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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Authoritarians have always been here. But the features of a given moment make that way of thinking more or less appealing. Germany in the 1920s, when people are starving, suddenly makes 'populist' answers and scapegoating different groups as the source of the problem much more appealing.

Well, much of my research over the years has been on stress, and the adverse effects of stress on the health of the central nervous system. All things considered, I've been astonishingly unhelped by my own research.

Successful stress management heavily revolves around combating the building blocks of psychological stress - a feeling as if you have no control over the adversities in your life, a feeling that you have no predictive information about the stressors, if you lack outlets for the frustrations caused by the stressors, if you have no social support.

If you spend enough time around something like baboons, you start to look at humans differently.

There are absolutely ways to manipulate behavior, because our behavior is endlessly being manipulated by the world around us.