The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

by Richard Wilkinson

  They collected findings from 208 published reports of experiments in which people’s cortisol levels were measured while they were exposed to an experimental stressor. They classified all the different kinds of stressor used in experiments and found that: ‘tasks that included a social-evaluative threat (such as threats to self-esteem or social status), in which others could negatively judge performance, particularly when the outcome of the performance was uncontrollable, provoked larger and more reliable cortisol changes than stressors without these particular threats’ (p. 377). Indeed, they suggested that ‘Human beings are driven to preserve the social self and are vigilant to threats that may jeopardize their social esteem or status’ (p. 357). Social evaluative threats were those which created the possibility for loss of esteem. They typically involved the presence of an evaluative audience in the experiment, a potential for negative social comparison such as scoring worse than someone else, or having your performance videoed or recorded, so creating the potential for later evaluation. The highest cortisol responses came when a social evaluative threat was combined with a task in which participants could not avoid failure – for instance because the task was designed to be impossible, or because there was too little time, or they were simply told they were failing however they performed.

  The finding that social evaluative threats are the stressors which get to us most powerfully fits well with the evidence of rising anxiety accompanied by a narcissistic defence of an insecure self-image. As Dickerson and Kemeny say, the ‘social self’ which we try to defend ‘reflects one’s esteem and status, and is largely based on others’ perception of one’s worth’ (p. 357).

  A quite separate strand of health research corroborates and fills out this picture. One of the most important recent developments in our understanding of the factors exerting a major influence on health in rich countries has been the recognition of the importance of psychological stress. We will outline in Chapter 6 how frequent and/or prolonged stress affects the body, influencing many physiological systems, including the immune and cardiovascular systems. But what matters to us in this chapter is that the most powerful sources of stress affecting health seem to fall into three intensely social categories: low social status, lack of friends, and stress in early life. All have been shown, in many well-controlled studies, to be seriously detrimental to health and longevity.

  Much the most plausible interpretation of why these keep cropping up as markers for stress in modern societies is that they all affect – or reflect – the extent to which we do or do not feel at ease and confident with each other. Insecurities which can come from a stressful early life have some similarities with the insecurities which can come from low social status, and each can exacerbate the effects of the other. Friendship has a protective effect because we feel more secure and at ease with friends. Friends make you feel appreciated, they find you good company, enjoy your conversation – they like you. If, in contrast, we lack friends and feel avoided by others, then few of us are thick-skinned enough not to fall prey to self-doubts, to worries that people find us unattractive and boring, that they think we are stupid or socially inept.

  PRIDE, SHAME AND STATUS

  The psychoanalyst Alfred Adler said ‘To be human means to feel inferior.’ Perhaps he should have said ‘To be human means being highly sensitive about being regarded as inferior.’ Our sensitivity to such feelings makes it easy to understand the contrasting effects of high and low social status on confidence. How people see you matters. While it is of course possible to be upper-class and still feel totally inadequate, or to be lower-class and full of confidence, in general the further up the social ladder you are, the more help the world seems to give you in keeping the self-doubts at bay. If the social hierarchy is seen – as it often is – as if it were a ranking of the human race by ability, then the outward signs of success or failure (the better jobs, higher incomes, education, housing, car and clothes) all make a difference.

  It’s hard to disregard social status because it comes so close to defining our worth and how much we are valued. To do well for yourself or to be successful is almost synonymous with moving up the social ladder. Higher status almost always carries connotations of being better, superior, more successful and more able. If you don’t want to feel small, incapable, looked down on or inferior, it is not quite essential to avoid low social status, but the further up the social ladder you are, the easier it becomes to feel a sense of pride, dignity and self-confidence. Social comparisons increasingly show you in a positive light – whether they are comparisons of wealth, education, job status, where you live, holidays, or any other markers of success.

  Not only do advertisers play on our sensitivity to social comparisons, knowing we will tend to buy things which enhance how we are seen, but, as we shall see in Chapter 10, one of the most common causes of violence, and one which plays a large part in explaining why violence is more common in more unequal societies, is that it is often triggered by loss of face and humiliation when people feel looked down on and disrespected. By playing on our fears of being seen as of less worth, advertisers may even contribute to the level of violence in a society.

