Low social status is bad for your health. Biologists are starting to understand why

GOUT is caused by lead poisoning from their shiny Krystal glassware. Today perhaps they'll suffer from injecting too many toxins into their faces...

Human Nature has been distorted, repressed and programmed. It's no longer nature. The zero-sum game of climbing the ladder is directly preconditioned on others falling off or being on lower rungs of the ladder. When one's identity is built based on the status of others then we are all trapped, because true freedom will always be denied since the juices of growth will be rerouted to ensuring "others" are "in their place". The crowd of humanity is indeed living in a rhesus macaque society ignorant of their potential to blossom from within. And when such blossoming happens navigating from low to high status becomes easy, inconsequential and done only as a side note to achieve other goals. Until this happens status will be the prison that holds all behind the invisible (but very real) psychological bars, be you "low" or "high".

It doesn't take a giant conceptual leap to understand that people at the bottom of the social pyramid suffer more stress. By definition, they have less control of their lives and access to tools to mitigate their problems.

A more interesting question is what to do about it. The answer for the right is to encourage people to climb the ladder, creating opportunities for the pursuit of higher status. The answer from the left is to engineer transfers from the top as a way to "flatten the pyramid".

Neither answer is practical, because we cannot abolish human nature. Yeah, I know that some people want to give it a shot - good luck trying it!

Watch this documentary to fully understand this article. "Stress: Portrait of a Killer" it's on Netflix.

I always thought the folks who were not clawing their way up to the top instead drinking Mai Tais on a beach would live longer. What is the definition of being on top of the Human pecking order - net worth, nice guy, etc

Errrrr. That's one perspective. Claw your way to the top and feel better. A different view is that actually enhanced equality provides a greater good for a greater number. C'mon Economist this is Bentham and Mills territory. there is so much research evidence pointing to equality as a good thing. Publish the World Happiness Report. That's got a lot of stats on life expectancy and fulfilment.

This study shows that one on one man acts rationally or a better term would be 'competitively'. It does not at all support the notion that we are rational economic actors. For example if we take the option of earning more than our peers but the company collapses can it be said we have acted rationally?

I thought capitalism by definition was an allocation, protection and distribution system of property rights? I mean if I own something including my labour, no one is going to take that from me simply because of my social status? enlighten me further....

It appears that Teacup775 has provided an answer to your question here on a separate comment to this article:

mileage varies

I stll remember the earlier studies of Sapolsky.

Bad news for the underlings.

My question is whether higher social status directly causes biological benefit or it's indirect, such as a higher social order macaque gets more and better food, and that in turn leads to a stronger immune system.
Maybe we can give those macaques exactly the same amount of food and exactly the same living quarters, but ask Her Majesty to bestow knighthood on a chosen few and then test their immune system?

That is why capitalism is so important to humanity. Without it we are just one giant social order, relying on each other for heart attacks while a few at the top eat cream.

In general, inherited epigenetic modifications are wiped during the early development of the embryo. Certain "imprinted" genes are exceptions, though. Epigenetic state can also be influenced in-utero, so there are a few possible routes for epigenetic "inheritance," though evidence is still sketchy.

Incredible...If "epigenics" tells us that low social status has an impact on our genome, then it can be induced it would have one on other type of cells; sex cells, and henceforth explain social reproduction.
So if somebody suffers from a low social rank, he will transfer these caracteristics to his offsprings, who would also be of the "lower-class" and so on...

So you never heard of Buddhism.

Why not just use the normal vocabulary used in such discussions?

I know what your getting at. The need for power is wrapped up in the mechanics of reproductive success for each species, at least the evolutionist would say this. The need is conditioned by the genes, in as much as they are an expression of strategy the individual undertakes.

But some clever elements of each species avoid the whole struggle for dominance normally played about between males.

It would also be said that health is a means to an end (making the next generation). Nature isn't kind about it.

Well within orangutans and certain squid species there are two male types. The typical type and ones that are 'camouflaged' as females. With the cephelopds, they can simply don female coloration and patterns, while male apes carry the physique of a female. They avoid most of the dominence conflict by simply slipping by the notice of fighting males or through the territory of dominant males, and quietly finding the females. Probably not what you had in mind.

Need for power in either gender I think always tied to reproductive success species wise, but in the above examples and in our own experience, individuals are born with character traits, which effects strategy.

Also in some monkey species, males accrue favor with the females by baby sitting their young, so there are other strategies out there.

But it s not the only study. This one mostly focused on how stress effecs health which is interesting.