ABSTRACT
The most important psychosocial risk factors for health led people to the three most powerful sources of chronic stress in modern societies: stress in early childhood, low social status, and having few friends. This chapter shows why violence is so consistently more common in societies with larger income differences. In itself, the relationship proves that the differing scale of inequality in different societies has psychosocial and behavioral effects, but people need to understand how the connection works. The relation between violence and inequality provides the best point of entry into understanding the broader social impact of inequality. Several psychologists and psychoanalysts have suggested that what leads to violence is "unacknowledged shame". Violence is of course much more frequently a feature of male rather than female behavior, and men tend to be more concerned with their status than women are.
