasco
himself was now a national figure. He appeared everywhere from Newsweek to the
CBS Morning Show to the BBC. This, he sensed, could be a major opportunity.
But first he needed to find a way to wrench the media conversation upwards. And
things, on that front, were going from unfortunate to ridiculous. It began with
the announcement of the task force s 25 members. On the upside, it was a
diverse group, including women, men, people of colour, gay people, straight
people, Republicans, Democrats, a former police officer and Vietnam veteran who
d been awarded two Purple Hearts. On the downside, it also included a white
man in a turban who predicted the work of the task force would be so powerful,
it would cause the sun to rise in the west. A delighted Los Angeles Herald told
how, in front of the press, one member of the task force had asked others to
close their eyes and imagine a self-esteem maintenance kit of magic hats,
wands and amulets.
Vasco s team began hearing testimony from people up and down California. They
heard from an LA deputy sheriff who toured schools, attempting to reduce drug
use by telling pupils, You are special. You are a wonderful individual. They
heard from masked members of the Crips, who blamed their violent criminality on
low self-esteem. One school principal recommended having elementary pupils
increase their self-importance by doing evaluations on their teachers. A woman
called Helice Bridges explained how she d dedicated her life to distributing
hundreds of thousands of blue ribbons that read Who I Am Makes A Difference.
With the national media given so much to snigger over, it was beginning to look
as if Vasco s mission was a bust. But there had been some good news: the
University of California had agreed to recruit seven professors to research the
links between low self-esteem and societal ills. They would report back in two
years time. For Vasco, their findings would be personal. If the professors
decided he was wrong, it was all over.
At 7.30pm on 8 September 1988, Vasco met the scientists at El Rancho Inn in
Millbrae, just outside San Francisco, to hear the results. Everything hinged on
Dr Neil Smelser, an emeritus professor of sociology who had coordinated the
work, leading a team who reviewed all the existing research on self-esteem. And
the news was good: four months later, in January, the task force issued a
newsletter: In the words of Smelser, The correlational findings are very
positive and compelling.
The headlines quickly piled up: Self-Esteem Panel Finally Being Taken
Seriously; Commission On Self-Esteem Finally Getting Some Respect. The state
governor sent the professors research to his fellow governors, saying, I m
convinced that these studies lay the foundation for a new day in American
problem solving.
Vasco s task force was almost done: all they had to do now was build upon this
positive tone with the publication of their final report, Toward A State Of
Esteem, in January 1990. That report turned out to be a victory beyond the
reasonable hopes of anyone who had witnessed its humiliating origins. The
governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who d privately mocked Vasco and his
project, now publicly endorsed it, as did figures including Barbara Bush and
Colin Powell. Time magazine ran with the headline, The sneers are turning to
cheers.
The man they were calling the Johnny Appleseed of Self-Esteem appeared on the
Today Show and Nightline, on the BBC and Australia s ABC. The report went into
reprint in its debut week and went on to sell an extraordinary 60,000 copies.
Vasco s publicists approached Oprah Winfrey, who ran a prime-time special
examining why she believed self-esteem was going to be one of the catch-all
phrases for the 1990s . Interviewed were Maya Angelou, Drew Barrymore and John
Vasconcellos.
What had really happened at that meeting? I found the answer on an old audio
cassette, hissy and faint
Four months after the launch of Toward A State Of Esteem, the papers were
reporting that self-esteem was sweeping through California s public schools ,
with 86% of the state s elementary school districts and 83% of high school
districts implementing self-esteem programmes. In Sacramento, students began
meeting twice a week to decide how to discipline other students; in Simi
Valley, kids were taught, It doesn t matter what you do, but who you are.
Political leaders from Arkansas to Hawaii to Mississippi began considering
their own task forces.
As the months became years, the self-love movement spread. Defendants in drug
trials were rewarded with special key chains for appearing in court, while
those who completed treatment were given applause and doughnuts. Children were
awarded sports trophies just for turning up; a Massachusetts school district
ordered children in gym classes to skip without actual ropes lest they suffer
the self-esteem catastrophe of tripping. Meanwhile, police in Michigan seeking
a serial rapist instructed the public to look out for a thirtysomething male
with medium build and low self-esteem .
The credibility of Vasco s task force turned largely on a single fact: that, in
1988, the esteemed professors of the University of California had analysed the
data and confirmed his hunch. The only problem was, they hadn t. When I tracked
down one renegade task force member, he described what happened as a fucking
lie . And Vasco was behind it.
In an attempt to discover how America, and then the world, got conned so
spectacularly, I travelled to Del Mar, California, to meet the task force
member who d predicted their work would cause the sun to rise in the west.
David Shannahoff-Khalsa welcomed me into his bungalow, looking little changed
from the old photographs I d seen: face narrow, eyes sharp, turban blue. A
kundalini yoga practitioner who believed meditation to be an ancient
technology of the mind , Shannahoff-Khalsa had been so disillusioned by the
final report, he d refused to sign it.
