Not entirely. The article talks about this. The theory was that low self-esteem led to violence. The facts are that self-reports of high self-esteem are correlated with increased violence.
You might disregard the "self report" aspect of the studies. But the main conclusion is that the original theory is wrong.
For Branden, the violent people Baumeister wrote about might have appeared confident, but underneath all that bluster they actually had low self-esteem.“One does not need to be a trained psychologist to know that some people with low self-esteem strive to compensate for their deficit by boasting, arrogance, and conceited behavior,” he wrote.
It's all a game of he said/she said. The bottom line is that the human mind is opaque. There's nothing easier than theorizing about something that can't be measured, or even directly observed.
With some work, a computer can determine the video a person is watching in an MRI. It's not perfect, but it's amazingly close.
Saying "the human mind is opaque" is wishful thinking. It's magical thinking that somehow people (and thought) is different from everything else in the world.
You act as if disregarding the self-report component is minor, but surely it is fundamental.
The original theory is that bullying is a way for someone with low self-esteem to make themselves feel superior. By the definition of the theory, a bully so motivated not to see themselves as having low self-esteem that they will resort to violence. Someone who will resort to violence to avoid acknowledging something, is unlikely to self-report accurately on that same topic.
Self-report is therefore clearly an invalid measure by which to test this theory.
Not entirely. The article talks about this. The theory was that low self-esteem led to violence. The facts are that self-reports of high self-esteem are correlated with increased violence.
You might disregard the "self report" aspect of the studies. But the main conclusion is that the original theory is wrong.