Status and Health

Article
Gray Matter

By CHRISTOPHER von RUEDEN

WHAT is the relationship between social status and health?

This is a tricky question. In modern industrialized societies, health certainly improves as you move up the socioeconomic ladder, but much of that trend is a result of health care and lifestyle factors (diet, physical activity) that are associated with income — not relative social position per se.

If you want to see how status affects health, you have to isolate status from material wealth. How to do that? The easiest way is to observe a society in which there is minimal material wealth to contest and where there are limited avenues for status competition.

So that is what my colleagues and I did. For several years, we studied the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Amazonian Bolivia, a small, preindustrial, politically egalitarian society in which status confers no formal privileges (such as coercive authority). As we report in a recent article in the journal Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, we found that even among the Tsimane, higher status was associated with lower levels of stress and better health.