There is an old saying from Australia:
“Tall poppies get cut down.”
The expression refers to the tallest flower in the field. Rather than celebrating its beauty, someone cuts it off so that it is no taller than the rest.
Psychologists have spent decades studying this phenomenon. They have given it several names: Tall Poppy Syndrome, the Black Sheep Effect, female intrasexual competition, and indirect or relational aggression.
Although each focuses on a different aspect of human behavior, they all point toward a similar observation.
Groups do not always reward excellence.
Sometimes they punish it.
Researchers such as Anne Campbell have argued that women historically competed quite differently than men. Physical aggression carried enormous risks for ancestral women, especially during pregnancy and child-rearing. Instead of fists and open confrontation, competition more often took the form of gossip, exclusion, reputation damage, coalition-building, and social isolation.
Tracy Vaillancourt and others have likewise shown that women are especially skilled at what psychologists call indirect or relational aggression—forms of competition that damage a rival without requiring physical conflict.
Interestingly, these patterns have been documented across a remarkable range of social settings. Researchers have observed them among schoolchildren, university students, summer camps, workplaces, parent groups, politics, entertainment, and increasingly on social media. The specific behaviors vary, but the underlying dynamic remains strikingly consistent. Wherever social relationships help determine status, competition often takes relational rather than physical forms.
Classic studies by psychologist Ritch Savin-Williams are especially revealing. His summer camp research showed that even groups of adolescents who had just met quickly formed stable dominance hierarchies. Among girls, those hierarchies were maintained largely through verbal and relational tactics rather than physical confrontation. The lesson was clear: human groups naturally establish social rankings, but the methods used to compete for status often differ between the sexes.
Another body of research examines what is known as the Black Sheep Effect. Groups often react more harshly toward members of their own group who violate expectations than toward outsiders. The person who rises too far above the group, receives too much attention, or appears to disrupt the existing social order can become the target of surprisingly intense hostility.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of relational aggression is not the aggression itself but its invisibility.
Unlike physical violence, relational aggression is often designed to leave little evidence. Gossip is whispered rather than shouted. Social exclusion leaves no bruises. Reputation attacks are disguised as concern. Coalitions form quietly. Each individual act may appear trivial—even accidental—but together they can profoundly alter a person’s standing within a group.
This invisibility may help explain why relational aggression is so often overlooked. Victims know something is happening, yet observers struggle to identify any single event worth condemning. Even authority figures can miss the larger pattern because they evaluate each incident in isolation rather than seeing the cumulative effect.
That brings us to Caitlin Clark.
By any objective measure, Clark has transformed the WNBA.
She fills arenas.
Television ratings have exploded.
Merchandise sales have soared.
Many fans who never watched women’s basketball now tune in specifically to watch her play.
One might expect such a player to be celebrated almost universally.
Instead, she has often been met with unusually hard fouls, dismissive comments, resentment, and a remarkable reluctance among some players to acknowledge what she has accomplished.
The fouls themselves are obvious enough, although even the obvious ones often seem to be missed by the referees.
That pattern is typical of relational aggression, which is frequently overlooked by school officials, HR departments, and even informal social groups. Researchers have long noted that women’s relational aggression often goes unrecognized by those in positions of authority.
The fouls against Caitlin Clark are physical, but they also share important characteristics with relational aggression. They are easily hidden within behavior that appears normal: “I play hard basketball. Sometimes it gets rough.” They also come with built-in plausible deniability: “I didn’t mean to do that.” “It’s just a foul.”
The deeper question, then, is not whether these are simply hard basketball plays. It is whether they are better understood as the physical expression of a broader social dynamic.
A hard foul is easy to dismiss. Two hard fouls are still just basketball. But when the same player repeatedly becomes the target of violent play, persistent criticism, social distancing, and efforts to minimize her accomplishments, the research suggests we should at least consider the possibility that we are witnessing something larger than ordinary athletic competition.
If so, the referees face a tough task. They are trained to officiate individual fouls, not invisible social hierarchies. A referee can call a shove. He cannot call status competition. He can penalize an elbow. He cannot penalize a coalition.
Perhaps Clark is not merely a great player.
She is a tall poppy.
Her extraordinary success has disrupted an existing hierarchy.
The research suggests that when someone suddenly rises far above her peers, she may trigger forms of indirect aggression designed—not consciously in most cases, but socially—to pull her back toward the group.
Again, this is not an excuse.
It is an explanation.
The interesting part comes when we compare this with men’s sports.
