by Joe Moran
Like Ellis, Philip Zimbardo grew up in the Bronx, the eldest child in a large Sicilian family. In 1939, aged five, he caught double pneumonia and whooping cough and, in those days before widespread drug and antibiotic treatments, had to spend six months in the children’s ward of the Willard Parker Hospital for infectious diseases. In a bleak, gray ward with a vast sea of iron bedsteads and hardwood floors smelling of disinfectant, the children were not allowed to touch or kiss anyone else for fear of contagion. The young Philip watched many of his fellow patients die. In the middle of this hellish experience he learned to charm the nurses to get a bit of extra butter or sugar and led fun games with the other children, such as imagining that their beds were rafts on the Hudson River. He was teaching himself the power of social ease.17
Zimbardo had a younger brother, George, who developed chronic shyness as a toddler after wearing leg braces to correct his infantile paralysis. Whenever someone knocked on the door of their home, he would count to see if all the family were present. If they were, he would run to one of two hiding places: under his bed or behind the locked bathroom door. He cried constantly on his first day at school, clinging to his mother’s dress in fear. Mrs. Zimbardo thought it might help if he pretended to be a masked man like his hero, the Lone Ranger. They made a hooded mask out of a brown paper bag, cutting out spaces for the eyes, nose, and mouth and coloring it in, and the teacher told his classmates that they were not to unmask the new boy. He wore the mask until the end of year, by which time he was no longer shy.18 It was a redemptive American story: shyness could be conquered through perseverance, creativity, and a mother’s love.
In 1971, as a young psychology professor, Philip Zimbardo conducted the notorious Stanford prison experiment. Student volunteers acted as prisoners and guards in a pretend prison in the basement of the Stanford University psychology building. The guards began treating the prisoners brutally, and many inmates internalized their subordinate positions and began sheepishly obeying their tormentors. The study became so gruesome that it had to be stopped a week early. The following year, discussing the prison study in a psychology class, it occurred to Zimbardo that shy people might be incarcerating themselves in a silent prison, in which they acted as their own guards, unconsciously imposing their own constraints on their speech and behavior. He set up the Stanford Shyness Survey, started with his own students, and went on to interview thousands of people. Of those interviewed 80 percent said they had been shy at some point in their lives, 40 percent said they were currently shy, and 4 percent said they were shy all the time with almost everyone. By making shyness a matter of self-definition, Zimbardo enlarged its meaning and showed that it waxed and waned in different situations and could afflict even the most assured social performers.
Having been brought up in a tight-knit Bronx neighborhood with a lively street culture, Zimbardo began to think of shyness as a particularly modern problem. He was saddened by the Saturday shopping-mall children he saw in California who, while their mothers shopped, sat, bored, around fountains eating Big Macs or pizza to the sound of piped-in lounge music, before being driven home to their suburban subdivisions.19 In 1977 he set up the Stanford shyness clinic, a free facility for adolescents and adults. It was, some felt, fortuitously placed in Silicon Valley, where among male computer scientists there might be a high proportion of techno-recluses conversing in computer code in rooms lit only by the glow of their VDUs.
Meanwhile, a second front had opened up in the war against shyness, at Oxford University. Michael Argyle, a pioneer in the field of social psychology in Britain, traced his interest in this field back to his concern for a school friend whose shyness had made him miserable. When he started his research in the Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge in 1950, it was full of people studying motor skills, and he began to wonder if social skills might be similar to motor skills in that they both depended on feedback, whether while interacting with a machine or listening to and looking at other people. It occurred to him that social skills might be taught and become second nature, like striking a golf ball or shifting gears in a car.
Argyle began researching the unspoken rules of human interaction, what he called “non-verbal communication.” His Social Skills Research Group at the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Oxford, formed in 1963, devised experiments to examine the minutiae of eye movements and head nods. A young researcher, Adam Kendon, who later became a leading authority on gesture, was an amateur cinematographer, and he filmed conversations between experimental volunteers at the institute. Captured on film, two people talking could clearly be seen to synchronize their nonverbal cues in a sort of gestural waltz.
In his much-cited 1965 article “Eye-Contact, Distance and Affiliation,” Argyle argued that there was an equilibrium level of physical closeness, eye contact, and other signs of intimacy. If one of these aspects changed, the others changed to compensate. So the closer two people stood together, the less eye contact they would make; a person would stand even closer to a second person if their eyes were shut. Eye contact was so crucial that wearing a mask or even dark glasses was enough to derail a conversation—although there was no problem if both parties were invisible, perhaps because the telephone had habituated people to not seeing their interlocutor. In another study Argyle and his team put hostile, friendly, and neutral verbal messages in different combinations with hostile, friendly, and neutral nonverbal ways of delivering them to see what effect they had on the listener. They arrived at an arresting statistic: nonverbal communication was twelve and a half times more powerful than language in conveying meaning.20
In 1966 the British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, which Argyle had co-founded, published an article that was reported widely in the British press. Sidney Jourard, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida, had conducted a field study of couples sitting in coffee shops in different cities. He had found that in the Puerto Rican capital, San Juan, couples touched each other—by hand-holding, back-stroking, hair-caressing, or knee-patting—180 times per hour. In Paris it was 110 times per hour; in Gainesville, Florida, it was twice per hour; in London, it was never.21
In another experiment Jourard gave several hundred of his students a sort of butcher’s beef chart with an outline of a human figure with twenty-two numbered zones—heads, hands, buttocks, and so on. Jourard asked them to mark which parts of their bodies had been seen naked and which had been touched by family and friends, and which parts of these people’s bodies they had seen naked and touched. The growing use of bikinis and bathing briefs meant that the question about what had been seen naked did not produce very interesting results. A more arresting finding was that most people, unless they were lovers, touched others only briefly on the hands, arms, and shoulders. In Puerto Rico, by contrast, men commonly walked arm in arm with other men in the street, and women with women.
