Social Status and Health

Ever compare yourself to other people and feel like you just don't measure up? Like, why does that other person can get all the like?

Well, did you know that comparing yourself to others might not just damage your ego but actually make you sick?

The United States is one of the most unequal countries of all developed nations in terms of financial inequality. That means that there's a huge gap in wealth between the rich and the poor. The gap hasn't been this big since the “Great Depression” back in the early 30s and it keeps widening with the upper class getting richer and the lower class getting poorer.

You might have heard of “Occupy Wall Street”, which was a movement that brought a lot of attention to these class differences. But complain with corporate greed and social inequality are resonating far beyond the streets of New York.

What exactly is social?

It's a bunch of things how much money you make, your education and how fancy your job is. These are all factors in how others see and how you see your class in society. What this does is create a social class ladder and that actually impacts your health.

Is it true that the higher you are in the social ladder the better your health? Because more money means healthier food, more exercise and better healthcare?

Researchers have long known that social class is one of the most powerful predictors of health. More powerful than genes smoking or how much alcohol you drink. But there's another component of social class but often doesn't get as much attention - how you feel you compared to other people or your subjective social status.

So does your subjective social status affects your health and if it does how to figure this out?

We have to start at the beginning with the famous Whitehall study back in the 1970s. Researchers track the health of over eighteen thousand British government workers. They fell into their own version of the social ladder - messengers and doormen at the bottom, execs up top. What they found was remarkable. Those at the bottom were three times as likely to die from just about any cause compared to those at the top. More remarkable still was that each class of worker had better health in the class just directly below it. This led researchers to look at subjective social status more closely. In fact you can even find this in high school students.

In a study similar to the Whitehall study, researchers track the health of two hundred and fifty students. They looked at the social class of their parents but also asked the students how they felt when they are compared to their classmates. Turned out the social class of their parents wasn't nearly as important as students subjective social status. Students that felt they were lower on the social ladder had higher blood pressure and reported getting sick more often.

Correlation versus causation

Maybe it's not that low social class is causing people to be less healthy, maybe it's the other way around. People who are less healthy are in a lower social class.

We can look at animal studies. Monkeys are close cousins on the evolutionary tree also form their own social ladders. In a study published in the journal Science researchers found that if you change the monkeys position on the ladder you could alter its immune system. Moving the monkey from the top of the ladder down to the bottom actually decrease the level of disease fighting cells. Researchers think that what's happening to the monkeys might also be happening to us humans. They call it the biological embedding of status.

Being lower on the social ladder is associated with chronic elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol plays a large part in the fight-or-flight response. Example: You show up to class and totally forgot about a test. Cortisol kicks in allowing you to either rise to the occasion in focus or pull a 180 and head home. Once the situation is over, your cortisol levels will drop but if you're chronically stressed out like many on the bottom of the social ladder those cortisol levels stay up which harms your immune system.