The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett Page A

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