Jennifer Crocker
Dr. Jennifer Crocker is a professor and Ohio Eminent Scholar in Social Psychology at Ohio State University. She is also a former president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Her publications are on the subject of self-esteem and the contingencies and interpersonal goals that individuals have that are a clear reflection of their level of self-esteem. Career She received her BA in psychology from Michigan State University, and her Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard University in 1979 with a thesis on "Schemas, hypothesis-testing, and intuitive assessments of covariation" She was subsequently assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern University(1979-1985), Professor at the University of Buffalo (1985-1995), Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research and Claude Steele Collegiate Professor of psychology at the University of Michigan (1995-2010). She came to Ohio State in June 2010. Awards She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. She is President-elect of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and has received the Lifetime Career Award from the International Society for Self and Identity. She was American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of 2019. Research Crocker studies self-esteem, contingencies of self-worth, and the costs of pursuing self-esteem. She also emphasizes interpersonal goals that are often involved in relationships. Self-esteem and self-worth Crocker is particularly notable for her research on contingencies of self-worth or contingent self-esteem. She created a scale called the Contingencies of Self-Worth Scale. This scale, made up of 65 items, evaluates these contingencies of self-worth and places them in two major categories. She argues that contingencies of self-worth are domains in which self-worth was either externally or internally validated. Contingencies that were considered externally validated included domains such as appearance, competition, and the approval of others. Contingencies that were considered internally validated were family support, virtue, and religious faith. Crocker surmised that it was these contingencies that defined a person's perception of their own self-worth. Because of this emphasis on contingency, level of self-esteem was no longer the issue of concern. Rather, where a person decides to stake his/her self-worth will influence his/her behavior, and depending on where the validation is placed, this behavior could either have costs or benefits. Furthermore, Crocker has studied the effects of contingent self-worth on psychological vulnerability and negative behavior. She is especially interested in how people search for self-esteem by pursuing success in certain areas of life, and how this search affects other human needs such as learning, relationships, self-regulation, and mental and physical health. Crocker has also studied how these variables of self-esteem relate to a person's ability to receive criticism. Through this line of research, she has gone on to research how self-worth defines a person's goals and the kind of motivation that in turn allows for a person to achieve these goals. Crocker acknowledges the benefits of pursuing self-esteem, but her research focuses mainly on the