All posts by Scott Allison

About Scott Allison

Scott Allison has authored numerous books, including 'Heroes' and 'Heroic Leadership'. He is Professor of Psychology at the University of Richmond where he has published extensively on heroism and leadership. His other books include Reel Heroes, Conceptions of Leadership, Frontiers in Spiritual Leadership, and the Handbook of Heroism. His work has appeared in USA Today, National Public Radio, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate Magazine, MSNBC, CBS, Psychology Today, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has received Richmond's Distinguished Educator Award and the Virginia Council of Higher Education's Outstanding Faculty Award.

Conceptions of Leadership: Enduring Ideas and Emerging Insights

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Conceptions of Leadership gathers together the latest work by distinguished leadership scholars in social psychology and related disciplines to explore classic conceptions of leadership.

The book reviews topics such as interpersonal influence, charisma, personality, and power, as well as recent perspectives on those enduring concerns. It includes contemporary departures from traditional approaches to leadership in considering gender, trust, narratives, and the complex relationships between leaders and followers. Together the chapters provide a wide-ranging and coherent account of how human beings get along and the ways they engage and work together to accomplish their goals.

Conceptions of Leadership is edited by George Goethals, Scott Allison, Rod Kramer, and David Messick. Here is an excerpt, taken from David Messick’s opening chapter:

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“In the spring of 1999, two of this book’s editors, Kramer and I, met for lunch at the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago. Kramer was on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and I was on the faculty of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. One of the topics that we talked about during lunch was the shift in emphasis in both business schools away from cooperation, trust, communication, coordination, and the like, to the related but distinct topic of leadership. Kramer and I were social psychologists and knew that the topic of leadership had been an important theme in some of the earliest research on group processes. However, as social psychology experienced an infatuation with the “cognitive” revolution in psychology, the topic of leadership shrank into obscurity. By the turn of the millennium, though, there were some new ways of thinking about leadership that had not been introduced to the business school environment. Why not, we thought, have a conference and invite some of social psychology’s most creative innovators to a conference to discuss these new approaches to leadership and then publish a book based on the talks? The conference was held in August of 2000 at the Kellogg School of Management, and the book based on this conference, The Psychology of Leadership, was published in 2005. Two of the creative innovators who were invited to the conference and who wrote chapters for the book are the other two editors of the current book, Allison and Goethals.

“Now, a decade, more or less, later, and there has been a virtual tsunami of books and articles about leadership. When the issue of updating the earlier book was first raised, Kramer and I wondered what the point of a revision would be. We then became aware of the creative work by Allison and Goethals and realized that there was indeed a body of research that had not been described in their earlier book. So Kramer and I discussed the idea of a revision with Allison and Goethals, and we all agreed that such a project was worth exploring. After much discussion and the exchange of scads of ideas, the current book was agreed upon by all of us, who, we should note, are all associated with the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was a faculty member, Allison and Kramer were graduate students, and Goethals was a visiting scholar.

“The familiarity of us four editors with each other is a blessing but also a shortcoming. We are all male, white, North American university professors. These facts surely limit our views of what constitutes good leader- ship and who qualifies to be thought of as a leader. Famous people from around the world, people like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, are all well known and admired. But there are many others who would be unrecognized by most Americans. Take, for instance, Lee Kuan Yew (familiarly known in Asia as LKY). LKY was the first prime minister of Singapore and one of the most famous and admired political leaders in Asia. When one of us (DM) taught in Hong Kong to a broad mix of Asian executives, LKY was one of the most popular figures executives wrote about to illustrate excellence in leadership. Consider also Molly Melching, about whom a book has appeared (Molloy, 2013). She is a volunteer in a not-for-profit organization in Senegal who spends time in rural villages where the practice of female genital cutting is a well-established cultural tradition. She has begun the process of gradually eliminating this barbaric practice from hundreds of villages in Senegal but remains relatively obscure in the United States. Finally, think of Simon Bolivar. His name is recognized by a fraction of US scholars, but he is famous throughout Latin America for having led the South American people in a rebellion against Spanish domination. Indeed he has one nation named after him (Bolivia) and is widely known as el Libertador throughout Central and South America. He is to Latin America what George Washington is to the United States.

