The Inner Level

by Richard Wilkinson

  A review of research concluded that social stress, particularly stress between parents and children, changes the expression of a wide range of genes that regulate stress responses.242 As a result, the dice are loaded very differently according to whether you are brought up with the benefit of secure loving relationships, or whether you are among the 10–15 per cent of the population who have suffered psychological or physical abuse, been neglected or witnessed parental conflict and violence, or whether your experience was somewhere between these two poles.243

  Many species have sensitive periods in early life that enable development to be informed by experience. Even plants seem to have an epigenetic capacity to change their developmental trajectory in response to an early experience of drought or salt, so they are better equipped to deal with any similar experiences in the future.244 Epigenetic changes are not triggered just by exposure to aspects of the physical environment. What makes them relevant to the ways people adjust to the different quality of life and social relationships associated with more or less hierarchical societies is that they are also triggered by subjective perceptions of our circumstances – including more stressful family relationships.245, 246 Our perceptions and feelings about our social situation and circumstances can alter the expression of hundreds of genes.245

  The discovery that our early social experiences trigger changes in gene expression affecting how we develop indicates that we have, throughout our evolution, needed to adapt flexibly to very different kinds of social environment and the different demands they entail. Over the course of evolution, humans have experienced societies based on everything from ‘might is right’ dominance hierarchies at one extreme, to caring, sharing reciprocity at the other. Rather than being adapted to one environment once and for all, epigenetics and our evolved psychology have equipped us with what amounts almost to two human natures, each triggered by the demands of the prevailing social system. It is rather as if babies were actors coming on to the stage and having to discover which of the plays in the human repertoire they need to perform.

  What matters is the quality of social relationships. Early development is shaped by whether we find ourselves growing up in a world where we must be ready to fight for what we can (except when deferring to dominants), learning not to trust each other because we are all rivals for scarce resources, or whether we find ourselves living in a society where we depend on co-operation and reciprocity, where empathy and trust are important. Each system requires a different social orientation, a different kind of emotional and cognitive development. People who have had stressful childhoods are not damaged in any simple sense of the word, but may be better adapted to function in a stressful social world. They may be more streetwise, less willing to trust others, less likely to have a false sense of security and more prepared to fight their corner.

  These epigenetic processes would have been beneficial in our prehistoric past when children were not separated off from the rest of the group in detached nuclear families. The childhood experience of social relationships among a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers would have been a good indication of the kind of society a child was born into and would have to deal with in adulthood. Now that family life is partly separated from the rest of society by the privacy of the home, childhood experience may often be a poor guide to relationships in society more widely. Some families are loving, while others are riven by conflict – a child’s early experience will set them off on a particular developmental trajectory regardless of whether that experience remains a useful indication of the nature of relationships in the wider society. But of course the modern nuclear family is far from impervious to the stresses of the wider society. Financial stress and debt, a difficult work–life balance, unemployment, mental health or addiction problems, or feelings of inferiority – all associated with inequality – take their toll on family relationships. Indeed, there is evidence that rates of child maltreatment are higher in the more unequal states of the USA (see Chapter 6).247

  While some epigenetic changes are fairly short lived, others can be carried between generations, even though they are not changes in DNA itself. For example, epigenetic changes identified in Holocaust survivors were also found in their adult children, showing that maternal stress even before conception can affect the next generation.248

  SOCIAL STATUS

  As well as the radical differences in the general quality of relationships from one society to another, there are also different adaptive challenges of living nearer the top or the bottom of the social ladder. In more unequal societies, the quality of social relations and the experience of adversity can vary dramatically according to where you are on the social ladder. As a result, there is evidence of epigenetic differences between people living in richer and poorer areas of our cities. A study carried out in Glasgow in Scotland compared the DNA of people in manual and non-manual jobs, as well as of people living in more or less deprived areas. Both comparisons showed that there were large epigenetic differences between socio-economic groups. Although the effects of most of these epigenetic changes are still unknown and more research is needed, there can be little doubt that they involve the insidious effects of inequality.249

  Fortunately, many changes in gene expression are likely to be reversible if and when an individual’s experience changes. A study in which the social rank of macaque monkeys was changed by moving them into different groups found that their epigenetic profile changed with their rank.250

  Although it might be assumed that these changes helped individuals to adapt their behaviour to their new status, little is yet known about the effects of specific changes in gene expression. They are thought to underlie many of the effects of stress in early life, including heightened responses to worries and anxieties, and are likely to have long-term health consequences. At Stanford University, the neuro-endocrinologist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky has described how stress changes our body’s physiological priorities.246, 251 The ‘fight or flight’ responses, which help us deal with an emergency or threatened attack – for example by mobilizing energy for muscular activity and increasing reaction speeds – are prioritized at the expense of things like tissue maintenance and repair, growth, digestion and reproductive functions. Although this does no real harm when triggered briefly by a threat which is soon over, if worries and anxieties continue for weeks or years, health is likely to suffer.