Illustration of a gold rosette with writing on it
Illustration: Franck Allais for the Guardian
As we sat and nibbled cheese, he picked up a thick book with a shiny red cover:
The Social Importance Of Self-Esteem. This was the collected work of the
University of California professors. He flicked through its pages, settling
eventually on Smelser s summary of the findings. The news most consistently
reported, he read out loud, is that the association between self-esteem and
its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant or absent.
This was a radically different conclusion from that fed to the public.
Shannahoff-Khalsa told me he was present when Vasco first saw preliminary
drafts of the professors work. I remember him going through them and he
looks up and says, You know, if the legislature finds out what s in these
reports, they could cut the funding to the task force. And then all of that
stuff started to get brushed under the table.
How did they do that?
They tried to hide it. They published a [positive] report before this one, he
said, tapping the red book, which deliberately ignored and covered up the
science.
It was hard to believe that Vasco s task force had been so rash as simply to
invent the quote, the one that stated the findings were positive and
compelling . What had really happened at that meeting in September 1988? I
found the answer on an old audio cassette in the California state archives.
The sound was hissy and faint. What I heard, though, was clear enough. It was a
recording of Smelser s presentation to Vasco s task force at that meeting in El
Rancho Inn, and it was nowhere near as upbeat as the task force had claimed. I
listened as he announced the professors work to be complete but worryingly
mixed. He talked through a few areas, such as academic achievement, and said:
These correlational findings are really pretty positive, pretty compelling.
This, then, was the quote the task force used. They d sexed it up a little for
the public. But they had completely omitted what he said next: In other areas,
the correlations don t seem to be so great, and we re not quite sure why. And
we re not sure, when we have correlations, what the causes might be.
Smelser then gave the task force a warning. The data was not going to give them
something they could hand on a platter to the legislature and say, This is
what you ve got to do and you re going to expect the following kind of results.
That is another sin, he said. It s the sin of overselling. And nobody can
want to do that.
I wondered whether Smelser was angry about the quote that got used. So I called
him. He told me the university got involved in the first place only because
Vasco was in charge of its budget. The pressure [from Vasco] was indirect. He
didn t say, I m going to cut your budget if you don t do it. But, Wouldn t
it be a good idea if the university could devote some of its resources to this
problem? It turned out that Smelser wasn t at all surprised about their
dubious treatment of the data. The task force would welcome all kinds of good
news and either ignore or deny bad news, he said. I found this was a
quasi-religious movement, and that s the sort of thing that happens in those
dynamics.
Vasco passed away, aged 82, in 2014, but I traced his right-hand man, task
force chairman and veteran politician Andrew Mecca. When we finally spoke, he
confirmed that it was the prestige of the University of California that had
turned things around for Vasco. That earned us some credibility stripes, he
said. Like Smelser, he felt that the university became involved only out of
fear of Vasco. John chaired their lifeblood. Their budget! he chuckled.
How did he rate the academics research? As you read the book, he said, it s
a bunch of scholarly gobbledegook.
What was Mecca s response when the data didn t say what he wanted?
I didn t care, he said. I thought it was beyond science. It was a leap of
faith. And I think only a blind idiot wouldn t believe that self-esteem isn t
central to one s character and health and vitality.
Was Vasconcellos angry when he read the professors reports?
The thing is, John was an incredible politician. He was pragmatic enough that
he felt he had what he needed, and that was a scholarly report that pretty much
said, Self-esteem s important. At least, that s the spin we got in the media.
Mecca told me that, prior to the final report s publication, he and Vasco
visited editors and television producers up and down the country, in a
deliberate attempt to construct the story before it could be subverted. An
extraordinary $30,000 was spent on their PR campaign: at its height, five
publicists were working full time. We decided to make sure we got out there to
tell our story and not let them interpret it from the stuff that was being
written by Smelser. We cultivated the message. And that positiveness prevailed.
So nobody listened to what Smelser and Shannahoff-Khalsa were saying?
I m not sure anybody cared, Mecca said. Who remembers Neil Smelser or
Shannahoff-Khalsa? Nobody! They were tiny ripples in a big tsunami of positive
change.
More than 20 years on, the effects of Vasco s mission linger. Whether the
tsunami of change he brought about was wholly positive remains doubtful. I
spoke to educational psychologist Dr Laura Warren, who taught in British
schools in the 90s, and remembers her school s edict that staff use mauve pens
to mark errors, in place of the negative red. It was a policy of reward
everything that they do , she told me. That turned out to be a terribly bad
idea.
The Ofsted inspectors discovered as much when they visited Barrowford primary
school in 2015. But after their critical report became public, the headteacher,
Rachel Tomlinson, defended herself in her local newspaper. When we introduced
the policy, it was after an awful lot of research and deliberation, she said.
And I think it has been a success.
Adapted from Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed And What It s Doing To Us
by Will Storr, published by Picador on 15 June at 18.99. To order a copy for
16.14, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846