The psychological biases that explain why people hate Carole Baskin so much
In Netflix’s Tiger King, we learn that Joe Exotic — a narcissistic, manipulative animal abuser — was convicted of trying to hire someone to murder Carole Baskin. Why? Because Baskin was trying to shut him down and stop his abuse of big cats. Yet somehow Joe Exotic has become something of a cult hero and Baskin has become the least popular person in the docuseries. How is it that Carole Baskin, the most virtuous figure in the series, is also its most hated? It’s possible that the answer says more about us than about her.
In an article for Shondaland, writer Virginia Pelley recounts how she provoked fans on a Tiger King Facebook group to elicit their thoughts about Baskin: “They bashed her as a hypocrite who once bred big cats herself (in the 1990s), deemed her ‘deeply unlikable,’ sanctimonious, and a phony who profits from caging big cats.” Let’s consider each of these accusations in turn.
Carole Baskin is “sanctimonious”
Is Baskin really sanctimonious or is she a victim of what psychologists Julia Minson and Benoît Monin have termed “do-gooder derogation”? Do-gooder derogation refers to the idea that people tend to feel preemptively judged by do-gooders and, as a result, will defensively put them down. For example, in one study by the pair, 47 meat-eating college students estimated that vegetarians would rate them as less moral than they rated themselves. The bigger the discrepancy between their estimates of vegetarians’ ratings of their morality and their self-ratings, the more negatively they evaluated vegetarians in a word-association task.
These subjects had no way of knowing if their estimates for the vegetarians were accurate, especially for individuals, just like viewers have no way of knowing for sure how judgmental Baskin might be of them. But this research suggests that the more judgmental they perceived her to be, the more likely they are to see her in a negative light.
Carole Baskin is a “hypocrite”
The accusation that Baskin is a hypocrite stems in part from the fact that she used to breed tiger and lion cubs for public entertainment, something she now condemns. Setting aside the fact that Baskin may simply have changed her mind about breeding big cats and therefore stopped doing it (which hardly makes her a hypocrite), hypocrisy itself is a funny thing. If someone publicly condemns animal abuse, even if they are guilty of it themselves, aren’t they at least doing a good thing by publicly condemning it? Why does a hypocritical animal abuser seem to incite more outrage than an animal abuser that commits abuse without taking a stand?
A study by a group of researchers led by Jillian Jordan offers one answer. The researchers hypothesized that when someone publicly calls out something as wrong — like saying that tiger cub petting is animal abuse — they are sending a strong signal to others about their good moral character. The problem with hypocrites is that they are sending a false signal: they get to seem super virtuous without doing any of the actual work.
To test this hypothesis, they ran a series of experiments. In one, they had 451 online subjects read about a conversation between two friends. Subjects read one of three stories. In the hypocrite condition, one friend condemned a behavior (like illegally downloading music); in the liar condition, the friend simply stated that she didn’t engage in the behavior herself; in a control condition, the friend said nothing about the behavior. In all three conditions, the story ended with the friend engaging in the behavior (she went home and illegally downloaded music). Subjects then evaluated the person’s moral character.
As you can see above, they evaluated hypocrites the worst, followed by liars, followed by the people in the control condition. Even though all three people committed the same transgression, subjects thought it was worse to condemn the behavior and then engage in it than to simply lie about it. This is consistent with the researchers’ theory that condemnation sends a stronger signal about one’s character.
Carole Baskin is “unlikable”
I think a lot of Baskin’s unlikability can be traced to her unrelatable response to her former husband’s disappearance (sprinkled with some old-fashioned sexism). Her muted response fueled rumors that she killed him, and may be why Virginia Pelley called Baskin “frustratingly aloof.”
But these interpretations of Baskin’s behavior may be misguided. They rely on a form of naïve psychology that reasons, “if I loved my spouse and they disappeared, I would be distraught and inconsolable; Carole Baskin wasn’t distraught, so she must not have loved her husband.” But even if you would react this way, it turns out that grief reactions are not so universal.
For example, in one 2002 study led by George Bonanno, researchers interviewed 205 subjects (mean age 72) who lost a spouse during a long-term study that they were taking part in for other purposes. Each subject took a survey of their general sense of grief and well-being before they lost their spouse, 6 months after their spouse died, and 18 months after.
The researchers found that the most common pattern of response (46% of subjects) was what they termed resilient: they had low grief symptoms before losing their spouse and there was little change in the two follow-up surveys. In other words, it was quite common for people suffer no long-term grief after losing a spouse. Additionally, relationship quality didn’t predict how people grieved. Subjects who showed a resilient response were not any more likely to negatively evaluate their relationship than subjects who grieved more.
Take these results and combine them with the fact that we’re often poorer judges than we think we are of what people are thinking and feeling and the truth is we don’t really know how Carole Baskin felt about losing her husband. Maybe she grieved but in her own way. Or maybe her grief was short and private. Regardless, her apparently aloof reactions shouldn’t be treated as suspicious, or used as evidence against her.
Carole Baskin and Joe Exotic
I’ll admit that I didn’t like Carole Baskin much either. As awful as Joe Exotic is, he drips with charisma that Baskin lacks. But if you judge the two by their actions, rather than your intuitive impressions, Baskin comes out miles ahead. Baskin’s unpopularity is a good illustration of some of the psychological biases we’re susceptible to when it comes to evaluating others.
Originally published at https://overthinkingtv.com on May 4, 2020.