Monthly Archives: December 2012

Louis Zamperini: The Unbroken Hero

War Heroes

By Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals

Human warfare brings out the worst in people. Prisoners of war, especially, can be at the receiving end of the most unimaginable brutality. During World War II, Second Lieutenant Louis Zamperini underwent horrific suffering after he survived a plane crash and was sent to several of the most brutal Japanese prison camps. Zamperini’s story is told in bold, vivid detail in Laura Hillenbrand’s book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, which was named Time Magazine’s best book of the year in 2010.

Zamperini’s heroic odyssey began with a few successful missions as a bombardier in the Pacific theater in 1942 and 1943.  In the spring of 1943, while on a routine mission searching for a lost plane, his own aircraft experienced mechanical trouble and plunged into the ocean about 850 miles west of Hawaii.  He and two other men drifted for 46 days on a raft, heading west into Japanese-held waters.  They suffered from thirst, starvation, violent storms, intense sunburn, menacing sharks, and strafing from a Japanese plane.  After floating 33 days, one of the three men died from starvation.

As much as Zamperini suffered on the raft, he would later recall that it was far preferable to what awaited him after the Japanese captured him on the 47th day near the Marshall Islands.  Already in an emaciated state from weeks on the raft, Zamperini was tortured and starved before being transferred to the notorious Ofuna Prisoner of War Camp, which was known for its egregious violations of the terms of the Geneva Convention.  At the Ofuna camp, Zamperini performed slave labor under the watchful eye of Imperial Japanese Army Sergeant Mutsuhiro Watanabe, perhaps the cruelest of all camp guards of World War II.

The level of hostility directed toward the prisoners by Watanabe was staggering.  He especially targeted Zamperini.  Watanabe was prone to violent outbursts during which he beat the prisoners daily, starved them, made them perform humiliating acts, refused to treat their illnesses, and exposed them to bitter cold.  Watanabe’s level of barbarism was so great that after the war he was classified as a Class-A war criminal.  The punishment heaped on Zamperini’s mind and body at the hands of Watanabe was extraordinary.

In one striking example of Watanabe’s sadism, Zamperini was once ordered to hold an extremely heavy wooden beam above his head.  He could barely raise it. Watanabe told a guard to strike Zamperini in the face with a gun if he dropped the beam.  No one expected Zamperini, in his weakened state, to hold it aloft for more than a few minutes.  Watanabe waited for Zamperini’s quick and inevitable failure.  Minutes ticked by.  Then a half hour.  Zamperini recalls the intense pain but also the fierce resolve not to let Watanabe defeat him.  After 37 minutes elapsed, Watanabe grew so frustrated waiting that he charged Zamperini and slammed his fist into the prisoner’s stomach, sending them both toppling to the ground.  Zamperini’s bold act of strength and defiance gave great inspiration to the throngs of POWs who witnessed the event.

But these moments of triumph were few and far between.  By August of 1945, Zamperini was near death, suffering from starvation, exhaustion, dysentery, and beriberi.  The dropping of the atomic bombs and Japan’s surrender soon thereafter saved Zamperini and other prisoners, all of them walking skeletons, who somehow managed to cling to life.

Because Zamperini was presumed dead, the reunion with his family was especially poignant.  He slowly regained his physical strength, but he suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder.  Each night in his dreams, Zamperini was haunted by images of Watanabe beating him.  Zamperini was agitated, depressed, and unemployed.  To soothe his pain, he turned to alcohol and was consumed by revengeful thoughts of returning to Japan to murder Watanabe, the man who ruined his life.

During this emotionally tumultuous period, Zamperini fell in love with a young woman named Cynthia Applewhite, and they married in 1946. Cynthia was aghast at the level of Zamperini’s emotional pain.  One day in 1948 she convinced him to attend a speech given by a young Reverend named Billy Graham.  Zamperini was transfixed by Graham’s message of forgiveness.  He made a life-changing decision to turn his life over to God and to forgive his Japanese captors, even Watanabe.  Zamperini traveled to Japan in 1950 to communicate his forgiveness to his former prison guards, now in prison.  The trip went well, but unfortunately Watanabe was nowhere to be found.  The cruelest of prison guards in all of World War II had somehow evaded capture.

