In this video I discuss the relationship between the stress response and the social hierarchy. While high status in a hierarchy can be associated with greater control and less stress, it can also be the case that high status positions involve constant challenges and this can increase stress and levels of glucocorticoids. Human hierarchies are also difficult to assess because we are all part of many hierarchies and the relative importance of these hierarchies is subjective and can vary dramatically. When it comes to socioeconomic status, higher positions are associated with better health outcomes, as demonstrated in the Whitehall studies led by Michael Marmot. Poverty is a major risk factor for many negative health outcomes and these may result from the many physical, psychological, and environmental stressors related to poverty. Once basic needs are met, however, social status and stress are harder to evaluate due to each individual’s positions across a unique combination of different hierarchies.

Whitehall Study Archive: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/libr…

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video, we looked at the relationship between perceived control and the stress response and we saw that if you feel you don’t have control over a stressor or you can’t manage a stressor that that stressor is likely to cause a greater stress response. So in this video we’re going to look at the relationship between stress and our position in the social hierarchy.

So you might think that if you’re higher status, if you’re higher up in the hierarchy, then that would mean you have lower levels of stress because you’re going to have greater perceived control and you’re probably going to have greater actual control over a number of possible outcomes. But it’s not always the case that being at the top of a hierarchy is necessarily better. Sometimes it’s not so good to be at the top if that hierarchy is unstable. so we see in some other species where the more dominant position in the hierarchy is constantly being challenged and that means that if you’re in that position you constantly have to fend off rivals and that can actually be associated with higher levels of stress and with elevated levels of glucocorticoids in your bloodstream. And of course, it’s also the case that being at the bottom of a hierarchy isn’t very good and that can be associated with elevated levels of glucocorticoids.

So how do we apply this to humans? Well it’s difficult because humans are members of many different hierarchies, so it’s difficult to come up with a precise ranking for each individual. We don’t have a single pecking order that we’re a part of and many of the hierarchies that we’re in, we’re not competing for vital resources like food, and so our perceived importance of hierarchies starts to matter. And that is, of course, subjective.

We also have a problem that we can associate certain personality traits with dominance and so we might therefore think that they’re associated with higher status but, in fact, they might be related to higher stress. This is something we saw with something like Type A personality; where certain traits like being very aggressive or easily angered and hostile might be perceived as making you higher status but they might actually be associated with higher levels of stress.

So what we can say is that, in general, being in a higher position does mitigate stress. One way that we can look at this is what are known as the Whitehall studies and these were a series of studies carried out for several decades on British civil servants. The first Whitehall study looked at 18,000 male British civil servants and the second study looked at males and females, over 10,000 civil servants, and what these studies found, led by Michael Marmot, was that people who are higher ranking within the British civil service tended to get sick less often and they had a reduced risk of several illnesses including heart disease. This suggests that being in a higher position in society is associated with positive health outcomes or that being in a lower position is associated with more negative outcomes.

This brings us to thinking about the hierarchy in terms of socioeconomic status; trying to find sort of a single pecking order that we can put people into. And so SES, socioeconomic status, refers to a combination of education, income, and occupation and what we do know is that being low socioeconomic status is associated with poorer health. One of the main reasons for this is that poverty is a major risk factor for a number of negative health outcomes and there’s a number of different reasons for this. Some of the reasons are physical stressors. So if you are living in poverty you’re likely to face more hunger, you probably have to do more manual labor, you have increased risk of accidents and injuries at work, and in many cases you’re dealing with chronic sleep deprivation if you have to work several jobs. You also have more psychological stressors. So you have less control in absolute terms over a number of different outcomes. You also have greater financial worries and fewer resources to deal with problems that do arise. And then lastly you have the environmental stressors of poverty and these are things like more noise, more pollution, poor living conditions, crowding and cramping, and often living in high-crime neighborhoods.

But of course, money isn’t the solution to all of these problems and once people have their basic needs being met it’s not the case that rising up in the hierarchy is associated with better and better health each step of the way. There reaches a point where your basic needs are being met and then those needs aren’t quite so important. This is because, as I said before, there’s no single hierarchy reflecting all areas of your life and once your basic physiological needs are being met, those other areas start to matter. You recognize that you’re part of multiple hierarchies; you have hierarchies related to your work, to your social life, to your leisure time, to your hobbies and other activities, and your values. How much importance you place on these different hierarchies is going to differ from one individual to the next and this is why, as I said before, it’s very difficult to come up with precise rankings for people. Because you might be part of some hierarchies that I don’t care anything about. That means I might be very low on those hierarchies but it’s not causing me any stress. At the same time there might be hierarchies that I value, that I think are really important and I care a lot about my position in those hierarchies, and the fact that somebody has surpassed me might be very stressful for me when it doesn’t bother you in the slightest.

So we might think about people who are competing in a race and there might be somebody who’s just recovered from a long illness and he’s just overjoyed that he’s managed to complete a 5k, you know, and so he’s feeling like he’s on top of the world and feeling really great about this and not feeling any stress at all. And somebody else who’s more competitive in this area, a competitive runner who thought he was going to come in first and he came in second, and this is just devastating to him. He feels terrible and he experiences a great deal of stress as a result of this. So here we have two people in very different situations within the same hierarchy, but with very different attached importances to that hierarchy and that can make a huge difference in how much we could predict about the stress response.

And this is where we see that it’s much more individual and the way that we think about people’s position in society. The truth is our society is much too complex to narrow everything down to a single hierarchy. Nevertheless, we do have some outcomes associated with certain things like our socioeconomic status being associated with better ability to manage stress. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!