There’s a reason a casual comment from a coworker can ruin your entire day, while a stranger’s road rage barely registers. The pain of an insult isn’t just about the words themselves. According to William B. Irvine’s “A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt—And Why They Shouldn’t,” the sting we feel comes from something far more primal—our participation in what he calls the social hierarchy game.
Understanding why insults hurt is the first step toward liberating yourself from their power. This isn’t about developing a thicker skin or learning to fire back with clever comebacks. It’s about recognizing the psychological machinery that makes words into weapons.
The Social Hierarchy Game We Didn’t Know We Were Playing
We are, Irvine explains, creatures who need to be among people. But once we’re among them, something curious happens. We immediately begin sorting ourselves into social hierarchies, just as our ancestors did. The difference is that we don’t need teeth or fists to establish our place in the pecking order. We have something far more sophisticated: language.
This social hierarchy game operates beneath our conscious awareness. Every interaction becomes an opportunity to gain or lose status. When your boss takes three days to respond to your email, it stings not because of the delay itself, but because it signals your relative position in the hierarchy. When a friend forgets to invite you to dinner, the pain comes from the implied demotion in social standing.
Irvine draws from historical examples to illustrate how deeply rooted this behavior is. In ancient Pompeii, someone carved graffiti complaining about Lucius Istacidius not inviting him to dinner. Nearly two millennia later, we’re still capable of being wounded by the same social oversights. The names change, but the hierarchy game remains constant.
Why Your Brain Treats Social Pain Like Physical Pain
When someone insults you, your brain doesn’t distinguish between a verbal attack and a physical one. The amygdala activates, triggering your stress response. Cortisol floods your system. Your body prepares for a threat that exists only in words.
This response made sense when social exclusion meant death in the wild. A person cast out from their tribe faced genuine threats to survival. But in modern life, this ancient wiring creates suffering that serves no useful purpose. Your nervous system can’t tell the difference between being mocked at a staff meeting and being expelled from the protection of your ancestral group.
The pain is real, even if the threat isn’t. Irvine doesn’t dismiss this pain as weakness or irrationality. Instead, he traces it to its source: our deep-seated need for social belonging and our evolved sensitivity to anything that threatens our position within the group.
The Self-Image Under Attack
Insults hurt most when they strike at the gap between who we think we are and who we fear we might be. Irvine explains that we all maintain a self-image, a conception of ourselves that we project to the world and, crucially, that we need others to validate.
When someone calls you lazy, the insult only cuts if some part of you worries it might be true. When a partner criticizes your emotional unavailability, the words land with force because they confirm a fear you’ve been carrying in silence. The most devastating insults aren’t the wildest exaggerations. They’re the observations that resonate with our own secret doubts.
This is why the same insult can devastate one person and bounce off another. If you’re genuinely confident in your intelligence, being called stupid by an angry stranger is merely puzzling. But if you harbor doubts about your intellectual worth, the same comment becomes ammunition for your internal critic.
Why Teasing from Friends Feels Different
Not all insults sting equally, and Irvine makes an important distinction between malicious insults and playful teasing. When a close friend jokes about your bald head ruining a group photo, you laugh. When a stranger makes the same comment, you might feel genuinely hurt. What’s the difference?
The answer lies in social status. Playful teasing between friends doesn’t threaten your standing in the hierarchy because your relationship with that person is secure. The teasing actually reinforces your bond—it signals comfort, intimacy, and mutual acceptance. You haven’t lost status; you’ve confirmed it.
But when the same words come from someone whose opinion of you is uncertain, or from someone trying to establish dominance, the game changes. The insult becomes a bid for power, an attempt to lower your position relative to theirs. Your brain recognizes the threat, and the pain follows.
The Insult as Social Weapon
Throughout history, humans have used insults to establish and maintain social hierarchies without resorting to physical violence. Irvine points out that this is actually an evolutionary advancement. Better to wound with words than with weapons. But the result is a society constantly engaged in subtle (and not-so-subtle) battles for status.
