The second source of our vulnerability to social anxiety, and our tendency to see – to know and experience – ourselves through the eyes of others, comes from our egalitarian prehistory. It is from our pre-agrarian ancestors that our worry about social exclusion and our need to feel liked and appreciated by others stems. Unlike animals, among which vulnerability is very largely a matter of differences in physical strength, human egalitarianism had its origins in our mutual vulnerability to each other – including the strongest to the weakest – which developed with our capacity for big game hunting. It became essential for all members of a group to maintain good – or at least tolerant – relations with everyone. As important as avoiding conflict was the need to avoid exclusion from the co-operative, mutually protective, food-sharing group.
This history may be the origin of what psychologists call our ‘inequality aversion’. There is now a substantial body of research (including findings from the ‘ultimatum game’ discussed earlier) showing that, alongside (and despite) our concern for status, human beings also have a dislike of inequality. For example, in one carefully designed experimental game reported in the scientific journal Nature, people interacted anonymously on computer terminals in groups of four.263 The computer then randomly allocated different sums of money to each of them. They could either keep what they had been given or spend some of it to buy tokens that could be used to reduce or increase the incomes of others. A token costing $1 could be used to raise or lower someone else’s income by $3. These interactions were repeated many times with different combinations of participants. Participants also had the following points explained to them: they could keep the money they ended up with; anonymity would be maintained throughout the game; they would only interact with each person once; and they would have no knowledge of each other’s performance in previous rounds. The result was that a large majority of the tokens bought by participants were used to reduce the incomes of people who received a high initial allocation, and a large majority of the tokens bought to increase people’s incomes were given to people who got a lower than average initial allocation. People who got a high initial allocation were accordingly heavily penalized, and those who got less than other group members had their allocations substantially increased. Those with the bigger initial allocations spent more money to raise the lower incomes of others, and those with the smaller initial allocations spent more on tokens to lower the higher incomes. These patterns of behaviour, and the emotions (including anger) shown by some of the subjects while they played these experimental games, suggest that at least in some contexts people have an aversion to inequality.263
The large body of work, mainly from behavioural economists, using these and other experimental ‘games’ to explore human social motivations, has led to broadly similar conclusions.232 We saw earlier that the ethos of people in hunter-gatherer societies was consciously and ‘assertively’ egalitarian. The advantage for them of avoiding inequality was that it was a precondition (albeit not necessarily a sufficient condition) for maintaining harmonious relations between people.210 Egalitarianism reinforced reciprocity and co-operation. An aversion to inequality was essential to gaining the benefits of friendship and sharing, and was foundational to social life among our hunter-gatherer predecessors. Both our preference for fairness and sense of indebtedness, which may prompt us to reciprocate kindnesses, can, of course, be eclipsed, but they are characteristics which contrast sharply with the ‘each against all’ self-serving principle of dominance hierarchies. Above all, these prosocial values depend on our desire for the good will of others and to be regarded as co-operative and an asset to the well-being of the group. The experimental evidence strongly suggests that high levels of inequality aversion are sustained only if there are possibilities (such as forms of ‘altruistic punishment’ discussed earlier) for sanctioning those who abuse the generosity of others.
LEARNED CULTURE AND SOCIAL ANXIETY
Our sensitivity to the judgements of others is likely to have made a major contribution to the development of our species’ unique dependence on culture – that is to say, on a learned way of life rather than simply on instinctive behaviour. Other primates have been found to have a few learned forms of behaviour – washing the earth off edible tubers before eating them, or using sticks to pick up termites to eat – but none have developed learned forms of behaviour much further. Only among humans does learned behaviour accumulate sufficiently to add up to an entire learned way of life. The transition from a rather inflexible lifestyle dependent on instinctive behaviour to our almost infinitely adaptable way of life is what has enabled us to respond to different circumstances and live as anything from early nomadic hunter-gatherers to modern wage-labouring city-dwellers.
From the point of view of each child as it grows up, other people are the bearers of culture. They are the carriers, the exemplars and guardians of a way of life. Growing up is a matter of learning to behave and live in ways which other people find acceptable or ‘proper’. So whether it is a matter of acquiring particular skills, accumulating knowledge, or pronouncing words in ways that don’t attract laughter or derision, learning has depended substantially on our desire for the good opinion of those around us. We become adept practitioners of a certain way of life because we want to be seen as proficient, or at least as competent, people.
Thomas Scheff regarded our desire to avoid shame and embarrassment as underpinning our tendency to conformity: we don’t want to look odd or stupid in front of others. From there it is only a short step to the idea that our desire for approval and to avoid derision may be what enabled human beings to develop a way of life so overwhelmingly dependent on learning. It looks as if a learned way of life must have arisen on the basis of a conformist tendency to imitate and learn the behaviour and practices of others. (In contrast, innovation or taking a new approach is a risky strategy; but even those who break with convention in one area of life tend still to depend on a learned culture in almost everything else.)
