Bullying Affects Social Status?

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a ScienceDaily article about the social status effects of bullying on mice and men. From the article: "The results reveal neural mechanisms by which social learning is shaped by psychosocial experience and how antidepressants act in this particular brain circuit. They also suggest new strategies for treating mood disorders such as depression, social phobia and post-traumatic stress disorder, in which social withdrawal is a prominent symptom ... He and his colleagues also discovered that social defeat triggered an upheaval in gene expression in the target area of the circuit, the nucleus accumbens, located deep in the front part of the brain -- 309 genes increased in expression while 17 decreased."

Comments

self-affirming dominance hierachy

[Cryofan]

the human animals at the top of the dominance hierarchy like it there. They are satisfied. So therefore they act as an ideological filter. They control the mass media and popular entertainment, and so any idea that makes it through their ideological filter, that idea gets disseminated.

Ideas that get disseminated are those that AFFIRM in a good way the dominance hierarchy now in existence. Meaning of course the "status quo."

Funny thing is that by definition any hierarchy must have only a few at the top.

However, Americans have ideologically been domesticated because the elite have evolved a culture that affirms power and the dominance hierarchy.

All societies do this to some degree, but the American culture used to be MUCH MORE critical of the dominance hierarchy. In part, this change is due to the mass media propaganda cultural evolution that the elite has worked upon America.
But part is also due to the benefits from technology and the steady accumulation of knowledge (which grows at an exponential rate). This technology advance makes us more comfortable than 100 years ago. So we put up with more of the dominance hierarchy.

The Ameican Revolution for example was really a revolution of the people against the elite, but the elite subverted it with the Declaration of Independence propaganda and other dirty tricks.

Anywho...