  INEQUALITY AND POVERTY

  The effects of low social status are often confused with the effects of poverty. It is often assumed that deprivation and poverty affect people primarily through the direct effects of exposure to poor material circumstances, such as damp or overcrowded housing, low quality food and so on. However, even though material standards become less important for their own sake as societies become richer, they remain important as indicators of people’s ability to take part in the normal life of society and avoid ‘social exclusion’. This is why poverty in developed countries is now almost always measured in relative terms. For instance, the European Union defines poverty as living on less than 60 per cent of the median income in each country. This is a recognition that what matters is how your material standards compare with others – your relative deprivation. Although the predominant view focuses on ‘social exclusion’, what is actually most demeaning about the experience of poverty is living in circumstances that define you – in most people’s eyes – as inferior to others. Marshall Sahlins went as far as to say that ‘Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status.’210 In a similar vein, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen suggested that shame was the ‘irreducible absolutist core’ of the experience of poverty.252

  Research that demonstrates the truth of these statements particularly clearly was provided by an international team which arranged for poor people – adults and children – to be interviewed about the experience of poverty in seven developed and developin
g countries: rural Uganda and India, urban China, Pakistan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and Norway.253 The material living standards of the people interviewed differed radically from one country to another. The poor in India typically lived in one- or two-roomed huts with an earth floor, corrugated iron roof, an outside cooking space, a communal tap and usually no access to lavatories. Respondents in Uganda were subsistence farmers living in earth-floored thatched huts which were not properly weatherproof; they cooked outside and many lacked access to clean water. In contrast, those interviewed in Britain and Norway usually lived in three-bedroom houses or flats, they had hot and cold water, electricity, heating, kitchens and bathrooms. Because most of the British and Norwegian respondents were unemployed, they lived on social security. However, despite these differences, and the corresponding differences in access to adequate food and clothing, the subjective experience of being poorer than others in each society was found to be remarkably similar. In order not to introduce bias, the researchers avoided using words like ‘shame’ and ‘poverty’ in the interviews, but they nonetheless concluded that:

  Respondents universally despised poverty and frequently despised themselves for being poor. Parents were often despised by their children, women despised their men-folk and some men were reported to take out their self-loathing on their partners and children. Despite respondents generally believing that they had done their best against all odds, they mostly considered that they had both failed themselves by being poor and that others saw them as failures. This internalisation of shame was further externally reinforced in the family, the workplace and in their dealings with officialdom. Even children could not escape this shaming for, with the possible exception of Pakistan, school was an engine of social grading, a place of humiliation for those without the possessions that guaranteed social acceptance … No parent was able to escape the shame of failing to provide for their children even when children were prepared to stop asking for things – the latter itself being a further source of shame.253

  As well as self-loathing, the sense of shame also led to ‘withdrawal … despair, depression, thoughts of suicide and generally to reductions in personal efficacy’. For respondents, the most telling symbol of failure was ‘the inability to provide appropriate food and shelter for oneself and one’s family’. ‘For men, relying on others or on welfare benefits was perceived as a challenge to their sense of masculinity: a British father to two children admitted that he felt “like shit … I’m the man in this relationship. I am meant to be the man … to take care of the missus and my kids. And I don’t.” ’

  As well as this internalized sense of shame, the researchers found that the poor also experienced explicit shaming by the wider society in each of the seven countries. It was noted that in Britain the mass media added particularly to this shaming by reinforcing the view that poverty was the result of personal failures.

  The effects of poverty and inequality cannot be properly understood without regard to our inherited aversion to low social status. As part of our evolved psychology it must date back to pre-human dominance hierarchies, but its grip is still felt strongly in relation to modern inequality. Those who fail to acknowledge its power often continue to imagine that economic growth can deal with what are actually status effects of inequality and relative poverty. Given the power of subjective experience, being substantially poorer than others will, as we have seen, have powerful epigenetic effects.

  TWO SOURCES OF SOCIAL ANXIETY

  We can now see that there are likely to have been two main sources of the human vulnerability to social anxiety which have etched themselves into our psychology. The first is the legacy of pre-human dominance ranking systems, and the second comes from the egalitarian period of our prehistory.