Our desire for respect is likely to have been a powerful motivation for all kinds of learning, whether of specific skills or broader aspects of behaviour. And effective learning and self-development would have brought powerful selective advantages to those who excelled in particular skills and abilities. They would have been admired and highly valued partners and members of the community. Presumably as important, however, was the rejection of the incompetent and those who appeared inadequate.
It is because of the evolutionary importance of passing on our genes to the next generation that these kinds of selective pressures, and the worries about other people’s judgements of us, seem to be at their height among people in their teens and twenties, when sexual selection is most intense. The desire to make as good a match as possible dramatically increases anxieties about looks, competence and status among young people.
REDUCING SOCIAL ANXIETY
Although we have emphasized the evolutionary roots of major features of our psychology affecting social relations, this does not mean they are fixed by our genes. Instead, there is an immensely complex interaction between genes and environment. Sapolsky provides a simple example of how many of our genetic characteristics, rather than determining behaviour regardless of our environment, instead provide us with more sophisticated ways of responding to different circumstances. He points out that a rat’s sense of smell enables it to distinguish between males and females, between close relatives and strangers, between different kinds of food and non-food, and to respond differently to each. As human beings, we know intuitively how to behave towards friends and in relationships between equals. We also know about the importance of social status and power. Modern societies include situations that bring out our prosocial tendencies, our desires to be liked and valued as equals. However, in other situations the striving for self-advancement and our preoccupation with status comes to the fore, and people tend to value – or devalue – each other and themselves according to status. Often the respect we want from other
s seems to depend on gaining higher status (or at least some outward appearances of it), but at the same time we want to be treated as equals. Contradictions abound.
The evolutionary roots of the contrasting sets of strategies we use cannot be understood in isolation: our varying circumstances influence which strategy comes to the fore. Because these different patterns of behaviour have such divergent implications for well-being, it is crucial to recognize the powerful influence that the scale of inequality has on social behaviour across whole societies.
WELL-BEING
Both sources of social anxiety we have highlighted concern our desire for the good opinions of others and are rooted in our evolutionary history, but they are nonetheless radically different. One is about building friendship and good social relations, about mutual support and contributing to each other’s well-being. The other is much more antisocial. It is about being seen as better than others, looking down on one’s inferiors, kowtowing to superiors, and being vulnerable to feelings of inadequacy when we are outdone by others. Though we will always live with a mix of the two, we need more of the first of these two social strategies and less of the second.
Although humans have lived with – and adapted to – extremely different levels of inequality and hierarchy, they have sharply contrasting implications for well-being. Social relations based on status competition foster needless opposition and so are more stressful than those based on greater equality and reciprocity. The evolutionary thread that runs all the way from the bullying structure of animal ranking systems to the ten-fold higher rates of bullying in schools in more unequal societies (Figure 5.2), illustrates what is at stake for us all. Bullying relationships are a source of profound misery. Some children are so badly affected that they vomit with fear at having to go to school each morning and suffer serious depression. People who were bullied at school often carry life-long psychological scars as a result. What goes for the effects of greater inequality among children also goes for the quality of relationships among all of us in more unequal societies. We know in our bones that status competition is a zero-sum game: we cannot all improve our status relative to each other. If some gain, others lose.
The research outlined above that uses experimental ‘games’ to explore human social behaviour demonstrates how flawed the idea really is of ourselves as fundamentally self-interested and possessive. As we saw in the first chapter, the evidence that good social relationships are the key to improved health and happiness is underpinned by studies of wound healing, vulnerability to infections and longevity.28–30, 33, 264, 265
By reducing the material differences between us we can improve well-being and the quality of social relationships across whole populations. As the data show, the more equal a society is, the stronger its community life becomes and the more we feel we can trust each other. Status anxiety, consumerism and violence all decrease, and social relationships become less stressful.
Unless we understand these links, we will go on wishing for a better society and that people would treat each other better, but to no avail. Exhortation alone will not stop people judging each other by outward appearances, or treating wealth as an indication of personal worth. Responses to hierarchy are too deeply ingrained to make it possible to switch them off while ignoring the scale of inequality. Similarly, we could wish that people would pull their self-confidence up by their own boot straps, make friends and contribute to community life, but again, for many the feelings of inferiority will be overpowering. We can wish that large income differences would not lead to feelings of superiority and inferiority, or for people not to be snobbish or look down on people lower on the social ladder, but to make any real difference we have to take account of the factors that provoke these reactions in us.
Because there are no perfectly equal societies, it is impossible to know whether there is a point at which reducing income differences stops being beneficial. There is no data from more equal societies to tell us whether we would benefit from becoming even more equal than the most equal of the developed countries. It is hard to imagine an egalitarian world without the highs and lows of status, a world in which that simple polarization of how we see and value people is absent. If the real differences in people’s endlessly varied skills, interests, abilities, knowledge and personality characteristics were no longer so hidden behind the masks of status, their true individuality might be more freely and clearly expressed.
