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

strategies to deal with very different kinds of social organization. At one extreme, dominance hierarchies are about self-advancement and status competition. Individuals have to be self-reliant and other people are encountered mainly as rivals for food and mates. At the other extreme is mutual interdependence and co-operation, in which each person’s security depends on the quality of their relationships with others, and a sense of self-worth comes less from status than from the contribution made to the wellbeing of others. Rather than the overt pursuit of material self-interest, affiliative strategies depend on mutuality, reciprocity and the capacity for empathy and emotional bonding.
    In practice, of course, god and mammon coexist in every society and the territory of each varies depending on the sphere of life, the economic system and on individual differences.
    EARLY EXPERIENCE

    So different are the kinds of society which humans have had to cope with that the processes which adapt us to deal with any given social system start very early in life. Growing up in a society where you must be prepared to treat others with suspicion, watch your back and fight for what you can get, requires very different skills from those needed in a society where you depend on empathy, reciprocity and co-operation. Psychologists and others have always told us that the nature of a child’s early life affects the development of their personality and the kind of people they grow up to be in adult life. Examples of a special capacity in early life to adapt to local environmental circumstances exist throughout animal and even plant life. In humans, stress responses and processes shaping our emotional and mental characteristics go through a kind of tuning, or programming, process which starts in the womb and continues through early childhood. The levels of stress which women experience in pregnancy are passed on to affect the development of babies before birth. Stress hormones cross the placental barrier and affect the baby’s hormone levels and growth in the womb.
    Also important in influencing children’s development is the stress they experience themselves in infancy. The quality of care and nurture, the quality of attachment and how much conflict there is, all affect stress hormones and the child’s emotional and cognitive development. Although not yet identified in humans, sensitive periods in early life may sometimes involve ‘epigenetic’ processes by which early exposures and experience may switch particular genes on or off to pattern development in the longer term. Differences in nursing behaviour in mother rats have been shown to affect gene expression in their offspring, so providing ways of adapting to the environment in the light of early experience. 336
    In the past, there was a strong tendency simply to regard children who had had a very stressful early life as ‘damaged’. But it looks increasingly as if what is happening is that early experience is being used to adapt the child to deal with contrasting kinds of social reality. The emotional make-up which prepares you to live in a society in which you have to fend for yourself, watch your back and fight for every bit you can get, is very different from what is needed if you grow up in a society in which (to take the opposite extreme) you depend on empathy, reciprocity and co-operation, and in which your security depends on maintaining good relations with others. Children who experience more stress in early life may be more aggressive, less empathetic, and probably better at dealing with conflict. In effect, early life serves to provide a taster of the quality of social relations you are likely to have to cope with in adulthood.
    So important are these processes that we need to see parenting as part of a system for passing on the adult’s experience of adversity to the child. When people talk of poor parenting, or say people lack parenting skills, the truth is often that the