Mark Leary

And one of the early chapters of my book is on self-esteem.

And I talk about Mark Leary's sociometer theory.

The sociometer theory is the idea that like when we were evolving in small groups, it was really essential not to get ejected from your group.

Like if you got ejected, you'd be vulnerable to predators.

Social interaction acts as a literal mirror.

But it wasn't until Mark Leary and his colleagues proposed the sociometer theory in 1995 that we really got the evolutionary teeth behind Cooley's looking glass.

Leary completely reframed how we view self-esteem.

Yeah, we typically treat self-esteem as an objective measure of our own self-worth.

We look into the faces, the reactions, the slight shifts in tone of the people around us to figure out what we are worth.

And that ties directly into something called sociometer theory, which completely changed how I think about self-esteem.

It's a brilliant framework by Mark Leary.

Yeah.

But at another level or another thought in our head, we don't like the idea of being embarrassed by admitting that publicly, embarrassed in front of others.

The researchers in intellectual humility, Mark Leary in particular, who was one of the founding researchers in this area, neuroscientist at Duke, what he suggests is that you focus internally and focus on being less embarrassed by that idea of outwardly acknowledging that you don't know and more embarrassed by the fact that you're wasting your time with that while you should be pursuing things that you don't know yet.

Like to focus on the learning rather than the, oh my gosh, I don't know everything and somebody might find out.

So that's the more, and it's a complicated thing because people are gonna handle that differently.