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hackerkiba comments on Rational Health Optimization - Less Wrong
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Why would this be? Higher social status seem to me to be correlated with greater wealth and the ability to buy expensive health food.
Much of the social status boost to life expectancy might not be due to wealth.
The "'Hierarchy Effect,' ...states that being lower in the social hierarchy independently impacts health through increases in the release of stress hormones. This has been shown fairly well in animal studies where researchers monitor the levels of stress hormones in primates and have found that being nearer the top reduces the overall level of stress hormones"'
http://longevity.about.com/od/researchandmedicine/a/hierarchy.htm
I wonder how one dissociates the cause and effect in animal studies. Healthier animals are more likely apriori to advance up the social hierarchy.
Nonetheless, it does make sense that social mammals could employ different strategies based on social rank. If you are at the top, you have more access to food and mates and a higher benefit to longevity. If you are at the bottom and have zero access to mates, longevity doesn't help your genes much, and your genes have an incentive to employ riskier strategies that could sacrifice longevity.
With those studies, I wonder how much is a sort of abstract being lower in the hierarchy, or having to give out submission signals, and how much is objectively worse conditions-- fro example, greater risk of physical assault or (for humans) less access to sunlight.