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

family types’. 13
    It is important to understand what these rises in anxiety are about before their relevance to inequality becomes clear. We are not suggesting that they were triggered by increased inequality. That possibility can be discounted because the rises in anxiety and depression seem to start well before the increases in inequality which in many countries took place during the last quarter of the twentieth century. (It is possible, however, that the trends between the 1970s and 1990s may have been aggravated by increased inequality.)
    SELF-ESTEEM AND SOCIAL INSECURITY

    An important clue to what lies behind the mental health trends comes from evidence that they were accompanied by a surprising rise in what at first was thought to be self-esteem. When compared over time, in much the same way as the trends in anxiety are shown in Figure 3.1, standard measures of self-esteem also showed a very clear long-term upward trend. It looked as if, despite the rising anxiety levels, people were also taking a more positive view of themselves over time. They were, for instance, more likely to say they felt proud of themselves; they were more likely to agree with statements such as ‘I am a person of worth’; and they seemed to have put aside self-doubts and feelings that they were ‘useless’ or ‘no good at all’. Twenge says that in the 1950s only 12 per cent of teenagers agreed with the statement ‘I am an important person’, but by the late 1980s this proportion had risen to 80 per cent.
    So what could have been going on? People becoming much more self-confident doesn’t seem to fit with them also becoming much more anxious and depressed. The answer turns out to be a picture of increasing anxieties about how we are seen and what others think of us which has, in turn, produced a kind of defensive attempt to shore up our confidence in the face of those insecurities. The defence involves a kind of self-promoting, insecure egotism which is easily mistaken for high self-esteem. This might seem like a difficult set of issues to pin down, particularly as we are talking about general trends in whole populations. But let us look briefly at the evidence which has accumulated since the self-esteem movement of the 1980s, which shows what has been happening.
    Over the years, many research groups looking at individual differences in self-esteem at a point in time (rather than at trends in population averages over time) began to notice two categories of people who came out with high scores. In one category, high self-esteem went with positive outcomes and was associated with happiness, confidence, being able to accept criticism, an ability to make friends, and so on. But as well as positive outcomes, studies repeatedly found that there was another group who scored well on self-esteem measures. They were people who showed tendencies to violence, to racism, who were insensitive to others and were bad at personal relationships.
    The task was then to develop psychological tests which could distinguish between people with a healthy and those with an unhealthy kind of self-esteem. The healthier kind seemed to centre on a fairly well-founded sense of confidence, with a reasonably accurate view of one’s strengths in different situations and an ability to recognize one’s weaknesses. The other seemed to be primarily defensive and involved a denial of weaknesses, a kind of internal attempt to talk oneself up and maintain a positive sense of oneself in the face of threats to self-esteem. It was (and is) therefore fragile, like whistling in the dark, and reacts badly to criticism. People with insecure high self-esteem tend to be insensitive to others and to show an excessive preoccupation with themselves, with success, and with their image and appearance in the eyes of others. This unhealthy high self-esteem is often called ‘threatened egotism’, ‘insecure high self-esteem’, or ‘narcissism’. During the comparatively short time