Racists Are Less Likely to Be Depressed Than You Are

Note From The Author: This article ends on a positive note, I swear.

That statement feels wrong; it should be wrong. People who believe vile things about their fellow human beings ought to suffer for it, ought to carry some psychological weight for their cruelty. But the neurochemistry doesn’t work that way. Your brain doesn’t care whether your beliefs are moral or accurate; it cares whether you feel like you’re winning.

Serotonin, the neurotransmitter most associated with wellbeing and mood stability, is regulated largely by perceived position in social hierarchies. Not actual position; perceived position. Your brain is running a constant background calculation about where you rank relative to others, and it adjusts your baseline mood accordingly. The research on this is robust and, frankly, disturbing in its implications.

The cleanest demonstration comes from a series of primate studies at UCLA. Researchers Michael McGuire and Michael Raleigh found that dominant male vervet monkeys had roughly twice the serotonin concentrations of subordinate males, which alone isn’t surprising.¹ What happened next is that they placed an alpha male behind a one-way mirror where his troop couldn’t see him. Nothing about his actual capabilities had changed; he hadn’t lost a fight, hadn’t been injured. But his troop couldn’t see his dominance displays, couldn’t acknowledge his status, and his serotonin crashed within days.

The brain doesn’t distinguish between losing status and losing the perception of status; as far as neurochemistry is concerned, they’re the same thing.

Consider what this means. Elon Musk has more money than any human being who has ever lived, and he’s up at three in the morning fighting with strangers on the platform he bought to make them pay attention to him.

The brain doesn’t measure your bank account; it measures where you think you stand. Happy people don’t feel like they need a billion dollars or the presidency to fill the daddy sized hole in their ego.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon tested this with actual viruses. They took 193 healthy adults, had them report their subjective sense of social status, then squirted rhinovirus directly into their nasal passages and quarantined them to see who got sick.² People who perceived themselves as higher status were significantly less likely to develop cold symptoms, and this held true even after controlling for actual income, education, and health behaviors. The effect wasn’t psychological; it was immunological. Perception of rank affected how well their bodies fought infection.

If your brain rewards you for believing you occupy a high position in a hierarchy, and if it doesn’t particularly care whether that hierarchy is real or fabricated, then bigotry becomes a neurochemical cheat code. Believing you’re inherently superior to an entire race or gender gives you a serotonin boost without requiring you to actually accomplish anything.

You get the reward without the work; the hierarchy is invented, the superiority is fictional, but the serotonin is real.

The same mechanism operates through certainty itself. Research on cognitive closure shows that the human brain finds ambiguity genuinely aversive; reaching a firm conclusion, any firm conclusion, reduces psychological distress.³ The distress comes from uncertainty, not from being wrong. A study of clinically depressed patients found that intolerance of uncertainty drove rumination, which drove depression.⁴ If you can settle on an answer, even a bad one, you stop ruminating; you feel better.

Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, studied religiosity across the spectrum from fundamentalist to liberal believers. What he found was that fundamentalists were significantly more optimistic than moderates, who were more optimistic than liberal believers; the pattern held across multiple religious traditions and denominations.⁵ A separate meta-analysis found that religious doubt predicted increased depression with an effect size substantially larger than the protective effect of belief itself.⁶

Losing certainty hurts more than having certainty helps.

The most striking study came from researchers who exposed participants to authoritarian speeches, including recordings of Hitler and Kim Jong Un. Across five experiments with over six thousand participants, people reported worse mood after hearing the speeches but higher meaning in life.⁷ They felt worse and more meaningful simultaneously; the authoritarian content was providing something the brain wanted even as it made them unhappy in the moment.

None of this validates bigotry or zealotry; it explains their appeal at a mechanistic level. The brain evolved to track social acceptance and hierarchical position, and it rewards certainty and belonging with serotonin and reduced anxiety. Whether one’s certainty is justified or one’s group is morally worthy is, neurobiologically speaking, beside the point. These systems are hundreds of millions of years old; they predate the questions we’re asking about them.

So where does this leave those of us who refuse to play the game that way? Those of us who won’t take the cheap serotonin hit of invented superiority; who sit with ambiguity because the honest answer is often “it’s complicated”; who care about people we’ll never meet in places we’ll never go?

We’re doing harder psychological work, and that’s not a metaphor. Engaging with complexity, tolerating uncertainty, extending moral concern beyond tribal boundaries: all of this is genuinely more taxing to the brain systems that regulate mood.

We’re paying a neurochemical tax that the other side never pays.

And some of us have been paying it for years. Being right early often means being alone. The recognition doesn’t come when you make the call; it comes later, if at all. And in the meantime, there’s no acknowledgment, no serotonin hit, just the experience of seeing clearly while others insist you’re overreacting.

That isolation isn’t incidental to being right early; it’s the cost. The brain does the work, makes the correct calls, and gets nothing back from the social environment. The mechanism explains why that hurts. It’s not imagined.

Being right early is neurochemically expensive.

There’s another path to the same reward. The research on perceived status cuts both ways; if the brain responds to where you believe you stand, then earned competence and genuine contribution can work the same lever that fabricated superiority works. The difference is that one requires building something real and the other requires only delusion.

The key word is “perceived.” We have to actually recognize our own value, consciously and often, because the bigot’s reward system is automatic and ours requires intention. This isn’t positive thinking; it’s working the same neurochemical mechanism through honest means.

You’re reading this because you want the world to be better, and that’s not nothing; that’s actually rare. Most people don’t carry that weight, don’t track democratic collapse or genocide in real time, don’t try to figure out what they can do to reduce the overall suffering in the world. The impulse that brought you here is worth recognizing, not as self-congratulation but as fact. You’re doing something difficult, it costs you something, and you do it anyway.

Take time to notice that. Build your competence in whatever domain matters to you; recognize when you’ve grown, when you’ve contributed, when you’ve held a position because the evidence supported it and not because it was easy. The conversation that actually landed. The moment someone’s understanding shifted because you’d done the work to explain it clearly.

That’s the earned version of what they’re stealing. The serotonin is available either way; we’re just taking the honest path to it.

Pick up a free digital copy of my book “Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder” at buymeacoffee.com/TheER. More at TheExistentialistRepublic.com.

References

Raleigh, M. J., McGuire, M. T., Brammer, G. L., Pollack, D. B., & Yuwiler, A. (1991). Serotonergic mechanisms promote dominance acquisition in adult male vervet monkeys. Brain Research, 559(2), 181–190.
Cohen, S., Alper, C. M., Doyle, W. J., Adler, N., Treanor, J. J., & Turner, R. B. (2008). Objective and subjective socioeconomic status and susceptibility to the common cold. Health Psychology, 27(2), 268–274.
Kruglanski, A. W., & Webster, D. M. (1996). Motivated closing of the mind: “Seizing” and “freezing.” Psychological Review, 103(2), 263–283.
McEvoy, P. M., & Mahoney, A. E. J. (2012). To be sure, to be sure: Intolerance of uncertainty mediates symptoms of various anxiety disorders and depression. Behavior Therapy, 43(3), 533–545.
Sethi, S., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1993). Optimism and fundamentalism. Psychological Science, 4(4), 256–259.
Braam, A. W., & Koenig, H. G. (2019). Religion, spirituality and depression in prospective studies: A systematic review. Journal of Affective Disorders, 257, 428–438.
Womick, J., Eckelkamp, J., Luzzo, S., Ward, S. J., Baker, S. G., Salamun, A., & King, L. A. (2021). Exposure to authoritarian values leads to lower positive affect, higher negative affect, and higher meaning in life. PLOS ONE, 16(9), e0256759.