Zamperini’s religious conversion helped him overcome his emotional scars and lead a happy, productive life.  After enduring a plane crash, weeks without food and water on a raft, and appalling treatment at illegal prison camps, Zamperini found a way to survive and even thrive afterward.  His military service to his country, by itself, made him a great hero.  His remarkable resilience as a POW has made him an inspiration to millions.  Today, at the age of 95, he still draws big crowds as a motivational speaker.  In Laura Hillenbrand’s words, Louis Zamperini is indeed a man unbroken in mind, in body, and in spirit.

Do We Expect Too Much From Our Heroes?

Commentary and Analysis

By Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals

In a recent New York Magazine article, Frank Rich argues that no one should have been surprised at the downfall of highly decorated U.S. Army General and CIA Director David Petraeus.  After the reputational demise of so many heroes before him — Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, and Joe Paterno, to name a few — why should we have expected anything different from Petraeus?

According to Rich, “What’s really shocking about the Petraeus affair is not Petraeus’s affair but the fact that once again, we were taken in by a secular plaster saint who turns out to bear only a faint resemblance to the image purveyed by the man himself and the mass media that abetted his self-glorification.”

Rich’s essay raises many interesting questions:  Why do people we admire tend to succumb to repeated moral failings? Do we expect moral perfection from those who show great competence in one sphere of life?  Why do we conveniently overlook the obvious fact that all human heroes are inevitably as human as they are heroic?  And then why do we seem to punish heroes more for their human foibles than we do non-heroes?

Prior to their downfall, we personally never imagined Woods, Armstrong, or Petraeus to be perfect individuals.  Perhaps people are too quick to assume that greatness in one realm implies (however naively) greatness in all realms, including — and perhaps especially — morality. Our thirst for heroes may be so urgent that we cannot help but harbor unrealistic impressions of their universal virtue.  In our first book on heroes, we discuss how the higher standards we hold for heroes make it easier to topple them from their pedestals.

Rich also reminds us of the often-heard speculation that ever since the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, public figures’ misdeeds are sought out by the media rather than covered-up by them.  Untarnished heroes of yesteryear, such as George Washington, JFK, and FDR, were probably as riddled with flaws as were Paterno and Patraeus.  The media of their day simply placed a higher priority on building heroes than on tearing them down.  We recommend Susan Drucker’s book, American Heroes in a Media Age, for a cogent analysis of this topic.

Lost in all the media frenzy about the many recent fallen heroes is the observation that many, many extremely successful people (and heroes to many) continue to maintain almost impeccably clean moral reputations.  These individuals come from all walks of life and a partial list of them includes Coach K at Duke University, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Meryl Streep, Stephen Hawking, and Michael Jordan.  Frank Rich’s essay suggests that it may only be a matter of time before at least a few of these icons crumble.  We hope he’s wrong.

The Seven Paradoxes of Heroism

Commentary and Analysis

By Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals

In our research on the subject of heroism, we’ve been surprised at times about the ways in which people choose and maintain their heroes.  Here we present these surprises to you in the form of seven paradoxes.  Maybe these paradoxes don’t strike you as surprising at all, but to us they reveal an unexpected psychological richness about the hero concept.

Paradox 1:  The truest heroes are fictional heroes.  When we’ve asked people to list their heroes, a third of the heroes listed were the products of someone else’s imagination.  In fact, many people listed only fictional characters as their heroes.  When we asked one respondent to explain why he listed only fictional heroes, his reply was very revealing:  “The only real heroes are fictional heroes.”  This mindset prompted us to conduct a study in which participants were asked to rate the overall “goodness” of a group of randomly selected heroes and villains. We found that fictional heroes and villains were rated as more definitely good or bad than their real-world counterparts. Fictional heroes are indeed “truer” heroes.

Paradox 2:  We all agree what a hero is, but we disagree who heroes are.  Our research has shown that most people agree that heroes are supremely moral, supremely competent, or both.  But people rarely share the same heroes. Thus people who agree about the definition of heroes often vehemently disagree about specific choices of heroes.  A telling example occurred when a colleague of ours loved our definition of heroes, agreed with our philosophy that “heroism is in the eye of the beholder”, but then fervently questioned our decision to include actress Meryl Streep as an example of a hero.  It didn’t matter that we pointed to the fact that some of our survey respondents listed Streep as their hero.  What was most important to our colleague was that Streep simply didn’t appear on her own personal list of hero exemplars.

Paradox 3:  The most abundant heroes are also the most invisible.  An important type of hero is called the Transparent Hero, who does his or her heroic work behind the scenes, outside the public spotlight.  Transparent heroes include teachers, coaches, mentors, healthcare workers, law enforcement personnel, firefighters, and our military personnel.  People judge the transparent hero as the most abundant in society, by far.  Transparent heroes are everywhere.  Yet they largely go unnoticed and are our most unsung heroes.