  It was Thomas Scheff, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who said that shame was the social emotion.17 He meant almost exactly what Dickerson and Kemeny were referring to when they found that the most likely kinds of stressors to raise levels of stress hormones were ‘social evaluative threats’. By ‘shame’ he meant the range of emotions to do with feeling foolish, stupid, ridiculous, inadequate, defective, incompetent, awkward, exposed, vulnerable and insecure. Shame and its opposite, pride, are rooted in the processes through which we internalize how we imagine others see us. Scheff called shame the social emotion because pride and shame provide the social evaluative feedback as we experience ourselves as if through others’ eyes. Pride is the pleasure and shame the pain through which we are socialized, so that we learn, from early childhood onwards, to behave in socially acceptable ways. Nor of course does it stop in childhood: our sensitivity to shame continues to provide the basis for conformity throughout adult life. People often find even the smallest infringement of social norms in the presence of others causes so much embarrassment that they are left wishing they could just disappear, or that the ground would swallow them up.

  Although the Dickerson and Kemeny study found that it was exposure to social evaluative threats which most reliably raised levels of stress hormones, that does not tell us how frequently people suffer from such anxieties. Are they a very common part of everyday life, or only occasional? An answer to that question comes from the health research showing that low social status, lack of friends, and a difficult early childhood are the most important markers of psychosocial stress in modern societies. If our interpretation of these three factors is right, it suggests that these kinds of social anxiety and insecurity are the most common sources of stress in modern societies. Helen Lewis, a psychoanalyst who drew people’s attention to shame emotions, thought she saw very frequent behavioural indications of shame or embarrassment – perhaps not much more than we would call a momentary feeling of awkwardness or self-consciousness – when her patients gave an embarrassed laugh or hesitated at particular points while speaking in a way suggesting slight nervousness.18

  FROM COMMUNITY TO MASS SOCIETY

  Why have these social anxieties increased so dramatically over the last half century – as Twenge’s studies showing rising levels of anxiety and fragile, narcissistic egos suggest they have? Why does the social evaluative threat seem so great? A plausible explanation is the break-up of the settled communities of the past. People used to grow up knowing, and being known by, many of the same people all their lives. Although geographical mobility had been increasing for several generations, the last half century has seen a particularly rapid rise. At the beginning of this period it was still common for people – in rural and urban areas alike – never to have travelled much beyond the boundaries
of their immediate city or village community. Married brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents, tended to remain living nearby and the community consisted of people who had often known each other for much of their lives. But now that so many people move from where they grew up, knowledge of neighbours tends to be superficial or non-existent. People’s sense of identity used to be embedded in the community to which they belonged, in people’s real knowledge of each other, but now it is cast adrift in the anonymity of mass society. Familiar faces have been replaced by a constant flux of strangers. As a result, who we are, identity itself, is endlessly open to question.

  The problem is shown even in the difficulty we have in distinguishing between the concept of the ‘esteem’ in which we may or may not be held by others, and our own self-esteem. The evidence of our sensitivity to ‘social evaluative threat’, coupled with Twenge’s evidence of long-term rises in anxiety and narcissism, suggests that we may – by the standards of any previous society – have become highly self-conscious, obsessed with how we appear to others, worried that we might come across as unattractive, boring, stupid or whatever, and constantly trying to manage the impressions we make. And at the core of our interactions with strangers is our concern at the social judgements and evaluations they might make: how do they rate us, did we give a good account of ourselves? This vulnerability is part of the modern psychological condition and feeds directly into consumerism.

  It is well known that these problems are particularly difficult for adolescents. While their sense of themselves is most uncertain, they have to cope in schools of a thousand or more of their peers. It is hardly surprising that peer pressure becomes such a powerful force in their lives, that so many are dissatisfied with what they look like, or succumb to depression and self-harm.

  INEQUALITY INCREASES EVALUATION ANXIETIES

  Although the rises in anxiety that seem to centre on social evaluation pre-date the rise in inequality, it is not difficult to see how rising inequality and social status differences may impact on them. Rather than being entirely separate spheres, how much status and wealth people achieve – from unskilled low-paid work to success, money and pre-eminence – affects not only their sense of themselves, but also how positively they are seen even by friends and family. Our need to feel valued and capable human beings means we crave positive feedback and often react with anger even to implied criticism. Social status carries the strongest messages of superiority and inferiority, and social mobility is widely seen as a process by which people are sorted by ability. Indeed, in job applications and promotions, where discrimination by age, sex, race or religion is prohibited, it is the task of the interview panel to discriminate between individuals exclusively by ability – just as long as they don’t make inferences from gender or skin colour, etc.