We see this everywhere once we understand the pattern. The backhanded compliment from a colleague isn’t really a compliment at all—it’s a carefully calibrated attempt to lower your standing while maintaining plausible deniability. The person who “helpfully” points out your mistakes in public isn’t trying to help; they’re establishing their superiority.
Even refusing to insult someone can be a form of insult. When you relay to a friend that someone else called them incompetent, you’ve found a way to deliver the wound without taking responsibility for it. Irvine describes this as the insult equivalent of a free lunch—all the satisfaction of seeing someone hurt, none of the risk of retaliation.
The Narcissism Factor
Not everyone responds to insults with the same intensity, and Irvine explores why some people seem more vulnerable than others. He draws on psychological research showing that people with narcissistic tendencies often experience insults more acutely. This seems counterintuitive—shouldn’t narcissists be more confident?
But narcissism isn’t confidence. It’s an inflated but fragile self-image that requires constant external validation. When that validation is threatened, the narcissist’s entire sense of self wobbles. What looks like arrogance is actually profound insecurity, and insults expose it.
The broader culture plays a role here too. Irvine discusses how the modern emphasis on self-esteem—particularly in American education and culture—has paradoxically made people more sensitive to criticism, not less. When everyone receives constant praise and protection from negative feedback, any hint of disapproval feels catastrophic.
When Insults Aren’t Intentional
One of Irvine’s most important insights is that insults don’t require malicious intent. If you feel insulted by someone’s behavior, you’ve been insulted, regardless of whether they meant to hurt you. The girlfriend who refused to cut her cruise short didn’t intend to wound Ronald Shanabarger when his father died. But her thoughtlessness registered as an insult so profound that it led to tragedy.
This matters because it means we can inadvertently hurt people all the time, and we can be hurt by actions that weren’t meant as attacks. The coworker who didn’t invite you to lunch might have simply forgotten. The friend who didn’t like your social media post might not have even seen it. But your brain interprets these omissions as signals about your social standing, and the pain is real whether the slight was intentional or not.
The Cost of Playing the Game
Living in constant vigilance about social standing exacts a heavy toll. Irvine argues that the social hierarchy game is a primary source of human misery. We spend our days saying, doing, and buying things calculated to gain admiration from others who are too busy seeking admiration themselves to give us what we want.
This creates a cycle of striving and suffering. We’re hurt by insults that threaten our status. We strike back with counter-insults to restore it. We engage in elaborate self-promotion to climb higher in the hierarchy. And all of this effort rarely produces lasting satisfaction because the game has no winning condition. There’s always someone above you, always someone threatening to take your position, always another rung to climb.
The solution Irvine proposes isn’t to win the game more effectively. It’s to stop playing altogether.
Ancient Wisdom for Modern Wounds
The Stoic philosophers, whom Irvine studied extensively, understood this problem two thousand years ago. They recognized that the pain of insults comes not from the words themselves but from our participation in the social hierarchy game. When Cato the Younger was struck in the face in public, he simply wiped away the blood and continued with his business, refusing to acknowledge the offense. His response—or lack of one—made his attacker look foolish rather than powerful.
This Stoic approach isn’t about suppression or denial. It’s about recognizing that you have a choice in how you respond to words. An insult is only effective if you grant it power. If you genuinely don’t care about the insulter’s opinion, their words become meaningless noise.
The Path Forward
Understanding why insults hurt doesn’t immediately make the pain disappear. Millions of years of evolution have wired your brain to care about social standing. You can’t simply switch off that response with intellectual understanding alone.
But awareness is the first step. When you recognize that the sting of an insult comes from your participation in a game you never consciously chose to play, you can begin to question whether you want to keep playing. When you understand that the pain signals a threat to your social status rather than a real danger, you can start to separate your self-worth from others’ opinions.
Irvine’s work doesn’t offer quick fixes or simple techniques. Instead, it provides a framework for understanding the psychological machinery that turns words into weapons. With that understanding comes the possibility of freedom—not from being insulted, but from being wounded by insults.
The next time someone’s words sting, pause and ask yourself: What game am I playing right now? What status am I trying to protect? And most importantly: Do I want to keep playing this game?
The answer to that last question might change everything.