Jourard concluded that America and Britain were “contactless societies.” In the United States this “touch taboo” even extended to barbers using electric scalp massagers strapped to their hands so they did not touch their customers’ heads. And yet, for Jourard, the large number of massage parlors in US and UK cities betrayed a desire for contact that was not being met in normal relationships. Many American motel rooms were equipped with “Magic Fingers,” a patented device that would vibrate the bed gently for fifteen minutes after a quarter was inserted. Jourard concluded that “the machine has taken over another function of man—the loving and soothing caress.”22
The new therapies and encounter groups that came out of California in the late 1960s, which prescribed the open expression of emotion and generous doses of hugging and Swedish massage, sought to cure Western society of this unhealthy touchlessness. Bernard Gunther, at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur Hot Springs in California, taught full-body and finger-head massage techniques as a path to “sensory awakening.” Some of Gunther’s more outré methods—such as mutual hair shampooing and the “Gunther hero sandwich” (whole groups spooning
one another)—failed to catch on. But the massage therapists probably did help Britain and America to become more tactile societies—which is one reason why, by the 1980s, “Magic Fingers” had largely disappeared from American motel rooms (another being that it was easy to break into the machines to steal the coins).
No one would have mistaken the clean-cut, churchgoing Argyle for a Californian hippie, but in a quieter way he was a product of the same expressive revolution of the 1960s. Citing Jourard’s research at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he lamented our “non-touching culture.”23 But these cultural differences reinforced his sense that social skills were learnable and teachable. Argyle’s new social psychology suggested that people’s personalities were not crystallized in childhood or adolescence but capable of change. In his best-selling book The Psychology of Interpersonal Behavior (1967) he argued that many mental problems were due not to a psychopathology dating back to early childhood, as Freudians thought, but to a lack of social skills.
In 1968 Argyle set up a social skills training program at the Littlemore Psychiatric Hospital, near Oxford, which had pioneered the use of small group meetings with patients instead of the traditional methods of strait-jacketed restraint and confinement in padded cells. Argyle wanted to carry on this enlightened tradition. He believed that a common trait in mental patients was their inability to make friends, owing to their failure to take any interest in people or see their point of view, and their consequent “very low level of rewardingness to others.”24
He set the patients exercises to improve their posture, enliven their expressions, and animate their gestures. They learned to “moodmatch” the voice tone, expression, and body language of their conversational partner. If their voices were monotonous, a common failing among the shy or depressed, they were taught to vary pitch. Since a falling inflection was often the hardest thing to correct in a shy person’s voice, patients were given a voice key—a meter with a counter triggered by a microphone at a certain noise level. If you got enough “counts” for speaking loud enough, you received a reward.25 The hardest thing these patients had to do was to watch videos of themselves and be shown how sullen, bored, or hostile they looked to others. They then had to reassemble their instinctive gestures and expressions more agreeably, like out-of-form golfers reconstructing their swings.
Argyle’s methods caught on and were rolled out into many areas of life. Schizophrenics were taught social skills to overcome their alienating sense of otherness. Violent prisoners were shown how to deal politely with situations that might lead to conflict. Alongside these people, whom Argyle named the “socially inadequate,” were line managers, doctors, teachers, service workers—anyone whose job involved dealing with people or the public—who had to be schooled in social skills as well. Every training day at work now seemed to have its role-play exercises and video tutorials about how to talk to other members of the human race.
Argyle became a cheerleader for Scottish country dancing, which he did every Wednesday for years and which he recommended as a universal cure for shyness. Just as Robert Burns took up Scottish dancing to “give my manners a brush,” Argyle felt that the careful tracing of progressive patterns to a set choreography could teach people social skills. Sequences such as “reels of three” and “grand chain” were mini-tutorials in the importance of taking polite turns and coordinating touch and gaze, rather as babies matched sequences of smiles and glances with their mothers. Scottish dancing welcomed newcomers, had few conflicts or cliques, and, since the rules were so clear, evoked little fear of failure or stage fright. It could also carry a hint of risk-free romance that required no words or commitment from the participants.