Consider Michael Jordan.
Jordan entered the NBA as an extraordinary talent. Opposing teams hit him hard. They challenged him physically. They tried to stop him.
But something else happened.
As his greatness became undeniable, players increasingly admired him. Young athletes wanted to imitate him. Rivals measured themselves against him. He became the standard by which excellence itself was judged.
The competition remained fierce.
The respect grew alongside it.
That difference is fascinating.
Male hierarchies often appear to resolve competition through rank. Once someone proves himself to be the best, others continue trying to defeat him, but they also acknowledge his position.
Female hierarchies often seem to operate somewhat differently. Because relationships and coalition membership play a larger role, someone who rises dramatically above the group may be experienced not simply as the best performer, but as someone disrupting the balance of the group itself.
Human behavior is almost always influenced by multiple factors—personality, cliques, incentives, race, culture, coaching, individual history, and circumstance. It would be a mistake to attribute what we are seeing to any single cause. My suggestion is simply that relational aggression deserves consideration as one contributing factor among many.
What is remarkable is that psychology has spent decades documenting phenomena such as Tall Poppy Syndrome, relational aggression, stable dominance hierarchies, and the Black Sheep Effect, yet almost no one seems willing to ask whether these well-established patterns might help us understand what we are witnessing today.
Sometimes the best way to understand a controversy is not to ask who is good and who is bad.
It is to ask what kind of human behavior we are looking at.
If Caitlin Clark were a man playing in a men’s league, would we be seeing the same social dynamics?
That may be the most interesting question of all.
Men Are Good.
Tall Poppy Syndrome
N. T. Feather’s classic work: Attitudes towards the high achiever: The fall of the tall poppy.
Also useful: BPS overview on tall poppies, deservingness, and schadenfreude. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229782141_Attitudes_towards_the_high_achiever_The_fall_of_the_Tall_Poppy
Relational Aggression
Crick & Grotpeter’s foundational 1995 paper: Relational Aggression, Gender, and Social-Psychological Adjustment. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7789197/
Black Sheep Effect
Marques, Yzerbyt & Leyens’ original 1988 paper: The “Black Sheep Effect”: Extremity of judgments towards ingroup members as a function of group identification. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.2420180102
Dominance / Status Hierarchies
Good overview: Dominance in humans — useful for distinguishing dominance from prestige/status.
Also relevant: Cheng et al. on dominance and prestige as routes to social status.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8743883/
Hierarchy Stability
Knight & Mehta: Hierarchy stability moderates the effect of status on stress and performance.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1609811114
Savin-Williams, R. C., & Vrangalova, Z. (2013).
Mostly heterosexual as a distinct sexual orientation group: A systematic review of the empirical evidence.
Developmental Review, 33(1), 58–88.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2013.01.001
Tom, while all you say in this piece is true and relevant, you appear to have overlooked the most significant dynamic in play here: race. Basketball is perceived as a sport in which black players are better, black players become the stars. The significant difference in how Michael Jordan was treated may be more because he is black than because he is male. And it is the black female star players that Kaitlin Clark has eclipsed who are the most incensed about her success and who deliver most of the fouls against her. Under Matrisensus, Kaitlin Clark is stealing fame that should belong to black players.
Sometimes things really do work out. Since retirement I have been able to do precisely that which I dreamt about as a boy: read and learn. The study of human relationships has been by far the most fruitful. Now that I have put two long marriages behind me, and it's too late to be useful, I believe I understand the human female quite well, warts and all.
Looking back on that boy of 24 who tried to juggle medical school and simultaneously deal with marriage to a second-wave feminist, I see now how it was all doomed to fail.
Were I to look for a partner now, I know exactly what I'd want. I now know the importance of setting boundaries and sticking to them. I understand shit-testing down to the last jot and tittle - especially the tittles. I understand how the court systems have been - well, systematically - perverted to give women what they thought they wanted but didn't. (Witness the well-documented unhappiness of "modern" women, a full 25% of whom are taking prescription psychotropics.)
But I also understand the backlash - men walking away, men refusing marriage, men putting in the time and effort to look their best so that they can bang like a broken screen door all those - again, "modern" women who have internalized the idea that they should have sex like men.
Yes, men are the problem-solvers. They've just suboptimized - defined as elegantly solving the wrong problem. They are successfully fighting AGAINST, but they need to fight FOR - for a way to normalize this crazy system so that men and women can resume their rightful roles: producing and rearing the next generation.