Brain research is doing two things. In part it is explaining the underpinning functioning of things we already know, like the importance of mindfulness (see last week's post). However, some research also points to the need for a major overhaul in our thinking. This appears to be the case with self-esteem.
While there's no question that there's a deep human drive for a feeling of self-esteem or competence, this feeling of competence is almost never assessed on it's own: we are social beings at the core, and as such our sense of competence appears to be deeply connected to others around us. Self-esteem may not be an accurate way of understanding this feeling of 'okayness', when we actually measure this constantly against others. Instead of self-esteem, we need to start thinking about the more dynamic sense of 'status'.
Status means where are we positioned in relation to those around us: literally where we are in the ‘pecking order'. Your perception of status, and any changes in it, can be a driver of what's called primary reward or threat. A sense of increasing status can be more rewarding than money, and a sense of decreasing status can feel like your life is in danger. Here's an excerpt from Your Brain at Work on this whole issue.
Maintaining the status quo
Status explains why people will queue for hours on a frosty morning to get a signed copy of a TV celebrity's new book, (a book they have no plan to read). Status explains why people feel good meeting someone worse off than themselves, the German concept of "Schadenfreude", with a study showing that reward circuits activate in this situation. Status even explains why people love to win arguments, even pointless ones. Status explains a tremendous number of strange occurances in life.
Status is relative, and a sense of reward from an increase in status can come anytime you feel "better than" another person. Your brain maintains complex maps for the "pecking order" of the people surrounding you. These maps have a similar structure to how you think about numbers. Studies show that you create a representation of your own and someone else's status in the brain when you communicate, which influences how you interact with others.
Changes in a pecking order brings about changes in how millions of neurons are connected. If you have ever been in a relationship in which one partner unexpectedly begins earning more money than the other, you would have felt these wide-scale changes in brain circuitry take place, and the related challenges. Organizations set up complex and well-defined hierarchies, and then try to motivate people with the promise of moving up within that hierarchy. One company won't let you face your desk toward the window until you move from a "band 30" to a "band 35" role, even though you might sit next to a "band 35". Marketing departments use two main levers to engage human emotions: fear, and the promise of increased status.
Despite attempts by corporations to make status about the size of your car or the cost of your watch, there's no universal scale for status. When you meet someone new and size up your relative importance, you might do so based on who is older, richer, stronger, smarter, or funnier. (Or if you live in some Pacific Islands, based on who weighs more.) Whatever framework you think is important, when your perceived sense of status goes up, or down, an intense emotional response results. As a result, people go to tremendous extremes to increase or protect their status. It operates at an individual and group level, and even at the level of countries. The desire to increase status is behind many of society's greatest achievements and some our darker hours of destruction.
On the way down
As with all emotional experiences, with status the threat response is stronger and more common than the reward response. Just speaking to someone you perceive to be of a higher status, such as your boss, can activate a strong threat response. A perceived threat to status feels like it could come with terrible consequences. The response is visceral, including a flood of cortisol to the blood and a rush of resources to the limbic system that inhibits clear thinking.
Naomi Eisenberger, a leading social neuroscience researcher at UCLA, wanted to understand what goes on in the brain when people feel rejected by others. She designed an experiment that used fMRI to scan the brains of participants as they played a computer game called "Cyberball." Cyberball harks back to the nastiness of the school playground. "People thought they were playing a ball tossing game over the Internet with two other people," Eisenberger explained during an interview down the road from her lab. "They could see an avatar that represented them, and avatars for two other people. Then, about half way through this game of toss between the three of them, they stop receiving the ball and the other players throw the ball only to each other." This experiment generates intense emotions for most people. Eisenberger says, "What we found is that when people were excluded, you see activity in the dorsal portion of the anterior cingulate cortex, which is the neural region that's also involved in the distressing component of pain, or what sometimes people call the "suffering component" of pain. Those people who felt the most rejected had the highest levels of activity in this region." Exclusion and rejection is physiologically painful. A feeling of being less than other people, activates the same brain regions as physical pain. Eisenberger's study showed five different physical-pain brain regions lighting up under this social-pain experiment. Social pain can be as painful as physical pain, as the two appear synonymous in the brain.
The real trouble with feedback
Think of the drop in your stomach when someone says to you, "Can I give you some feedback?" It's a similar feeling to walking alone at night and sensing that someone is about to attack you from behind: perhaps not as intense but it's the same fear response. This discovery about the brain explains why people sometimes react with the human equivalent of a dog baring its teeth and growling when you tell them they've done something wrong: their brain thinks someone is about to hit them. Because of the intensity of the status-drop experience, people go to great lengths to avoid situations that might risk their sense of status. This includes staying away from any activity they are not confident in, which, because of the brain's relationship to novelty, can mean avoid anything new, impacting quality of life.
The threat response from a perceived drop in status can take on a life of its own, lasting for years. People work hard to avoid being "wrong" in a situation, from a simple typesetting mistake, to an error of judgment about a major strategy. Think of some of the big corporate mergers that have gone bad, and the executives involved avoiding any responsibility. People don't like to be wrong because being wrong drops your status, in a way that feels dangerous and unnerving.
When you decide you are right, the other person must be wrong, which means you don't listen to what he or she says, and he or she experiences you as a threat too. A vicious cycle emerges. Being "right" is often more important to people than, well, than just about anything else, at the cost of not just money but relationships, health, and sometimes even life itself.
