How social status shapes personal evaluations and health

Abstract

Hierarchies have shaped social interactions and health throughout our evolutionary history. My research focuses on the ways that social status influences health and social cognition using a multi-method approach that includes geolocation tracking, ecological momentary assessments (EMA), physiological data, and neural responses. In this talk, I first articulate a micro-level framework for studying the status-health gradient (i.e., the tendency for higher social status to be associated with increasing health). Leveraging this framework, my work aims to understand the psychological and physiological mechanisms underlying the status-health gradient gradient (e.g., social comparisons and stress, respectively). To illustrate this approach, I present findings from an ongoing project that uses geolocation tracking and EMA to predict smoking frequency from the interaction of intraday poverty exposure and negative mood states. Drawing on my social neuroscience framework for the study of social status, another branch of my research examines how social status shapes our evaluations and how these evaluations intersect with attributes like race and gender. To conclude, I discuss ways that I plan to integrate these two lines of my research to study the contributions of one’s social rank (and perceptions of social rank) to well-being, broadly construed.