Self-Esteem in Your Teens Defines How 'Woke' You Become, Study Finds

A unique Norwegian study that followed more than 2,000 people over a nearly 30-year-span found a correlation between high self-esteem in one’s adolescence and a greater penchant for social justice as an adult.

Young people with low self-esteem tend to be less tolerant of equality, immigrants and “wokeness” as adults, a multi-decade Norwegian study has found.

By contrast, people who had good self-esteem as teenagers and felt good about themselves tend to be more inclusive as adults.

In the unique study, more than 2,200 Norwegians have been analyzed from the age of 15 in the Nineties until they turned 43 in 2020.

During the 28 years, the subjects' self-confidence was measured five times. The last time they were also asked what they felt about the feminist #MeToo movement, immigration and other contemporary issues. Tellingly, the researchers found the same connection between self-esteem and attitudes in men and women alike.

“How you felt about yourself in your youth still affects you almost 30 years later. It's quite amazing that it works that way,” research fellow Anne-Marie Fluit of the University of Oslo's Department of Psychology and one of the survey's authors told Norwegian media.

According to Fluit, those struggling with self-esteem will subconsciously do several things to compensate for it, such as “looking down on others to increase their social status”. “One might think, ‘I'm not the best, but at least I'm better than the immigrants. Or I do it better than women’," she explained.

Professor Tilmann von Soest of the University of Oslo who also co-authored the study, suggested that modern society is tending to become more polarized, and highlighted Trump's success in the US and Brexit in the UK as examples of such great divides.

“In other countries too, we see more and more people with attitudes that are extreme. It is thus important to look at what experiences and feelings people have, and how they relate to this type of attitude,” he concluded about the importance of such research.

According to Von Soest, politicians must create “more inclusive” schools, working environments and leisure arenas on a community level to help people feel better about themselves, which would ultimately be reflected in their beliefs and attitudes.

In Norway itself attitudes about foreigners have become more positive over the past decades as the country increasingly relies on immigration to solve its demographic and labor woes. In a major study from 2021, eight out of 10 respondents argued that most immigrants make an important contribution to Norwegian working life and enrich the country’s cultural life. Oil-rich Norway is also known for having a welfare state with a wide “safety net” and is often hailed as a poster child for gender equality and feminism.