ArticleEvolution, medicine, and public health2014
Political influence associates with cortisol and health among egalitarian forager-farmers.
Article in Evolution, medicine, and public health, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Wealth, health and inequality in Agta foragers.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2023Article
- Minimally invasive biomarkers in human and non-human primate evolutionary biology: Tools for understanding variation and adaptation.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2022Article
- When does reputation lie? Dynamic feedbacks between costly signals, social capital and social prominence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Children's fingernail cortisol among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin: associations with fathers' roles.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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- Wild chimpanzees exhibit humanlike aging of glucocorticoid regulation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Relationship of sanitation, water boiling, and mosquito nets to health biomarkers in a rural subsistence population.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2020Article
- Status does not predict stress: Women in an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- The dynamics of men's cooperation and social status in a small-scale society.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
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- Broadening horizons: Sample diversity and socioecological theory are essential to the future of psychological science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Child nutritional status among births exceeding ideal family size in a high fertility population.Maternal & child nutrition · 2018Article
- Hunter-Gatherer Social Networks and Reproductive Success.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- The Tsimane Health and Life History Project: Integrating anthropology and biomedicine.Evolutionary anthropology · 2017Article
- Individual health and the visibility of village economic inequality: Longitudinal evidence from native Amazonians in Bolivia.Economics and human biology · 2016Article
- Evolving the neuroendocrine physiology of human and primate cooperation and collective action.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2015Review
- Leadership solves collective action problems in small-scale societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2015Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
objectivesLow social status increases risk of disease due, in part, to the psychosocial stress that accompanies feeling subordinate or poor. Previous studies report that chronic stress and chronically elevated cortisol can impair cardiovascular and immune function. We test whether lower status is more benign in small-scale, relatively egalitarian societies, where leaders lack coercive authority and there is minimal material wealth to contest. METHODOLOGY: Among Tsimane' forager-horticulturalists of lowland Bolivia, we compare informal political influence among men with urinary cortisol, immune activation (innate and acquired), and morbidity as assessed during routine medical exams.
resultsAfter controlling for potential confounds, we find that politically influential men have lower cortisol, and that this association is partly attributable to access to social support. Cortisol is positively associated with men's income, which may reflect chronic psychosocial stress from market involvement. Greater influence is also associated with lower probability of respiratory infection, which is a frequent source of morbidity among Tsimane'. Among men who lost influence over a 4-year period, cortisol and probability of respiratory infection were higher the greater the decline in influence. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Deleterious effects of low status on health are not merely 'diseases of civilization' but may result from how (even subtle) status differences structure human behavior.
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Registered trials
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