I expected social rank to be the determining factor in health, and in some ways that's true. But far more important is what sort of society that rank occurs in. Being low ranking in a benevolent troop is a hell of a lot better for your blood pressure than being low ranking in an aggressive troop.

I used to be a very serious pianist, and I was one of the snot-nosed classical ones who was appalled by nightmares of Ethel Merman and trombones blasting in the background and who knows what else.

If a male primate is mean to a female primate, her whole family will come after him. We don't have that sort of accountability in industrial societies.

Trying to get somebody excited about learning and trying to get somebody to think in a moral context have begun to have a lot more significance to me.

Primates are really well designed to see who is not keeping up their end of the deal.

In terms of the most unique thing we do socially, my vote goes to something we invented alongside cities - we have lots of anonymous interactions and interactions with strangers. That has shaped us enormously.

Regardless of your sex, if you have elevated testosterone levels in your blood, you're more likely to think a face with a neutral expression is instead looking threatening.

I think the relationship between social-dominance orientation in people and the extent to which they're made uncomfortable by ambiguity and novelty is really important. Better a stable world that's familiar, in which I'm doing pretty poorly, than dealing with all the ambiguity of a changing world.

Not a whole lot of us are wrestling somebody for a canned food item in the supermarket or having an ax fight in the jungle clearing. Instead, we sit and think about taxes and the ozone layer.

At its worst, there's just virtually no organ system in your body that's not thrown out of kilter in some way by chronic psychological stress.

For an architect's son, I am remarkably unformed in my architectural tastes.

To do good science, you've got to work really, really hard.

I was this eggheady kid, the one who was consistently beaten up and picked last for the baseball teams.

As for testosterone, it's gotten a bum rap. Yes, it has tons to do with aggression but it doesn't cause aggression as much as sensitizes you to the environmental triggers of aggression.

We are not humans because we've invented a different type of brain cell, a different type of brain chemical. We are the same basic building blocks as even a fruit fly.

When you've wised up enough, there is a very clear conclusion that you have to reach after a while, which is, at the end of the day, it is really impossible for one person to make a difference.

Baboons are poster children for psychosocial stress, living in troops with bruising and shifting dominance hierarchies among males and high rates of male aggression.

Go get yourself stressed all the time and the common cold becomes more common.

When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.

My roots, in college, were in behavior in the context of evolution.

I was not especially a writer back in college.

Do I get grief for the fact that in communicating, say, about the baboons I'm doing so much anthropomorphizing? One hopes that the parts that are blatantly ridiculous will be perceived as such. I've nonetheless been stunned by some of my more humorless colleagues - to see that they were not capable of recognizing that.

The notion of humans as inherently rational beings has been not only trashed in economics, but trashed in all the best research on moral decision-making.

Individuating and taking someone else's perspective can be very powerful.

I'm sort of a hippie pacifist in terms of general persona.

You know, I'm an egg-heady scientist with a large beard and like Birkenstocks.

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

Of necessity, a scientist typically studies one incredibly tiny sliver of some biological system, totally ensconced within one discipline, because even figuring out how one sliver works is really hard.

I think my becoming a writer had much to do with spending a chunk of each year sitting by myself out in a tent without radio, without newspapers, without a whole lot of people to interact with, without anybody having any sort of similar background to me.

If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.

What adolescence is about is by trial and error, honing a frontal cortex that is going to be more optimal by the time you're 25.

Well, when I was a teenager I was terribly bookish. I was very studious.

My adolescent rebellions took the form of, if anything, passive aggressively doing what was asked of me but doing it ten times more than what was asked of me, so that eventually they'd have to beg me to stop.

My guess is that people with a stereotypically conservative exclusionary stance about immigration rarely have the sense that they feel disgusted that people elsewhere in the world would want to come to the United States for better lives. Instead, there is threat by the rabble, the unwashed masses, to the American way of life.

The key thing about us is that we all belong to multiple tribes. Even if we are predisposed into dividing the world into 'us' and 'them,' it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who is an 'us' and who is a 'them' at any given moment.

Ninety percent of what I'm listening to overall is like the same tape of Bob Marley's Greatest Hits. Like, how did I become one of those people on late night TV where they sell anthologies to you and you buy them?

I think you get to a time in life where by definition stuff's turning to quicksand and wherever you can get some solid footing of the familiar suddenly becomes real comforting.

I spend most of my time by being at a university, hanging out with very manic, excited 18-year-olds.

I think it is inevitable that we make Us/Them distinctions but there's nothing inevitable about who counts as a Them.

You don't want to end up telling somebody who's homeless or a refugee that stress is all perceptual, because it sure isn't in those cases. But most of us have fairly neurotic middle-class stressors.

I'm a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, and I'm kind of half-neurobiologist, half-primatologist.

Show me one neuron that has some cellular semblance of free will. And there is no such neuron.

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

We like our individuality, we like the mysteriousness of us, the essentialism of us, and it can be alarming to see the biological gears turning underneath.

One definitely wants to have a functioning hippocampus. It's all about learning and memory, the part blown out of the water by Alzheimer's disease. It's also the part that is most vulnerable to the effects of stress.

If some baboons just happen to be good at seeing water holes as half full instead of half empty... we should be able to as well.

Baboons have the exact physiology as humans do. They also get the same stress-related illnesses, such as ulcers and heart disease.

Low socioeconomic status carries with it an enormously increased risk of a broad range of diseases, and this gradient cannot be fully explained by factors such as health-care access.