New research suggests that knowing people in high and diverse positions can be good or bad for your health. The guilty? Economic inequality. The study examines the relationship between a person's health and the socio-economic status of their social contacts — what's called "entering" status. The idea is that we all have a personal network – made up of family, friends, relatives, neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances and others – and the status of our social contacts can influence our lives through our relationships with them.
The researchers analyzed representative data from extensive social surveys taken simultaneously in the United States, Taiwan and urban China to see whether a person's status could influence whether they had a serious enough health issue in the previous year. to prevent them from participating in their daily routines for more than a week.
Accessible status can affect our health in interesting ways. Higher status people tend to be healthier – they tend to be more informed and health conscious, have more time and money to invest in a healthy lifestyle, experience less chronic stress and have more access to medical care, among other positive things . These are also benefits that can extend to their social contacts – a so-called social capital theory.
"But we see that the status that is accessible has a dark side, and we want to understand why," said the researcher. In two of the three societies studied — the United States and China — that were associated with people of higher and diverse status, they were actually associated with more health disturbances, not less. That is an unexpected discovery and one that is not well understood.
To explain it, the researchers proposed a new theory to explain the negative health effects of high access to socioeconomic status, called cost theory. The main features are negative social comparison, reception of harmful sources and network costs. An example of a negative social comparison might be developing negative psychological feelings, such as fear or a sense of failure, and poor health habits, such as smoking, when comparing themselves to people in better situations, while an example of a harmful source may be undesirable. meddling in their affairs. Network costs are simply the extra effort, such as time, money, and energy, required to establish and maintain valuable, high status relationships.
Social charges like this can make it harder for a sick person to get the support they need to get better faster.
So why does having connections with a higher and diverse status help in some societies and not in others? Economic inequality seems to play a role. Taiwan has relatively low economic inequality, and of the three societies studied, it is the only one to suggest that the good outweighs the bad. The United States and China have a much higher degree of economic inequality and show the opposite.
