Better Response in Stressful Situations. Higher Socioeconomic Status

Individuals with higher levels of education respond better in stressful situations. They solve problems better, control their neuroendocrine stress responses better, and use their mobilized energy more constructively. People with higher levels of education take a more pragmatic approach to problems, looking for solutions rather than just getting anxious, angry, or depressed.

They also have greater cognitive flexibility, which is the ability to imagine and consider a variety of possible solutions or viewpoints. They are better at communicating and negotiating, have better sources of information, and have more skill at judging and applying information. These abilities make individuals more effective and also more self-assured, which reduces neuroendocrine reactivity.

Individuals with higher levels of education also make better use of the energy mobilized in the stress response. The mental and physical activity directed at problem solving helps use the energy constructively. In addition, adults with higher levels of education are more likely to have habits designed to channel the excess energy mobilized by stress constructively, such as jogging, bicycling, walking, gardening, weight lifting, swimming, playing active games such tennis, or taking fitness classes such as aerobics or yoga.

These better events, situations, and responses associated with higher levels of education result from its two primary consequences: socioeconomic status and learned effectiveness.

Higher Socioeconomic Status. Social scientists view education level as a major element of achieved social status, along with occupational status, management level, earnings, household income, and wealth. The level of education achieved acts as a structural element of a person’s life, like a structural beam in a building.

Many other aspects of life depend on a person’s level of education and take shape with respect to it, including the other achieved statuses. In the advanced industrial nations, education level is increasingly important to status attainment (how high a person rises socially and economically) and status transmission (how many advantages in one generation are passed to the next).

Higher status gives an individual more money, authority, influence, and freedom. It shifts life events toward more controllable and desirable ones, and it reduces the risk of a prolonged or severe discrepancy between goals and means.

The higher statuses achieved through education generally reduce stress. The chief exception is managerial responsibility. Management requires a responsibility to others for the performance of others; a manager is responsible to those above for the accomplishments of those below and is responsible to those below for the rewards and resources allocated by those above. But no one can completely control the behavior of others. This creates stress.

Work organizations compensate for the stress of greater responsibility by reducing other strains on managers. Higher salaries reduce managers’ household economic strains and allow the purchase of goods and services that relieve other demands on time and effort.

More important, however, managers generally are given more freedom to decide what they do and how and when they do it, which reduces the stress associated with job demands. They also generally are given more resources and opportunities to do things they find challenging and interesting, which helps make job demands stimulating rather than distressing.

Learned Effectiveness and the Sense of Control

During the twentieth century, formal education came to be viewed as a system for developing human capital. Economists had long viewed capital as material wealth in the form of money or property that is or can be used to produce more material wealth. However, the growth of wealth in the United States and other nations exceeded what could be attributed solely to accumulating monetary and physical capital.

Economists revived Adam Smith’s concept of human capital as productive capacity developed, embodied, and stored in humans themselves. Levels of formal education are the most important measure of human capital, along with work experience.

Formal education develops the skills and abilities of general productive value (such as reading ability or punctuality), as distinct from ones of value in a particular job (such as knowing which forms to fill out or how to operate a particular machine).

Education reduces stress partly by enhancing material productivity but mostly because it develops general problem-solving abilities. The learned effectiveness makes people better at avoiding or solving problems and more confident, reducing stress throughout life. Formal education teaches people to learn. It develops the skills and habits of communication: reading, writing, inquiring, discussing, looking things ups, and figuring things out.

It develops analytic skills of broad use such as mathematics, logic, and, on a more basic level, observing, summarizing, synthesizing, interpreting, and experimenting. The more years of schooling, the greater the cognitive development, characterized by flexible, rational, complex strategies of thinking. Education teaches people to think logically and rationally, see many sides of an issue, analyze problems, and design strategies of personal action.

Education also develops broadly effective habits and attitudes such as dependability, good judgment, motivation, effort, trust, and confidence. It instills the habit of meeting problems with attention, thought, action, and persistence. In school, people encounter and solve problems that are progressively more difficult, complex, and subtle. This process develops persistence and self-assurance as well as skill.

When individuals control their own lives, this means they exercise authority and influence over it by directing and regulating it themselves. People vary in the control felt over their own lives. Some feel they can do just about anything they set their minds to. They see themselves as responsible for their own successes and failures and view misfortunes as the results of personal mistakes.

Others feel that any good things that happen are mostly luck - fortunate outcomes they desire but do not design. They feel personal problems mostly result from bad breaks or the callous selfishness of others and feel little ability to regulate or avoid the bad things that happen. The sense of control varies by degree, ranging from fatalism and a deep sense of helplessness to instrumentalism and a firm sense of mastery.

The sense of personal control is a learned and generalized expectation. As such it acts as a cognitive-behavioral accumulator, integrating past experience and bringing it into the present. In many ways, a sense of control is to successful action as wealth is to profitable investment - an accumulated product returning subsequent advantage.

Perceptions of control grow out of the interaction between intention and outcome. The occurrence of something desired, planned, or attempted reinforces a sense that individuals’ choices and actions have consequences. This, in turn, encourages attention to setting goals, directing actions toward the goals, evaluating apparent consequences, and revising efforts.

The sense of control is more than seeing things occurring as individuals want. It is individuals seeing themselves as the authors and editors of the choices and actions that link their preference to occurrence. Within contexts that support its success, critical selfdirection sharpens their ability and encourages effort.

The resulting effectiveness and resilience strengthen the sense of control in a beneficial developmental spiral. The system of formal education serves as the chief social institution for developing this sense of control.

A number of social and behavioral sciences recognize the importance of a sense of personal control. The concept appears in a number of related forms with various names, including internal locus of control, mastery, instrumentalism, self-efficacy, and personal autonomy; at the other end of the continuum (lack of control), this is fatalism, perceived helplessness, and perceived powerlessness. A low or negative sense of control corresponds to learned helplessness, a behavioral state of suppressed attention and action that induces biological stress in mammals.