"For Becker, the psychological purpose of self-esteem is to serve as an anxiety buffer. In other words, self-esteem serves the psychological function of helping us function on a day-today basis with our anxieties under control. Because self-esteem is based on meeting internalized standards of goodness or value ultimately learned from the culture, Becker defines self-esteem as: the culturally derived sense that one is an object of primary value in a world of meaning. For example, as a little kid, the standard of value is to please one’s parents. As the child gets older, standards of value prescribe “being cool”, “athletic”, “smart”, etc. Once we reach adulthood, the standards in our culture call for the fulfilling of culturally valued social and occupational roles, and acquiring possessions and money. A number of factors can affect these standards and our perceptions of how well we are meeting them. Other people play a large part in this: Our self-esteem is often affected by how we compare to others around us. This is known as social comparison. Usually we compare ourselves to those who are around us and similar to us. For example we are most likely to compare to same sex siblings close in age to us. If we play tennis, we are most likely to compare to others at about our level of experience and ability. When we compare favorably, we feel good about ourselves but when we suffer by comparison, our self-esteem is damaged. To protect self-esteem, we try to compare to others a little bit worse than ourselves—this is known as downward social comparison. One of the most potent examples of self-esteem-relevant social comparison is sibling rivalry. In childhood, siblings will measure to the millimeter to see who got the bigger lollipop. Each child wants to be of primary (or minimally, equal) value in the eyes of the parents. We can also derive or lose self-esteem based on our identifications with different types of groups. For example, when we identify with an individual or group that achieves success (e.g., Edmonton Oilers hockey team), this increases self-esteem (often referred to as “basking in reflected glory”). We often adjust our identifications to maximize self-esteem: we increase association with successful groups (e.g., by wearing Oiler’s T-shirts after a championship run) and decrease it with unsuccessful ones. Because our sense of self-worth comes from socially derived and shared standards of value, we are always in need of social validation of our worth. Luckily friends, family, coworkers etc. provide most of us with continual evidence of our value. However, others can very easily threaten our self-esteem. For example, if we see someone we know on campus and the person simply walks by us without some kind of greeting to at least acknowledge our existence, the snub may bother us for days. Sociologist Erving Goffman referred to our socially exposed self-esteem as face and explored the elaborate ways in which we try to protect our own face but also use tact to try to protect other people’s face as well. This analysis suggests that to understand people, we need to realize that what each person wants to know is: Where do I stand as hero? We all want to feel heroic (not necessarily in a Bruce Willis way (thankfully), but in the sense of fulfilling culturally prescribed standards of value and the culture provides different ways to do this. When a mom plays the martyr role, what she is really doing is making her claim of heroism (minimally at least, for not strangling you after one of your childhood fits or fights with a sibling). We can seek that sense of heroism in school or in the courtroom, on playing fields or the dance floor, in an obscure laboratory or on a theatrical stage."