Paradox 4:  The worst of human nature brings out the best of human nature. This paradox probably needs little explanation. Human-caused catastrophes such as the holocaust, the September 11th attacks, and the Virginia Tech shooting tragedy were fertile soil from which great acts of heroism blossomed.  One year ago exactly, when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot outside a supermarket in Arizona, heroes stepped forward to protect Giffords from further harm and to prevent the gunman from targeting others.  Stories of such heroism abound.  Villainy always begets heroism.

Paradox 5:  We don’t choose our heroes; they choose us.  There is considerable research evidence supporting the idea of inherited cognitive capacities that interact with experience to produce the ways that people think and construct their worlds. To us, the idea of inherited, universal hero narrative structures that provide a ready basis for adopting heroes seems quite plausible. Our minds may equipped with images of the looks, traits, and behavior of heroes, as well as the narrative structure of heroism as outlined in Joseph Campbell’s (1949) hero monomyth.  These archetypes may prepare us for seeing and identifying heroes. Thus our heroes may choose us as much as we choose them.

Paradox 6:  We love to build up our heroes and we also love to destroy them.  Our research shows that people are captivated by dramatic tales of underdogs who heroically prevail against the odds.  Hero construction is inspiring and offers hope to all of us.  But the reverse is also true: people also appear to crave the undoing of heroes.  In fact, we suspect that this type of schadenfreude is heightened in hero-perception.  Our studies show that our greatest heroes cannot get away with anything less than near-perfect moral behavior.  For this reason, many heroes are bound to fall from grace.  People appear to believe in, and relish, a perverse law of heroic gravity:  What goes up must come down.

Paradox 7:  We love heroes the most when they’re gone.  Many studies we’ve conducted point to a rather morbid conclusion:  As much as we love our heroes when they are around, we love them even more when they’re dead. We call this phenomenon the death positivity bias. This bias is seen in the factors that determine the perceived greatness of U.S. Presidents. Getting assassinated truly helps a president gain stature as a great leader. The greatest of our heroes must die to achieve their greatness.

– –

What accounts for these seven paradoxes?  For us, the concept of heroism has proven to be slippery, mysterious, and surprising. To understand the paradoxes, we introduce the term intuitive heroism, which refers to people’s naïve beliefs about the way heroism operates.  Intuitive heroism is similar to intuitive psychology or intuitive physics: What we think isn’t necessary so.  Our naïve beliefs may lead us to underestimate the idiosyncratic nature of people’s hero choices. Intuitive heroism can make us oblivious to the impact of death in promoting heroism, and it can make us blind to our desire to see heroes fall as much as our desire to see them rise.

It is the misleading nature of intuitive heroism that has prompted us to undertake a more scientific approach toward understanding heroes.  We invite you to learn more about these paradoxes at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology website.  We’ve been delighted by all the surprising findings in our studies of heroism, and we look forward to uncovering – and understanding – many more.

 References

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2011). Heroes: What they do & why we need them.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Allison, S. T., Eylon, D., Beggan, J.K., & Bachelder, J. (2009).  The demise of leadership: Positivity and negativity in evaluations of dead leaders.  The Leadership Quarterly, 20, 115-129.

Carruthers, P., Laurence, S., & Stich, S. (2005). The innate mind: Structure and contents.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Cialdini, R. B., Borden, R. J., Thorne, A., Walker, M. R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L. R. (1976). Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 366-375.

Dehaene, S. (1997, October 27, 1997). What Are Numbers, Really? A Cerebral Basis For Number Sense.  Retrieved from http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dehaene/dehaene_p2.html

Dunning, D. (2011). He turned toward the gunfire. Personality and Social Psychology Connections. Retrieved from http://spsptalks.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/he-turned-toward-the-gunfire/

Goethals, G. R., & Allison, S. T. (2012). Making heroes: The construction of courage, competence, and virtue.  Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 183-235.

Jung, C. G. (1917).  The psychology of unconscious processes.  In Long, C. (Ed.), Collected papers on analytical psychology.  London: Bailliere, Tindall, & Cox.

Jung, C. G. (1969).  Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 1):  Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious.  Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press.

Pinker, S. (1991).  Rules of language.  Science, 253, 530-535.

Simonton, D. K. (1994). Greatness: Who makes history and why. New York: Guilford Press.