Hated Heroes Admire Authentic Art
How Suspicious Attainment Drives Consumption of Lowbrow Culture
Reading Length: 10 Minutes
Keywords: Sociology, Art, Status, Authenticity
In the past few decades social scientists have discovered an interesting tension between two phenomena of status-ranking: hero worship and hero denigration.1
Hero worship is not terribly surprising, considering high-status individuals often achieve their rank by providing services to the public. Athletes perform, authors write books, entrepreneurs invent products, musicians make music, et cetera. Hero denigration is likewise not counterintuitive. High-status individuals sometimes compromise on their values, such as the ruthless executive, unsportsmanlike athlete, or vain artist.
Hero Hate or Hero Worship?
The first tension is obvious: why do we worship some heroes and denigrate others? In a 2014 paper, the sociologists Halh and Zuckerman explore this question:
…why do we often denigrate the very heroes that are publicly celebrated?2
The second puzzle is less obvious and more interesting: even when individuals identify themselves in the same high-status group as others, they still denigrate their own kind, even though they themselves are not low-status:
…individuals who are experimentally manipulated to see themselves as a member of the more competent, higher status of the two social categories tend to regard their own social category as lacking in “considerateness” or warmth towards others.
This is important because the prevailing theory in the psychological literature posited that hero denigration occurs as a method of compensation for low-status individuals. In this theory, a sense of virtuous superiority is a ‘consolation prize’ for low-status people. Even if they didn’t win the status game, they can at least retain a sense of worth because they are not like the morally inferior successful.
If high-status individuals also have a tendency to denigrate themselves, this obviously casts doubt on the ‘compensation’ theory, because the high-status have no need of such compensation. This opens the door for a new theory of hero denigration:
Evidence that high-status actors often suspect that actors from their own high-status category are inferior on these dimensions suggests that there may be something systematic in the tendency for high-status actors to be considered morally suspect.
What could explain this ‘systematic tendency’?
Suspicious Attainment
Attaining status is suspicious. Why? Because high-status confers benefits. This simple observation is the driving engine for the authors’ theory of ‘suspicious attainment’.
Because high-status confers benefits, individuals have an incentive to achieve high-status purely for the benefits that high-status brings, rather than any benefits they may bring to society. Therefore, no matter how pure an individual’s motive may be, there will always be a lingering suspicion that they are ‘doing it for the wrong reasons’, and because internal motives cannot be fully interrogated by outside observers, this suspicion is ineliminable.
Insofar as it promises benefits to the holder, the very attainment of status fosters suspicion regarding the high-status actor’s ulterior motives for achieving high levels of performance.
Hahl and Zuckerman create three laboratory experiments to put this theory to the test. Subjects in the first experiment watched actors perform tasks and were manipulated into identifying more closely with one or the other actor.
In either case, subjects were likely to consider the actor that performed better on the task as less considerate and less authentic, even though there were no tangible awards for outperforming at the task. An interesting caveat is that when the superior actor acted in a deferential and ‘prosocial’ manner to their less-skilled counterpart, hero denigration was diminished.
This raises the possibility that hero denigration occurs simply because of how high-status individuals act, which would jeopardize the suspicious attainment theory. To test this possibility, in the second experiment a ‘teamwork’ bonus was introduced so that an actor that showed ‘good teamwork’ could earn more money.
In this second experiment there is now of course an incentive for the high-status individual to show the kind, deferential treatment to their counterpart. This incentive now destroys the effect that was found in the first experiment; showing deference no longer reduces hero denigration. This lends evidence to the ‘suspicious attainment’ theory rather than a theory of how the individuals act simpliciter.
In the third experiment, actors compete to solve questions instead of working together. In some cases, there is a private incentive to perform, and in some cases a ‘social purpose’ is introduced as a charity donation for the winner to choose.
When there was no private incentive and there was a ‘social benefit’, there was no hero denigration:
Once we have eliminated the concerns inherent to the status attainment process, the audience is free to celebrate the higher-performing type with higher attributions of status, considerateness, and authenticity.
The three experiments together demonstrate evidence for the theory of ‘suspicious attainment’. Heroes are denigrated when their motives are in doubt. The authors give the case of Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenburger, the pilot who emergency landed a commercial airliner on the Hudson River. He was widely lauded as a hero and celebrated, until he announced a book deal. The book deal soured his public image because it made apparent the issue of ‘suspicious’ motives.3
Because there are often so many avenues of benefitting from high-status in modern society, we should expect that people (including the high-status themselves) are suspicious of attainment.
Thus, in the absence of extrinsic rewards, audiences should apply the morally benign interpretation, and high-status actors should not feel insecure about their authenticity. But the more typical case is that implicit extrinsic rewards are present, and thus there is some ambiguity as to whether the pursuit of status was morally problematic.
