What is it about celebrities that makes us love or hate them?
As Shaun White waited at the top of the halfpipe for his final run in the Winter Olympics, eyes ping-ponging nervously behind his glare-reducing goggles, I can’t say I was cheering him on. Honestly … I was kinda rooting for the halfpipe. The thing is breathtaking. Long, menacing and possessing a geometric purity that made it an arresting sight, even viewed in the flat, rectangular confines of a living-roomsized HDTV.
White, on the other hand, didn’t look that good to me. Strutting around in gold chains, nursing an obviously fragile, swollen ego after a disastrous performance in the Sochi Winter Olympics, the guy looked past his prime, scared and ripe for another fall. NBC, with a lot of its eggs in the Shaun White basket, forced us to watch footage of his rock band. My money was on that merciless 25-foot-deep oval in the snow.
Of course, White proved me wrong, soaring up to gold-medal heights in just a few hard-won maneuvers. And I had to admire the guts and skill it took to pull it off. Fine. Flash-forward to his post-win press conference (where he sloughed off a question about a sexual harass-
ment lawsuit against him by calling it “gossip”), and it turned out it wasn’t the halfpipe that took White out, it was hubris after all.
We saw that coming, right? White’s celebrity morality tale felt predictable because it was.
“Celebrities we like often have some skill or ability that we don’t have,” says Jim Houran, a psychologist with the Aesop Group consulting firm, known for his work on the topic of celebrity worship. “So we buy into the hype: Yes, they are special. We respect them for their accomplishments. But then when they start to reveal their personal side, beyond the persona, we may not like what we see, and that’s when we start to dislike them.”
Disliking celebrities isn’t hard, and it definitely isn’t exclusive to Shaun White. It’s just that certain celebrities, like White, are like divining rods for discord—we either like them, or we really, really don’t. Take actor Benedict Cumberbatch. Smart and sexy as all hell, or downright repulsive? Gwyneth Paltrow: empowered health and beauty entrepreneur, stylish lifestyle guru or over-sharing, self-righteous creep? Be honest—you may not know where your friends all stand on tax reform, but you have a pretty clear idea where they stand on Paltrow. She’s a line in the sand. But where did that line come from? Evolution, obviously. “In our evolutionary history,” says Dan Kruger, a researcher at the University of Michigan and expert in evolutionary psychology, “we have always had a social structure where there is a variation in social status. There has always been a status hierarchy.” In other words, when our ancestors were still rooting around in the earth for grubs to eat to sustain their lives and pass on their DNA to us, they were also thinking about who the hottest hunter-gatherer of the moment was.
“Celebrities,” says Houran, “used to be the people who were the best hunters or gatherers, or shamans. They played special roles that set them apart, and so we looked up to those people, we followed those people, they had authority.”
Over time, power and respect shifted from those who had purely physical prowess to other arenas, like religion, then shifted again.
“People are still hardwired to worship something,” says Houran, “and so as people become less religious, the halo stops being around spiritual entities and starts to shift to celebrities.” Which brings us to our present day, the Kardashian Era, in which skill-related fame has found its nadir.
In our current social climate, Houran says, “(celebrities) become symbols for anything related to attitudes and behaviors. Religious views, political affiliation. You have people literally love or hate celebrities simply because of who they endorse or reject. It’s sort of like a team jersey: Celebrities are living symbols, so by saying you like them, you are professing your allegiance for a certain value system.”
His example? Oprah Winfrey. “She’s the closest thing we have to a living deity.” Maybe that’s why when folks profess their allegiance to Oprah, it seems to take on evangelical fervor. “When you say I admire Oprah Winfrey,” says Houran, “that means something more than you admire her as a media mogul. Oprah now means so much more than the skills that made her a celebrity, and people can instantly relate to that.”
“It’s probably part of our heuristic design,” says Kruger. “The world is so complicated even for our ancestors that our brains have a lot of built-in shortcuts, our heuristic brains, that give us the right answer most of the time.” Heuristic thinking, Kruger says, has often been called out as the source of our brains’ inherent biases. But over time, a more nuanced scientific view has emerged. “People have successfully argued that we have them because they’re useful. They’re practical, they’re usually right and if something is right enough to be functional most of the time, (that’s why) we’re going to have it.”
“So, rather than having an hourlong conversation about your views and your values that maybe someone couldn’t even follow, you could say, ‘Well, I like John McCain’ or somebody else, and that’s a pretty easy heuristic placing you and your identity and your values.” And regular old celebrities can be just as handy as political types when it comes to this litmus test. Recent weeks provided plenty of fodder: Try Fergie (catch a load of that national anthem performance?) or the Olympic broadcasting duo Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir (The outfits! The snarky comments! The hair!)
“What about Ed Sheeran?” I asked my 16-year-old daughter as I was researching this piece. “What? Everyone loves Ed Sheeran!” she answered. A cursory Google, however, instantly revealed “So You Have Decided to Hate Ed Sheeran: A Guide for Americans.” According to this Vice.com story, “his inoffensiveness is what makes him offensive.” Got it. So, if you’re wearing an Ed Sheeran T-shirt right now and you’re not a teen, my heuristic brain is going to feel safe in assuming you like your celebrities bland and your music blander. Or something.
I asked my buddy at work what would have happened if, on the day she first sat down next to me in our adjoining cubes, I had professed my love for Gwyneth Paltrow. She leaned back in her chair and looked at me over the cubicle wall, and I thought, just for a minute, I saw a flicker of doubt in her eyes. “I guess,” she said, “I would’ve had second thoughts about you.”
Maybe I won’t tell her how I feel about Oprah.