Introduction

Why do some situations make us more uncomfortable than others? We typically think of feelings of discomfort and comfort as highly individualised and subjective. In this chapter, however, I argue that visceral gut feelings like discomfort are not merely private emotional experiences but in a certain sense collective and public. To illustrate this point, consider the following testimony from a young African American man:

Imagine this young man interviewed for a job by three white men. His interviewers appear uncomfortable in his presence. Registering their discomfort, he also begins to feel nervous. If we attribute the tension in the room to individual psychology, we have told only half the story. It is well-established that we find it easier to interact with people who resemble us – for example, in terms of ethnicity, gender, and social and economic class (Danyluck and Page-Gould, 2018). The people with whom we share these characteristics increase our visceral wellbeing and make us comfortable. Emotional synchronising and empathising become easier when we share the same experiences or cultural background (Barrett, 2017; Bloom, 2018). We are drawn to people in whose company we feel comfortable and we avoid situations and people that make us uncomfortable. Feelings of discomfort usher us in certain directions, often without our explicit awareness.

The statement quoted above takes place in the context of the contemporary United States, where perceptions of race play a central role in social interaction. Evidence on implicit biases suggests that we can adapt our thought experiment to any particular social, political and geographical location, varying the example to the social identities of the setting: a woman before an all-male panel of interviewers (gender); or one wearing a hijab before a panel of European Christians or secularists (religion, ethnicity); a first-generation academic from a working class background before a panel of distinguished university professors (class) and many other parameters (appearance, weight, disability, and so on).