  Competition for status is predicated on being highly aware of rank, and is likely to be the source of much of the downward prejudice seen in human societies towards those lower on the social ladder. Among non-human primates it is clear that each individual can treat those of lower rank with impunity – that is part of what superior status is about. But to compete for status without offending superiors in a dominance hierarchy is difficult: you have to be able to recognize your own inferiority in relation to a dominant to ensure you back off from unwinnable conflicts and potential injury, while also attempting to maintain and improve your position relative to near equals.

  The psychological impact of dominance hierarchies is evident in the amount of time that subordinates of almost all the strongly rank-ordered monkey species spend checking on the location and disposition of dominants – so much so that the dominant members of a group can be identified just by seeing which are most watched by others.254 That this vigilance reflects fear and the need to avoid conflict has been confirmed by observations that subordinates look most frequently at the most aggressive members of their troop.255

  Human beings still show a remarkable ability to judge dominance characteristics in each other. One study observed interactions among small groups of students meeting each other in experimental conditions for the first time. It found that even ‘at first glance’ – actually within one minute of meeting and before they had spoken to each other – they had made subliminal assessments of each other’s tendency to dominant behaviour as expressed in body language. These assessments were then borne out in observations of subsequent interactions.256 The study was designed to exclude the influence of external signs of status such as clothing. The researchers concluded that the clues to dominance behaviour which were most likely to have been influential from the start were things like whether people looked confident, how active they were, and whether or not they looked away when they met each other’s eyes. Particularly interesting in this context is that the researchers who conducted the study said that their findings were ‘consistent with primate literature which shows that dominant animals receive many short gazes’ from subordinates.256

  Pre-human ranking systems have left us with an overwhelming concern for, and sensitivity to, social status.257-259 Our tendency to compare ourselves with others is presumably as old as the face-offs between animals competing for dominance as they assess each other’s strength and decide whether to fight or concede rank. Few things are as important as your position in the pecking order. And as we saw in Chapter 4, our concern with status drives consumerism in modern societies. Because we are attuned to even subtle markers of status, consumerism becomes a fight for status by other means.

  A difficulty we faced when studying the effects of income inequality across whole societies was the question of who people compared themselves to. The consistent finding from research on relative deprivation suggested that people have a strong tendency to compare themselves with others like themselves, with near equals – such as neighbours or work colleagues – rather than with those much further up or down the social ladder.260 This appeared to suggest that the very rich and very poor don’t make much difference to the vast bulk of the population in the middle; it seemed to run counter to the copious evidence that income inequality, measured from richest to poorest across the whole spectrum of inequality, does matter and leads to many different forms of social dysfunction. Looking again at this puzzle from an evolutionary perspective, we can see how the two can be reconciled. Robert Sapolsky, who made annual trips for some twenty-five years to study troops of wild baboons in the Serengeti, found that fights for dominance tend to be between near neighbours in the ranking system.261 Hence, number seven in rank order will contend for position with numbers six and eight and not with numbers one or twenty. Seven gives way to one because it knows it would lose; similarly, number twenty won’t fight number seven because it knows that it would be defeated. However, if an animal might gain or lose position in the rank hierarchy, that animal must watch that it isn’t bettered by its nearest neighbours. If there is any chance of a change in rank, seven has to watch numbers six and eight. This does not mean that much higher or lower ranking animals are unimportant. Recognizing the superiorit
y of dominants is crucial to survival – hence the constant glances towards dominants among non-human primates and, presumably, the higher levels of blood clotting factors among junior civil servants in London offices described above.

  Perhaps this is why it is when our friends and near equals start to talk or behave as if they think they are better than us that it elicits the angry response: ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ It surely is also the reason why the increased violence found in more unequal societies is not the result of the poor attacking the rich, but primarily an increase in violence among those at the bottom of the ladder.1, 262 Violence is more common in more unequal societies because the heightened importance of status makes it even more necessary to defend our position when we feel disrespected or suffer real (or imagined) slights from near equals. Concern with social status is inevitably about how others see us, about respect, about being thought well of, being looked up to rather than down on. Equally inevitably, it brings with it the obsessive concern with self-presentation and our vulnerability to advertisers’ promises that the right purchases will enhance our image and status.

  It is likely that one of the epigenetic changes caused by exposure to greater inequality as status becomes more important, is that we become more vigilant towards social comparisons with those around us. But whether or not epigenetic processes are involved, it is clear that increased inequality makes everyone more attentive to status, touchier about how they are seen and more watchful for possible slights.