6
The Misconception of Meritocracyfn1
Boris Johnson, the former Mayor of London who became Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s Conservative government in 2016, was educated at Eton and Oxford. Giving ‘The Margaret Thatcher Lecture’ to a think tank in 2013, he articulated the view that economic equality will never be possible because some people are simply too stupid to catch up with the rest of society: ‘Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85.’ Comparing society to a box of cornflakes, he praised inequality for creating the conditions under which the brightest triumph: ‘the harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top’. Inequality ‘is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity’.266
Whether or not Johnson is quite as clever a cornflake as he presumably likes to think, he certainly isn’t in command of the facts. Nobel Prize-winning economists,267, 268 as well as the OECD and IMF,269, 270 have shown how inequality, far from spurring on economic growth, leads to stagnation and instability. Social mobility is reduced where income inequality is greatest and, far from inspiring innovation, it turns out that there are actually slightly more patents granted per head of population in more equal countries. And, as we’ve seen in the previous chapters, there is also the undeniable human cost of our fixation with keeping up with the Joneses. But Boris is far from alone in his misconceptions about the relationships between inequality and ability.
The idea that people are naturally endowed with differences in ability, intelligence or talent, and that those differences then determine how far up the social ladder they reach, is a powerful popular justification for social hierarchy. The presumption is that we live in a ‘meritocracy’, in which the key to status is ability. We think of society as shaped like a pyramid: the supposition is that most people are near the bottom or only a little above it because the bulk of the population lack the special talents that we imagine get people to the top. The belief that differences in ability are the main influence on where people end up on the social ladder is so strong that we tend to judge everyone’s personal worth, ability and intelligence from their position in society. Nor is this confined simply to how we judge others: it also affects how people see themselves. Those at the top often believe that they are there because they were naturally endowed with plenty of ‘the right stuff’, just as those near the bottom often think that their low status reflects a lack of ability.
That picture is not, however, supported by the latest scientific evidence. First, research now shows that a very major part of what happens to people and where they end up is the result of totally unpredictable influences and occurrences amounting to pure luck. Second, aside from luck, the most important links that exist between ability and status operate in the opposite direction to that imagined by most people. Rather than different endowments of talents determining position in the hierarchy, it is much nearer the truth to say that position in the hierarchy determines abilities, interests and talents. Let’s address luck first.
Whether or not we consider ourselves successful, most of us can probably look back across our own life histories and recognize the roles that luck and chance have played getting us to where we are today. We were perhaps lucky with schools or teachers, with the questions in an important exam, with some nameless person dealing with university applications, or we got on well with an interviewer when applying for a job. Perhaps a c
hance meeting was important, or perhaps an opportunity for promotion came up unexpectedly. Finding a life partner is just as important for our quality of life as our career or income, but we are far happier to acknowledge that chance and luck played a key role in meeting that person than we are in acknowledging luck’s role in our career. No one minds mentioning the chance meeting, the circumstances that put you both at ease with each other, or the shared interest that might easily have gone unrecognized.
The role of chance makes people’s lives highly unpredictable. Although there are huge social class biases in social mobility, there are at the same time vast numbers of people moving up or down the social ladder in ways that even the most detailed analysis of parenting and ability fail to predict. Similarly, although there are differences of perhaps ten years in the average life expectancy of upper and lower social classes, that explains very little of the individual differences in how long people live: inevitably some rich people die young and some people live in poverty to a great age. And, as some public health mavericks used to say, even if you exercised, ate healthily and didn’t smoke, your most likely cause of death was still heart disease. In addition to all this, there may be a large element of chance in whether our experiences – including subjective experiences – trigger the kind of epigenetic changes affecting subsequent development that we discussed in the last chapter.
Just as the development of weather systems is sometimes said to be so chaotic that it can be changed by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, so what amount to chance events at the social or the cellular level are now thought to play a very substantial part in our lives. So much so that scientists have worried that if random chance and luck are such important determinants of whether or not an individual becomes sick, gets good exam results or has a good marriage, it becomes difficult to understand causal pathways at all, and to do anything about preventing or remedying bad outcomes. In the social sciences this has become known as the ‘Gloomy Prospect’ – the notion that scientific inquiry will bump up against Lady Luck and be of no further explanatory or practical use.271 But although the role of luck shows us the unpredictability of individual lives, it impinges little on our understanding of average or group differences among large populations. It is a bit as if life was played using dice weighted according to the social class in which we grow up. Outcomes of each roll of the dice are still very much a matter of chance, but when you look at a large number of throws the biases in favour of some and against others become clear. So to attribute an individual’s success in life largely to luck is not incompatible with our ability to demonstrate that, on average, people from poorer backgrounds do worse and have shorter lives, or that the majority fare worse in a more unequal society.
The Inner Level Page 17