Why Elites Love Lowbrow Art
In a parallel paper, the authors use the theory of ‘suspicious attainment’ to answer a curious question: why do elites love low-status art?4 From jazz to hip-hop, from indigenous African art to street clothing and comfort food, there is a tendency for high-status individuals to consume cultural goods that are not made for them. Jazz, for example, was made for and by lower and middle-class African Americans in the 20th century and was not considered a ‘classy’ genre until recently.
Because this art is not made for them, high-status individuals can consume these cultural goods ‘authentically’. The street food vendor does not worry about appeasing the food critic and wealthy customers, so it has an aura of authenticity for such customers.
In short, insofar as low-status culture is produced without any awareness that it might impress elite audiences as aesthetically sophisticated, elite audiences can generally assume it was produced in a spirit of disinterestedness with respect to highbrow standards, and thus in pursuit of intrinsic rather than extrinsic rewards.
If this is true, it raises the question of why high-status individuals care about consuming authentic cultural goods in the first place. This is where the theory of suspicious attainment comes in. If high-status individuals know that they are considered less authentic as a consequence of their status, they will seek out ways to restore this authenticity. The authors put it this way: “…authenticity is sought because authenticity is lacking”. Elites are insecure about their status, and partake in low-brow, and therefore authentic, cultural goods as a way of addressing and restoring this insecurity.
Why would consuming authentic cultural goods imply that oneself is therefore authentic?
The basic logic of this effect is that if one appreciates the work of those who are indifferent to social approval, this implies that one is similarly indifferent to social approval. In other words, one effective solution to authenticity-insecurity is to borrow the authenticity of (lowbrow) culture producers.
Public consumption of cultural goods by those who are indifferent to fame or fortune makes it seem less likely that the appreciator is herself motivated by fame or fortune.
There are two different theories here: (1) the status-insecure will consume low-status cultural goods to alleviate the effect and (2) the public buys into this borrowing of authenticity and lessens their denigration. Are either of these actually true?
Outsider Art
To test these theories, the researchers built a pair of experiments around ‘outsider art’. Outsider art is literally art made by outsiders. Outsider artists are self-taught and do not follow conventions of more popular artists.5 Outsider art is low-brow because the art is not given prizes, hung in famous museums, or written about by critics. Outsider artists are therefore authentic because they are not producing art with the ambition of gaining extrinsic rewards.
In the first experiment, subjects are manipulated to feel either high or low-status, and then asked to rank art based on their personal preference. Importantly, artist biographies were included. Unbeknownst to the subjects, the artists and biographies were fictional and intentionally designed to come off as either authentic or inauthentic. For example, here are some details of one of the fictional inauthentic artists, Knapp:
…Knapp was described as having received critical acclaim and his work “is included in the collections of major art museums”.
Knapp is obviously not an Outside artist, so we would not expect the status-insecure to prefer his art, and this is in fact what the results from the first experiment show. The second theory, however, that consuming authentic cultural goods will decrease denigration, has not yet been proven.
In the second experiment, subjects witnessed a winning and losing actor in a competition and were then told about the art they preferred. Shockingly, the hero denigration effect was eliminated when the high-status winner of the competition preferred the low-status, Outside art.
Ultimately, this study shows that expressing a preference for authentic art can be effective in reducing the concern generated by attaining status in morally ambiguous ways.
Importantly, the subjects had no reason to believe that the high-status winning actor was preferring authentic art for the purpose of reducing insecurity:
…the possibility that an actor is motivated to access the “authenticity by appreciation” effect must be obscured from the audience’s view.
If there is widespread cynicism about elite consumption of low-brow culture, then the strategy of insecurity reduction will no longer be effective. In a footnote, the authors state playfully:
Ironically, if this article becomes widely read, the spread of such cynicism becomes more likely!
These theories claim that high-status elites consume low-brow cultural goods not because they are low-brow, or considered better, but because they mitigate insecurity via their authenticity:
Accordingly, the distinctive appeal of lowbrow culture for such consumers is not that the culture is lowbrow, but that it is perceived to be authentic.
For hero worship, see Goode, ‘The Celebration of Heroes: Prestige as a Control System’, 1978.
For hero denigration, see Lamont, ‘The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration’, 2000. More sources are provided by Hahl & Zuckerman, infra. page 506.
‘Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger Signs Book Deal To Tell Life Story’, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chesley-sully-sullenberge_n_177605. Sullenberger’s book is available here.
Halh, Zuckerman, & Kim, ‘Why Elites Love Authentic Lowbrow Culture: Overcoming High-Status Denigration with Outsider Art’, 2017.
Much like jazz, outsider art has over time been institutionalized and accepted by high-brow cultural institutions. See, for example, ‘Outsider Art: The Hot List’ by Christies.