“Inescapably then, we editors are constrained by our backgrounds in our selection of “core” issues about leadership, and we are constrained in ways that will often be invisible to us. For instance, we are all social psychologists and have read much of the same literature on leadership. But that literature is different from that which a political scientist or a journalist or a military historian will have read. Their books on core concepts would be different from ours—not better, necessarily, nor worse, just different. The way we define leadership is likely to differ from the way people whose backgrounds and experiences are different from ours define leadership. This fact is true about professional experiences and it is equally true about political and social differences. Most citizens of the United States, for instance, would not consider Fidel Castro to be a hero and a leader, but most Cubans would. Most North Koreans think their leaders have almost godlike qualities and most Americans think these leaders are monomaniacal lunatics. What is implied by these differences is that leadership, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder. If history is written by winners, one will either be viewed as a hero or a terrorist depending on who wins….”

Conceptions of Leadership is available in both hardcover and paperback.

Presidential Leadership and African Americans

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In this book, George Goethals  traces the leadership affecting African Americans of eight US Presidents, from George Washington through Lyndon B. Johnson.  In addition to chapters on each of these men, the volume includes an Introduction and a concluding chapter that considers progress during the past 50 years.  The overall arc of the story begins with slavery and ends with the election of an African American president.

The lives and leadership of individual presidents is considered within two important contexts.  The first is the evolution of the United States, starting as a collection of thirteen separate colonies joining together in 1775 to fight a war against England, and eventually becoming the world’s leading economic and military power.  A second is the evolution of the role and status of African Americans in the United States from slavery to emancipation, through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, to civil rights and voting rights, through affirmative action and to the White House.

But the focus is on the evolving psychology that underlies the attitudes and actions of men who served as US president throughout America’s history of constitutional government.  How did their backgrounds as well as the challenges they faced as presidents shape their values, attitudes, moral development, judgment and, ultimately, their decisions?  We see that historic, economic, and cultural evolutions affect both the lives of African Americans and the nature of presidential leadership.  We see that specific events and politics combine in influencing each president’s attitudes and actions toward blacks.  And we see that the contributions and actions of African Americans alter economic, military, and cultural developments, and, ultimately, presidential leadership.

The life histories and the administrations of the eight presidents we consider both shape and are shaped by Americans of African descent.  While the story highlights the leadership of these chief executives, it also emphasizes the agency of African Americans, some well- known, some never to be known.  These include figures such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  They also include unnamed escaping slaves and as well as fighters in America’s battles from Bunker Hill in 1775 to the present day in the Middle East.

In appraising the personalities, policies, and initiatives of these selected American presidents, the book situates their lives and administrations within the political and cultural context of their times.  The actions of all of them, and the credit or blame we attribute to them, have to be understood within these parameters.  In each case, the historical and situational forces that shape their values, priorities, and ultimately, their actions are highly relevant.  In evaluating their leadership we often overlook these contextual influences.  One goal of this book is to weigh them more fairly.

Presidential Leadership and African Americans is published by Routledge and is now available for purchase.

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Bill Cosby and the Transition from Hero to Villain

Commentary and Analysis, , ,

By Scott T. Allison

The unthinkable has happened again. Another widely admired public figure is facing allegations of horrific conduct, and fans are scrambling to make sense of it all.

For at least a decade, rumors have swirled about Bill Cosby’s improprieties with women. The accusations never stuck and so we could easily dismiss them and give Cosby the benefit of the doubt. But over the past few weeks at least a dozen women have come forward with allegations that Cosby sexually assaulted them, used date rape drugs on them, or both.

A former employee of Cosby has also admitted to helping Cosby find private time with these women and then paying them thousands of dollars, presumably to keep them quiet.

