Sapolsky

 Q: You have spoken and written extensively about how economic inequality affects an individual and a society. Could you explain how that works?

A: When you look at poverty, you see that it is a predictor of poor health, more violence, less kindness, and all of those things. But even more important than poverty is inequality, which is not so much about being poor, rather, it’s about being reminded every day of what you don’t have and what others have. It’s the comparison.

Researchers have spent a lot of time showing that when inequality increases, the health of the poor gets worse, their crime rates go up and all of those bad things happen. But something that is even more interesting in some ways is that when inequality goes up, the health of the WEALTHY gets worse too. Of course, not as much as the poor, but it gets worse for them as well.

It’s not that if you are in the right part of society you can selfishly say that it’s their problem, because even if you’re wealthy and you don’t care about anyone else, living in an unequal society is even bad for your health, because it stresses you. For example, you have to spend more of your income on your house alarm system. You have to spend more of your income sending your children to private schools because the public schools are “too dangerous”.

It’s very stressful to try to construct a world in which nothing stressful can happen to you. In other words, it’s every level of society that pays for it and I think we see that in the United States. That’s why most of the wealthy vote for Donald Trump. Because they suffer too.

The voting patterns show that the wealthy in the cities are more in the direction of supporting the Democrats and are a little more liberal, in contrast to the wealthy in the suburbs and in rural areas. If you’re wealthy in a city, for example, if you’re going to the opera and you’re paying a crazy amount of money for it and you’re wearing a tuxedo and your life is wonderful, even just getting out of your limousine and going to the opera, you’re gonna have to step over somebody who is sleeping on the sidewalk because he is homeless. Even on the level of selfishness, you would say, “We have to do something about the homeless because it’s really very uncomfortable to go to the opera and have to see homeless people.”

But if you live in the rural areas and you’re a billionaire and you go to a rodeo of cowboys steer roping, if that’s your idea of fun, you’re not gonna have to step over homeless people – it’s a different world than that. But even the wealthy here pay a price for inequality.

Q: So, inequality is generally another category to divide the world into Us-es and Thems, which in turn would lead to more public anxiety.

A: Absolutely. And as a measure of how fast that could happen, you do studies where university students play an economic game, and then you introduce inequality to the game. For instance, half of the subjects start the game with ten units of money, and the other half start with a hundred units. Two minutes ago, the students were economically roughly equal and they were from the same dormitory. But now, even within minutes of artificially introducing inequality to the game, you already begin to see some of those behaviors.

It is so fast and it is so strong. To see one of the reasons why kindness and empathy go down, suppose you have a world where everybody gets one of two different incomes: Fifty percent of people get ten units of money a year, and fifty percent get a hundred units a year. That’s so unequal! But even with that, at any given point, half of the people in your world at least have the same income that you do. At least economically they are somewhat equal to you.

But if instead, only one percent of people in the country are getting the same income you’re getting, the inequality spreads out enormously. There will be fewer people who are your peers. A greater percentage of the people around you are either poorer or richer than you. If they’re poorer than you, you are afraid of them, or you want to keep them away, or you’re disgusted by them. And if they’re richer than you, you resent them and you envy them. So, you don’t have equals. The more inequality there is, the more of a hierarchy there is, and the more of a hierarchy, the fewer peers you have whom you are more likely to be kind to, and who are more likely to be kind to you. It makes for a more awful world by definition.

Q: So, in this context, the idea of bringing people of different backgrounds together doesn’t resolve that issue, right?

A: No, because you have to do it the right way. People used to say “Ooh, if you could take people from two different groups who don’t like each other, if you could bring individuals together and let them spend time together, they will learn to see each other as individuals and they will learn that there are more similarities than differences and it would be wonderful, etc.” However, sixty years’ worth of research on contact theory has shown that most of the time it does not work, because it has not been done in the correct way. And if you do it the really wrong way, you will make things worse.

It takes a lot for it to work correctly. You can’t do it for a weekend or even a week. It takes contact lasting for months. It has to be on equal grounds. It has to be in settings where you are not seeing the other group’s symbols, which are a constant reminder to you.

So, it takes a lot of work to do it right. One of the areas where it has been most studied is in summer camp programs for Palestinian and Israeli teenagers, where you bring them together and you try to do it right. You get them in a neutral setting, and you give them something they all have as a shared goal. For instance, they’re brought to a place where they have no symbols – they cannot have flags or anything like that – then you show them this field full of boulders and rocks and weeds, and you say, “Okay, if you guys wanna work together like crazy for the next week to turn this into a football field, go for it. There you go. That’s the only way you’re gonna have a football field.” And then they work like crazy, and they work in teams together, which is the sort of thing that actually helps, and you show that when they leave at the end of these two weeks, some of them have had a change in their attitudes.

They’ve been doing that for twenty years, and despite that occasional good news, what the studies have also shown is that no person who ever went to one of those groups on either side has become a leader of a peace group; next to no person on either side has stayed in touch with the person they became friends with; no person has caused other people to change their opinions. What you get instead is that the researchers come back to them one year later to ask them about the other side, and they say, “Oh, those people? They’re terrible! They’ve stolen our land,” or “They’re terrorists. They’re terrible, rotten people.” But then they say, “Oh, I knew this one guy though… He was a good guy. You know, they’re not all that way. You know, but there was this guy… I should email him to see how he’s doing,” and then they never do that. But the overall prejudice does not go away, and whatever changes there have been in your attitudes, you do not spread them to anybody else. So, it takes so much work. It takes years.

You have to want the change to occur. You have to actually accept that the current situation is not good.

Robert Sapolsky