  Greater inequality seems to heighten people’s social evaluation anxieties by increasing the importance of social status. Instead of accepting each other as equals on the basis of our common humanity as we might in more equal settings, getting the measure of each other becomes more important as status differences widen. We come to see social position as a more important feature of a person’s identity. Between strangers it may often be the dominant feature. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth-century American philosopher, said,

  ‘ ’Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it.’19 Indeed, psychological experiments suggest that we make judgements of each other’s social status within the first few seconds of meeting.20 No wonder first impressions count, and no wonder we feel social evaluation anxieties!

  If inequalities are bigger, so that some people seem to count for almost everything and others for practically nothing, where each one of us is placed becomes more important. Greater inequality is likely to be accompanied by increased status competition and increased status anxiety. It is not simply that where the stakes are higher each of us worries more about where he or she comes. It is also that we are likely to pay more attention to social status in how we assess each other. Surveys have found that when choosing prospective marriage partners, people in more unequal countries put less emphasis on romantic considerations and more on criteria such as financial prospects, status and ambition, than do people in less unequal societies.21

  SELF-PROMOTION REPLACES SELF-DEPRECATION AND MODESTY

  Comparing Japan with the USA, that is, the most equal with almost the most unequal of the rich market democracies (see Figure 2.1), research has revealed a stark contrast between the way people see and present themselves to others in the two countries. In Japan, people choose a much more self-deprecating and self-critical way of presenting themselves, which contrasts sharply with the much more self-enhancing style in the USA. While Americans are more likely to attribute individual successes to their own abilities and their failures to external factors, the Japanese tend to do just the opposite.22 More than twenty studies in Japan have failed to find any evidence of the more self-serving pattern of attributions common in the USA. In Japan people tended to pass their successes off as if they were more a reflection of luck than of judgement, while suggesting their failures are probably attributable to their own lack of ability. This Japanese pattern was also found in Taiwan and China.

  Rather than getting too caught up in psychological terminology, we would do well to see these patterns as differences in how far people value personal modesty, preferring to maintain social bonds by not using their successes to build themselves up as more able than others. As greater inequality increases status competition and social evaluative threat, egos have to be propped up by self-promoting and self-enhancing strategies. Modesty easily becomes a casualty of inequality: we become outwardly tougher and harder in the face of greater exposure to social evaluation anxieties, but inwardly – as the literature on narcissism suggests – probably more vulnerable, less able to take criticism, less good at personal relationships and less able to recognize our own faults.

  LIBERTY, EQUALITY AND FRATERNITY

  The demand for ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ during the French Revolution shows just how long the issues we have been discussing here have been recognized. The slogan focused attention on the dimensions of social relations which matter most if we are to create a better society and make a difference to the real quality of our lives. ‘Liberty’ meant not being subservient or beholden to the feudal nobility and landed aristocracy. It was liberty from the feudal shackles of inferiority. Similarly, ‘fraternity’ reflects a desire for greater mutuality and reciprocity in social relations. We raise the same issues when we talk about community, social cohesion or solidarity. Their importance to human wellbeing is demonstrated repeatedly in research which shows how beneficial friendship and involvement in community life is to health. ‘Equality’ comes into the picture as a precondition for getting the other two right. Not only do large inequalities produce all the problems associated with social differences and the divisive class prejudices which go with them, but, as later chapters show, it also weakens community life, reduces trust, and increases violence.

  PART TWO

  The Costs of Inequality

  4

  Community life and social relations

  Among the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me with greater force than the equality of conditions. I easily perceived the enormous influence that this primary fact exercises on the workings of the society.

  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

  In August 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the southern United States, devastating cities in Mississippi and Louisiana, overwhelming flood protection systems, and leaving 80 per cent of the city of New Orleans under water. A mandatory evacuation order was issued for the city the day before the storm hit, but by that time most public transport had shut down and fuel and rental cars were unavailable. The city government set up ‘refuges of last resort’ for
people who couldn’t get out of New Orleans, including the Superdome, a vast sports arena, which ended up sheltering around 26,000 people, despite sections of its roof being ripped off by the storm. At least 1,836 people were killed by the hurricane, and another 700 people were missing and unaccounted for.

  What captured the attention of the world’s media in the aftermath of the storm as much as the physical devastation – the flattened houses, flooded streets, collapsed highways and battered oil rigs – was what seemed like the complete breakdown of civilization in the city. There were numerous arrests and shoot-outs throughout the week following the hurricane. Television news screens showed desperate residents begging for help, for baby food, for medicine, and then switched to images of troops, cruising the flooded streets in boats – not evacuating people, not bringing them supplies, but, fully armed with automatic weapons, looking for looters.