These repulsive acts, if they occurred, contrast so markedly from the image of Cosby as America’s dad, Mr. Huxtable, who gently and lovingly parented his children in his 1980s television sitcom. This same Cosby made us laugh and gave us great joy with his Fat Albert series and in his groundbreaking role in the 1960s series, I Spy.

Four years ago, we blogged about Cosby as a hero. He overcame racism directed toward him to blaze a trail for African-Americans. Cosby broke down stereotypes, and he was unafraid to take strong and sometimes unpopular stances about race and class in America.

Now this.

We don’t know all the facts yet, but what we do know is that the usual polarization of opinion about a fallen hero has occurred. Some fans have decided to remain fans of Cosby. At a recent concert, Cosby received two standing ovations. But many other fans have jumped ship and are spouting venomous ire toward Cosby. To them, he is now a villain.

The psychology here is not yet clear. What distinguishes fans who may be loyal to a fault from fans who bolt at the first sign of trouble? There appear to be individual differences in the elasticity of the hero concept. Those with low elasticity may not tolerate much deviation from the idealized image of the hero. In contrast, those with high elasticity may have a higher tolerance for ambiguity and for evidence that contradicts the heroic ideal.

Psychologists who study social cognition have found that people engage in motivated cognition. Our motivations influence the way we interpret information. For example, people who like President Obama will interpret neutral and ambiguous behaviors performed by Obama more favorably than will people who dislike the President. And those who truly love Bill Cosby may be willing to give him far more benefit of the doubt compared to those who only have a neutral or mildly positive opinion of him.

In an earlier post, we proposed that people form an implicit contract with their heroes. The agreement involves the idea that we will give heroes our adulation and support, but in return they must maintain an idealized image of human greatness. If a hero misbehaves, we consider it a breech of contract and we withdraw our admiration and support. We may also show considerable anger about the contract violation — witness the outrage directed toward Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong that still lingers today. A broken agreement can turn a hero into a villain quickly and easily.

For many people, Cosby has broken this implicit contract and deserves condemnation, if not a prison sentence.

More than a half-century ago, Carl Jung proposed the idea that all humans have collectively inherited unconscious images, ideas, or thoughts, which he called archetypes. These archetypes reflect common experiences that all humans (and their ancestors) have shared over millions of years of evolution, and the main purpose of these archetypes is to prepare us for these common experiences. Two such archetypes, according to Jung, are heroes and demons.

People tend to paint their social world with all-or-nothing brushstrokes. For many of us, Bill Cosby’s sexual transgressions moved him quickly from the hero category to the villain category. There doesn’t seem to be an in-between category, suggesting that there is more of a fine line between heroism and villainy than we realize.

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The Man of Spider!

Superheroes

By Ashley Mekin, Raha BagherNiakan, and Aubrey Hunt

Born in Queens, New York, Peter Parker lived with his Uncle Ben and Aunt May after being orphaned as a child when his parents were killed in a plane crash by U.S. government spies. Peter was an academically gifted child who excelled in science and became a high honors student which in turn often made him a social outcast and a target for bullies.

While attending a public science exhibition at the age of 15 years old, he was bitten on the hand by a radioactive spider which had been irradiated by a beam from a particle accelerator used in a demonstration. Peter was walking home from the exhibition when he was nearly hit by a car; yet, he managed to jump out of the way! It was then that he discovered his incredible strength and his ability to cling to walls, much like a spider.

Ever since that night, Peter started noticing a variety of changes to his body and learned that he had acquired super powers. Spider-Man’s super powers consist of the ability to cling to walls, a “spider-sense” that alerts him to danger, perfect balance and equilibrium, and superhuman strength and agility. Though Spider-Man has cool powers, he isn’t necessarily invincible. Punch him and he bleeds, shoot him and he goes down–his victories are hard fought through guile and effort. However, he is stronger and faster than any normal person and has those amazing webs!