Like his American comrades-in-arms in the campaign against shyness, Argyle possessed the evangelism of the missionary, not the empathy of a fellow sufferer. An outgoing personality who at parties wore a revolving and flashing pink bow tie, he came to feel that extroverts were happier because they expected to get on with people, and so they did. “The happy people are a lot less popular than they think they are,” he said. “The depressives are a lot less unpopular. But on the whole, the depressives are generally nearer the truth.” He saw no rational reason for people to be shy and lonely and was puzzled by the reluctance of intelligent people to learn the social skills that would make them happier. When he ran the first conference on nonverbal communication in Oxford in 1967, he was baffled by “the amazingly inept and socially incompetent behaviour of some of the world’s greatest experts on social behaviour. No satisfactory explanation was found for this despite much discussion.”26
Late one Saturday night in December 1978, an unemployed nineteen-year-old was not to be found in the pub or watching the soccer highlights like most of his peers. Steven Morrissey had the kind of personality that Michael Argyle might have called “unrewarding to others.” He was sat on his own in the living room of his parents’ house on King’s Road in Stretford, near Manchester, watching the first of a new series of Alan Bennett plays on ITV. Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf was the story of Trevor Hopkins, a shy lecturer in English at a northern polytechnic, who on buses was never without a book, not because he liked reading but because it gave him somewhere to look, and who suffered from shy bladder, being unable to pee in a public toilet if anyone else was at the urinal. Morrissey felt that, for the first time, his own sense of humor about Rattigan’s “vice anglais” had been caught on screen.
In 1992, Morrissey, now in his early thirties, dropped a CD through the letterbox of his near-neighbor Alan Bennett in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, with a note inviting him for tea. Bennett accepted, and the two men became friends, in spite of the awkwardness Bennett felt about addressing Morrissey by his second name as everyone else did, so he ended up not calling him anything. Ironically, in Bennett’s youth it had been the transition to first-name terms that had signaled a hard-won intimacy.
In his cultural tastes, Morrissey often looked past the popular culture of his formative years of the 1960s and 1970s to older role models to help him cultivate a personal mythology of shyness and silence. He loved the unfashionable A. E. Housman, who published short poems about unstated and unreturned love at decades-long intervals. He dreamed of being Dirk Bogarde, living alone in a Chelsea mansion flat and hiding himself under a cloth cap in the street so he never had to speak to anyone. And he had a soft spot for George Formby, especially the song “Why Don’t Women Like Me?,” which he had played as interval music at Smiths concerts.
Morrissey’s shyness was shaped by a tough secondary school where the physical education teacher made his class run round the gym while he took pot shots at them with a medicine ball. One school contemporary recalled that Morrissey simply walked around, looking at things intently, as though “he had a shield round him.” At least some of the time he wore glasses, which he hated. They were the standard-issue 524 Contours, with the thick black plastic frames, millions of pairs of which had been perched on British noses since the founding of the National Health Service in 1948. By 1972, when the thirteen-year-old Morrissey was forced to wear glasses, most people were paying for commercial frames to go with their NHS lenses, so wearing 524 Contours meant both that you were a “speccy four eyes” and that your family was too poor to afford anything else. After leaving school in 1975 with no qualifications, he enrolled at Stretford Technical College, where he stopped wearing glasses. Without them he couldn’t see beyond a couple of feet, so he gained a reputation for snubbing people, which aggravated his shyness. For the next few years he became, in his own phrase, a “back-bedroom casualty”—withdrawing to his small room at the back of the house to sulk and dream.27
The period of our lives when we experience what Janet Frame called “the adolescent homelessness of self” is when we are most naturally disposed to shyness.28 The teenage years are ones of uncertainty about our futures, failed experiments with identity, hormonal mood swings, and physical and social ungainliness. Teenagers often hug them
selves because they feel deprived of physical affection and unsure how to obtain it. (Not coincidentally, perhaps, this became one of Morrissey’s distinctive moves on stage.) They are drawn to displaced forms of communication—texting, letters to pen pals, diaries with locks and keys, badly emoted poetry scrawled in exercise books—as a way of bypassing their blushing, mumbling selves.
But the shy, solitary teenager is also a modern invention, a product of the postwar rise in youthful disposable income and the changing layout of houses. In Britain it is only quite recently that most young people have had the privacy of their own bedroom, so it was in the late 1950s that the first British teenagers retreated from the family TV room to their own rooms to play 45-rpm singles on their portable Dansette record players or tune into Radio Luxembourg on their transistor radios. The signal from the Radio Luxembourg transmitter could only be received satisfactorily after dark, when it was able to defeat the curvature of the earth by striking the ionosphere and bouncing back down to Britain. As it played late into the night, teenagers would listen with their radios under their pillows, enhancing a sense of the new youth culture as something to be experienced intimately and clandestinely.
The history of British pop music is tied up with this emergence of the teenage bedroom as a place where young people could smolder away and nurse their private crushes, protected by the Keep Out sign on the door. Morrissey’s withdrawal was extreme and lasted for years, into his early twenties. In his tiny box bedroom he painted his window glass black, closed the curtains, and shut out the world, longing only for “those tiny crackles that are about to introduce that record.”29 He often did not leave the house for a month at a time.