- Ever compare yourself to other people
and feel like you just don't measure up?
Like why does Kim get all the likes?
(sad horn music)
Well, did you know that
comparing yourself to others
might not just damage your ego
but actually make you sick?
(coughing)
(sneezes)
(ambient electronic music)
Fact, 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've heard of Occupy Wall Street,
which was a movement that
brought a lot of attention
to these class differences.
- The complaints of corporate
greed and social inequality
are resonating far beyond
the streets of New York.
- [Crowd] We are the 99%!
- But what exactly is social class?
Well, 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.
So what this does is create a social class
ladder
and that actually impacts your health.
You're probably thinking,
well, duh, the higher
you are in the social ladder,
the better your health
because more money means healthier food,
more exercise and better healthcare.
Bam, end of the story, right?
Well, maybe, 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 to social class
that often doesn't get as much attention.
How you feel you compare to other people
or your subjective social status.
So does your subjective social status
affect your health, and if it does, how?
To figure this out, we have
to start at the beginning
with the now famous Whitehall Study.
Back in the 1970s researchers
tracked the health
of over 18,000 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 than 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 tracked the
health of 250 students.
They looked at the social
class of their parents
but also asked the students
how they felt they compared
to their classmates. Turns
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. Okay, so that's
some pretty good evidence
but we still have a classic
science problem, 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.
To tease this out, we can
look at animal studies.
(screeching)
(playful music)
Monkeys, our close cousins
on the evolutionary tree,
also form their own social ladders.
In a recent study published
in the journal Science,
researchers found that if you
changed the monkey's position
on the ladder, you could
alter its immune system.
Moving a monkey from the top of the ladder
down to the bottom actually decreased
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.
Show up to class and totally
forgot about that test?
Cortisol kicks in,
allowing you to either rise
to the occasion and focus
or pull a 180 and head home.
Once a situation's 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.
It's kinda crazy to you
think about how social status
can affect your health so much.
Have you felt it yourself or seen evidence
of the social ladder?
Let us know in the comments below
and we'll chat more about it next week.
Bye!
(bright music)