But why do we look up to Spider-Man? What is it about him that makes him different from your every-day human (besides his special powers)? Superhero actor Christopher Reeve once stated, “What makes a person a hero is not the power they have, but rather the wisdom and maturity they have to use the power wisely.” Spider-Man has the opportunity to show everyone all of the powers he has; yet, he decides to put himself in the shoes of the “average” human. For Spider-Man, it is not about receiving high status or gratitude.

He works as a reporter and never uses his abilities to get out of unfavorable situations (that do not have to do with evil, of course!) Furthermore, Spider-Man always has his mask on when saving the world, which further emphasizes his humility. It is not who he is under the mask that is important to him, but rather the idea that the mask represents that is bulletproof. Instead of boasting about the heroic acts he performs every day, by leaving his mask on, Spider-Man demonstrates that what is important is not who saves the world but who is out there doing the best they can do, with what they have, in order to make the world a better place.

Heroes not only do great things, but they also give back by inspiring us and giving us the confidence and motivation to do the same. We are all links in a chain and it is our duty to pay it forward– and that is what will truly change the world.

Many may assume that just because Spider-Man has super powers, he is automatically a hero. However, powers are not what make the hero–the mindset is. What makes someone a hero is how they use their knowledge and natural abilities to improve the world, thus giving others the courage and inspiration to do the same. To be a hero is not just performing one heroic act — it is a journey one chooses to explore. Imagine a world where every human chose to nurture their inner hero.

To quote Christopher Reeves, “A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.” Spider-Man began as an ordinary man. He fought crime even when he had no powers. He made the decision to help those in need, knowing that he would receive nothing in return. He proves his courage every day and he never gives up, even when his opponent is much more powerful than himself. Like Bob Riley said, “Hard times don’t create heroes. It is during the hard times when the hero within us is revealed.” We all have a hero inside of us– sometimes, we just need a boost of confidence or someone to help us unleash it, to whisper in our ear and say “Go for it. You can do it. You will prevail.”

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Ashley Mekin, Raha BagherNiakan, and Aubrey Hunt are undergraduate students at the University of Richmond. They wrote this essay as part of their course requirement while enrolled in Dr. Scott Allison’s Social Psychology class.

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Emma Watson: Wizard and Hero

Artist Heroes, Celebrity Heroes

By Carolyn Flannery, Nora Tocheny, & Briana Robinson

British actress and model Emma Watson was born on April 15, 1990. She became a household name when, at the age of nine, she was cast as the strong, charismatic Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movie series. Watson auditioned for the part as Hermione because her friends did and because it would “be a laugh”. Although she didn’t take the audition seriously, her drama teacher and casting agents saw great potential in her.

She starred in eight Harry Potter movies, and has gone on to attract prominent roles in other movies and television shows. Her acting career has earned her many awards, such as the Young Artist Award, two Otto Awards, Child Performance of the Year Award, and many more.

Even though Emma Watson had many cinematic successes, becoming a world famous actress did not steer Emma Watson away from continuing her education. In 2009, Watson attended the prestigious Brown University while continuing her role as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter franchise. She took a year off from her education to act in several movies, but eventually received her bachelor’s degree in English Literature.

Not only is Emma Watson known as an accomplished actress, she was also named a Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women and has traveled to Bangladesh, Zambia, and Uruguay to advocate for human rights. In her September 20 speech for the United Nations, she launched the new HeforShe campaign that aims to bring men into the fight for gender equality. This speech earned her a standing ovation and began a national conversation about gender and feminism.

The HeforShe campaign advocates for gender equality as a human rights issue involving both sexes, a message Watson clearly expressed in her speech. Watson proclaims that feminism has become synonymous with “man-hating”, a negative stigma that has thwarted the advancement of gender equality. As a self-declared feminist, Watson explains how both women and men are targets of gender bias, and she urges both men and women to work together to modify today’s social norms. Emma Watson focuses her message to men and women of all ages.  She spoke out for human equality, motivating everyone to take a stand for what they believe in by saying, “If not you, who? If not now, when?”

