Higher Status People Are More Likely To Whine

Money and education confer plenty of advantages in life, and research has long shown that people who have them live healthier, longer lives and tend to have more stable, less-monotonous jobs. But they also report feeling a lot more stress at work than people with lower salaries and fewer degrees. To measure stress levels during the work day, researchers gave 122 workers living in a northeast US city Palm Pilots to carry with them on the job. Several times a day, the handheld computers prompted them to rate how stressed and how happy they felt. The idea was to measure stress in real time, rather than ask people at the end of the day, when other factors such as commutes or family obligations might influence their stress levels. People with higher incomes and levels of education reported being about 28% more stressed and 8.3% less happy overall than workers with lower incomes and levels of education did. In addition to reporting being more stressed and less happy from moment to moment, those higher-status workers – that is, those in the top fifth of a combined measure of income and education, tending to earn at least $100,000 a year – also reported having more trouble meeting the demands of their jobs. These individuals who report higher stress are probably individuals who simply have more authority or decision making duties than others. The study’s results certainly don’t mean low status workers have it easier. Obviously, low status jobs can create all sorts of problems for workers, such as making it more difficult for them to pay bills. Even though that’s caused by work, maybe it’s a stressor you can leave behind for the moment when you get to work. Researchers also found in a 2014 study that people with lower incomes tended to report more stress at home than at work – the opposite of what higher income people reported. Stress and happiness are also pretty subjective feelings, and people express their moods and deal with stress in different ways. Could it be that higher status people are just more likely to whine when things don’t go their way? More research is needed, but the study contains a clue: In addition to answering questions the subjects also submitted saliva so their tem could measure their levels of the stress related hormone, cortisol – an those levels didn’t indicate significantly more stress among better paid workers.