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

way parents treat their children actually serves to pass on their experience of adversity to the child. Although this is usually an unconscious process, in which the parent simply feels short-tempered, depressed or at their wit’s end, it is sometimes also conscious. In a recent court case, three women were found to have encouraged their toddlers to fight – goading them to hit each other in the face and to kick a sibling who had fallen to the ground. 337 The children’s grandmother showed no remorse, insisting that it ‘would harden them up’. Given their experience of life, that was clearly what they thought was needed. Many studies have shown that forms of behaviour experienced in childhood tend to be mirrored in adulthood. Children who have, for example, experienced violence or abuse are more likely to become abusing and violent when they reach adulthood.
    The effects of early experience are long-lasting. Children stressed in early life, or whose mothers were stressed during pregnancy, are more likely to suffer in middle and old age from a number of stress-related diseases – including heart disease, diabetes and stroke. The result is that some of the effects of widening income differences in a society may not be short-lived. Increased inequality means that more families suffer the strains of living on relatively low incomes, and numerous studies have shown the damaging effects on child development. When parents experience more adversity, family life suffers, and the children grow up less empathetic but ready to deal with more antagonistic relationships.
    Many of the problems which we have seen to be related to inequality involve adult responses to status competition. But we have also found that a number of problems affecting children are related to inequality. These include juvenile conflict, poor peer relationships and educational performance at school, childhood obesity, infant mortality and teenage pregnancy. Problems such as these are likely to reflect the way the stresses of a more unequal society – of low social status – have penetrated family life and relationships. Inequality is associated with less good outcomes of many kinds because it leads to a deterioration in the quality of relationships. An important part of the reason why countries such as Sweden, Finland and Norway score well on the UNICEF index of child wellbeing is that their welfare systems have kept rates of relative poverty low among families.
    MIRROR NEURONS AND EMPATHY

    To view the pursuit of greater equality as a process of shoe-horning societies into an uncomfortably tight-fitting shoe reflects a failure to recognize our human social potential. If we understood our social needs and susceptibilities we would see that a less unequal society causes dramatically lower rates of ill-health and social problems because it provides us with a better-fitting shoe.
    Mirror neurons are a striking example of how our biology establishes us as deeply social beings. When we watch someone doing something, mirror neurons in our brains fire as if to produce the same actions. 338 The system is likely to have developed to serve learning by imitation. Watching a person doing a particular sequence of actions – one research paper uses the example of a curtsey – as an external observer, does not tell you how to do it yourself nearly as well as if your brain was acting as if you were making the same movements in sympathy. To do the same thing you need to experience it from inside.
    Usually, of course, there is no visible sign of the internal processes of identification that enable us to put ourselves inside each other’s actions. However, the electrical activity triggered by these specialized neurons is detectable in the muscles. It has been suggested that similar processes might be behind our ability to empathize with each other and even behind the way people sometimes flinch while watching a film if they see pain inflicted on someone else. We react as if