Emma Watson embodies the qualities of a hero through her strong dedication to achieving her goals and advocating for worthy causes. She is an incredibly successful actress, and has many more achievements that are central in her everyday life. Her acting has brought her worldwide fame, and she uses her fame in a positive way to actively support humanitarian efforts. For example, she supports UNICEF on her official fan page and asks her fans to donate.

Watson also is involved with smaller charities, such as Blue Peter’s Mission Nutrition, and Wild Trout Trust. She has collaborated with Peopletree, a fair trade ecologically friendly fashion company that establishes production facilities in developing countries to provide community members with economic support through employment opportunities. Emma Watson has had a positive and enduring influence on society and has advanced numerous humanitarian causes, making her a role model and modern day hero.

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Carolyn Flannery, Nora Tocheny, & Briana Robinson are undergraduate students at the University of Richmond. They wrote this essay as part of their course requirement while enrolled in Dr. Scott Allison’s Social Psychology class.

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How I Came To Study Heroes

Commentary and Analysis

By Scott T. Allison

The famed comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

Campbell was profoundly wise. He knew that the hero’s journey was the grand blueprint for each human being’s path in life. Our journeys are wild and unpredictable to us despite the pattern of the journey being plainly evident in every novel that we read and in every movie that we see. My own personal journey fits the Campbellian path and led me to the study of heroism.

Studying heroes was not on my to-do list as a young assistant professor at Richmond in the 1980s.  Years ago I was interested not in great people, but in the types of situations that give rise to cooperative behavior in groups. I published a number of studies that examined the conditions under which people placed their group’s welfare ahead of their own individual welfare (e.g., Allison & Messick, 1985, 1990; Samuelson & Allison, 1994).

Not surprisingly, these conditions were hard to find, as people tend to show self-serving biases in their distributions of resources and in their self-assessments of their morals and abilities. I was struck by the ways in which subtle variations in the environment could lead people down the path of either selfishness or selflessness (Allison, McQueen, & Schaerfl, 1992).  It wasn’t quite heroism research but my research did focus on the factors that tend to make people behave badly – or well – in group settings.

Then in 1991, I found myself teaching a “great books” humanities course to first-year students at the University of Richmond. The course was multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural in its emphasis, and it required students to read such books as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Plato’s Symposium, Darwin’s Origin of Species, the Analycts of Confucius, Naguib Mahfouz’s Fountain and Tomb, Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle, and many other great texts from around the globe. What most caught my attention were the two epic stories on the course syllabus: The Epic of Sundiata told by the Malinke people of Africa, and the epic novel Monkey (also known as Journey to the West) written by Wu Cheng’en during China’s Ming dynasty.

These two epic adventures were composed at different points of time in human history, and in different parts of the world, and yet they bore a striking resemblance to the two great western epic stories I had read in high school and in college, namely, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The Epic of Sundiata tells the story of the hero Sundiata Keita, the founder of the Mali Empire.  Born an ugly hunchback, Sundiata was prophesized to become a great ruler of the Mali people.  The existing king felt threatened by this prophecy and thus banished Sundiata from the kingdom, but years later Sundiata returned to defeat the king and establish the great empire.  In Monkey, a brave young pilgrim named Tripitaka must travel to strange faraway places to retrieve sacred information needed to enlighten the entire Chinese people.  Tremendous courage, wisdom, and virtue are needed by Tripitaka to accomplish this objective.

People’s fascination with ancient legendary figures caught my attention.  Nearly every psychological theory I had encountered was centered on people’s fascination with living people, not dead people, and so I sensed an opportunity to study how human beings perceive and evaluate the dead.  This led my colleagues and I to write articles on the death positivity bias – the tendency of people to evaluate the dead more favorably than the living (Allison, Eylon, Beggan, & Bachelder, 2009).  It also led to our discovery of the frozen in time effect – people’s tendency to resist changing their evaluations of the dead even when new information surfaces that challenges that evaluation (Eylon & Allison, 2005).

