Choose the Appropriate Letter to Identify the Main Idea Implied

Multiple Choice

Choose the appropriate letter to identify the main idea implied by the paragraph. For decades, Americans have not questioned the belief that low self-esteem is at the root of our personal and social ills.Yet, how does this belief square with the failure of the "California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility"? Formed in 1986 to reduce crime and substance abuse by boosting Californians' feelings of self-worth, the task force has had no such effect on substance abuse levels.Relevant, too, is the research done by Roy Baumeister of Case Western University? Baumeister found that people with high self-esteem are the most likely to inflict electric shocks or ear-piercing blasts of noise upon innocent subjects.Consider as well the fact that researcher Nicholas Emler of the London School of Economics tested the self-esteem of violent men and found no evidence that they secretly disliked themselves.Instead, Emler concluded, "These men are ...violent because they don't feel bad enough about themselves." According to David Reynolds, a psychotherapist who practices Morita, a Japanese treatment based on the idea that self-awareness causes suffering, "The most miserable people I know have been self-focused." In other words, their high levels of self-esteem tended to make them miserable.It's no surprise, then, that programs for abusive men such as Emerge, run by psychologist David Adams in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have successfully rehabilitated wife batterers by leading them to honestly evaluate and criticize their behaviors rather than encouraging them to feel better about themselves
Implied Main Idea

A) It now appears that increasing self-esteem may not be a very effective way of curing either personal or social ills.
B) In the end, it's probably better for people to have low self-esteem, because high self-esteem seems to be linked to violent behavior.
C) The failure of the "California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility" is proof enough that self-esteem cannot be manufactured by a committee.