London, April 29 (IANS) There may be a reason why we naturally befriend and marry people of our own social standing. A part of our brain that controls motivation and emotion becomes more active when we meet people ‘like us’, researchers have found.
The findings seem to turn on their head the idea that we are more excited about meeting people above our station and that we aspire to a higher class, the journal Current Biology reports.
Caroline Zink, at National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland, US, assessed the socio-economic status of a group of individuals and then showed them information about someone of relatively higher, lower or similar social standing, according to the Telegraph.
Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner they measured the activity in an area of the central brain known as the ventral striatum – which is involved in deciding what motivates us and what stirs our emotions.
The researchers found that the closer the person we were looking at was to our own standing, the more area of the brain lit up with activity.
That means the brains of high social status people lit up when meeting other high social class individuals, and lower status individuals’ brains lit up when they met others from the same background.
‘The way we interact with and behave around other people is often determined by their social status relative to our own, and therefore information regarding social status is very valuable to us,’ said Zink.
However, Zink said that as our social status changes, so would the people we associate with.
‘As one’s status changes, I would expect that the value we place on status-related information from others and corresponding brain activity in the ventral striatum would also change,’ said Zink
