9 Comments

Wait, this has larger implications.

basically, it means that religion"we are all great under god" can actually be beneficial.

ALso, this provides clear evidence for self deception to evolve.

wow.

Expand full comment

Assuming the study was accurate, is it possible for one to raise his own status/self esteem?

Expand full comment

I find these findings believable.

Our daughter developed some spring-time allergy symptoms. My high SES husband postured defensively, "It's not from my genes."

Expand full comment

Yawn. Nominal p only below 0.02, and no Bonferonni correction, that I can see, despite testing 20 hypotheses?

Expand full comment

retired, people volunteer for randomized trials all the time - the stakes here seem pretty low compared to most of those, and these folks were paid $800 each.

Brian, we often see status-health effects that large.

Expand full comment

Holy crap, am I reading Figure 1 correctly in the paper? Is it really saying that if you think you're "high status" you're more than half as likely to get sick from direct exposure than someone who thinks they are "low status"? Even after controlling for actual, objective status?

That's huge. That seems to blow even the placebo effect out of the water. Obviously we need to market a cold cure with advertisements that say "the pill is made out of pure gold -- only the coolest, most elite of people will receive it."

Expand full comment

Yeah, and people that think more highly of themselves than their peers do are happier compared to their colleagues who have more accurate self-perception. I remember there was a study on that too.

Bias overcomers, beware your health and happiness!

Expand full comment

I am immediately curious to know why these healthy men and women volunteered to be exposed to influenza virus and subsequently quarantined. The article mentions research grants, but makes no mention of incentives; was it money, altruism, strange signaling? How many people had to be screened to find 193 individuals with the poor judgment to risk their lives for such trivia? I would think this says far more about the subjects (and the researchers) than their SES scores.

Expand full comment

I wonder what the correlation is between subjective and objective status.

Expand full comment