The Long-Term Stability of Self-Esteem: Its Time-Dependent Decay and Nonzero Asymptote

How stable are individual differences in self-esteem? we examined the time-dependent decay of rank-order stability of self-esteem and tested whether stability asymptotically approaches zero or a nonzero value across long test-retest intervals. analyses were based on 6 assessments across a 29-year period of a sample of 3,180 individuals aged 14 to 102 years. the results indicated that,as test-retest intervals increased,stability exponentially decayed and asymptotically approached a nonzero value (estimated as.43). the exponential decay function explained a large proportion of variance in observed stability coefficients,provided a better fit than alternative functions,and held across gender and for all age groups from adolescence to old age. moreover,structural equation modeling of the individual-level data suggested that a perfectly stable trait component underlies stability of self-esteem. the findings suggest that the stability of self-esteem is relatively large,even across very long periods,and that self-esteem is a trait-like characteristic. © 2013 by the society for personality and social psychology,inc.