Theodore Powers
Theodore Powers is a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, working on self-criticism, perfectionism and how people pursue goals. His 2011 paper is the cleanest available separation of two things that almost always travel together in ordinary life: holding yourself to a high standard, and attacking yourself for missing it.
Who they are
His post was confirmed on 11 September 2026.
The separation he made is the practical point of this whole subject. Most people who suspect that being kinder to themselves would help also suspect it would make them worse at things, because they cannot tell the two apart from the inside. The 2011 studies take them apart statistically and show they behave differently.
Key papers
Powers, T. A., Koestner, R., Zuroff, D. C., Milyavskaya, M., & Gorin, A. A. (2011). "The effects of self-criticism and self-oriented perfectionism on goal pursuit", Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(7), 964 to 975. First author. Five studies. Once self-criticism was accounted for, high personal standards went with more progress towards goals, not less.
Key ideas
High standards help. The self-attack that usually comes bundled with them is the part that hurts. That is the version of this argument that is fair to people who are frightened of going soft on themselves, and it is his.
It is prospective and correlational, not experimental. The honest phrasing is that harsh self-criticism reliably travels with worse progress towards goals, and that nobody has shown it produces better.
David Zuroff is a co-author here and the main collaborator on Sidney Blatt's clinical research, which is how this everyday line and the clinical one connect to each other.
Concepts on this site
Find them elsewhere
Nothing confirmed. A search was run and no website or account could be tied to this person with enough certainty to publish. A name match on its own is not evidence, and a wrong link here would be worse than none.
Checked 2026-09-11. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Powers, T. A., Koestner, R., Zuroff, D. C., Milyavskaya, M., & Gorin, A. A. (2011). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(7), 964 to 975.
- Vault verification record, 2026-09-11. Affiliation confirmed.