Then, plain old good luck came my way. In 2005, my dear friend and colleague, George Goethals, who had toiled for decades at Siberia-like Williams College in Massachusetts, decided to move south and join me on the faculty at the University of Richmond. Goethals came with an expertise in leadership and an impressive scholarly record. He and I had collaborated in Santa Barbara back in the mid-1980s while I was a graduate student at the University of California. At that time, Goethals was visiting Santa Barbara while on leave from Williams, and he, David Messick, and I embarked on a collaborative project that, on the surface, would seem to have no connection to heroism at all. We set our sights on understanding self-serving biases in social judgments.

Yet somehow, there was indeed an indirect connection to heroism.  Looking back at our 1980s collaborative work in Santa Barbara, I should have realized that some day Goethals and I would surely write about heroes.  The first paper we published together, along with David Messick, was inspired by one of our heroes, the boxer Muhammad Ali.  We were always fascinated by Ali’s influence and leadership outside the ring, particularly his role in improving race relations in the United States.  Ali was always his own man.  He insisted on being called Muhammad Ali rather than what he referred to as his slave name, Cassius Clay.  At first the media refused to go along.  But as we know from his long boxing career, Ali never quit.  Eventually sports writers and broadcasters recognized that he was right to insist that they call him what he wanted to be called.  He led the way for many, many more African Americans to use names that reflected their pride in their racial identity.  There was no doubt that he was the first, and that he led the way.

As George Goethals and I tried to identify the qualities that made Ali an effective leader to a largely hostile white establishment, we focused on his wit and his obvious linguistic intelligence.  We remembered that when Ali was once asked whether he had deliberately faked a low score on the US Army mental test, so that he could avoid the draft, he mischievously quipped, “I never said I was the smartest, just the greatest” (McNamara, 2009).  That self-characterization led us to research some of the limits on people’s self-serving biases.  The result was our Social Cognition paper,  “On being better but not smarter than other people: The Muhammad Ali effect” (Allison, Messick & Goethals, 1989).

At that point neither of us had turned to studying heroism or leadership or the connections between them.  But we were inching closer in that direction.  After joining the faculty at Richmond in 1987, I continued to conduct work focusing on pro-social behavior in groups, examining the conditions under which people place their group’s well-being ahead of their own individual interests.  Goethals, meanwhile, returned to Williams and was publishing some great work on group goals, social judgment processes, and eventually leadership.

When Goethals was coaxed to join the faculty at Richmond in 2004, he and I renewed our collaboration, this time focusing on the underdog effect – the tendency of people to root for disadvantaged entities in competition.  This research was borne out of our earlier interest in such diverse heroes such as Muhammad Ali, Sundiata, and Odysseus, all of whom somehow overcame the most terrible adversity to achieve greatness.  Goethals and I embarked on a research program exploring people’s love for underdogs (Kim et al., 2008), and this research evolved slowly into work examining triumphant underdogs who became exemplary leaders and heroes.  Our interest in underdogs, Goethals’ scholarship on U.S. Presidents, and my own research on people’s reverence for the dead (Allison et al., 2009), all eventually led to the books and articles on heroes that Goethals and I have written today (Allison & Goethals, 2008, 2011, 2013, in press; Goethals & Allison, 2012).

Our first book on heroes, Heroes: What They Do & Why We Need Them (Allison & Goethals, 2011) addressed the psychology of constructing heroes in our minds as well as the path that great heroes take when they perform their heroic work. Although scholarship on leadership, particularly Howard Gardner’s (1997) Leading Minds, was always important in the way we thought about heroes, our general exploration of the psychology of heroism diverted us from focusing on the connections between leadership and heroism.  Those connections were explored more fully in our review article in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Goethals & Allison, 2012), where Goethals and I proposed a conceptual framework for understanding heroism in terms of the influence that heroes exert.  Heroes, we argued, vary in their depth of influence, their breadth of influence, their duration of influence, and the timing of their influence.

But there was clearly much more to consider.  This became increasingly clear in 2010 when we started to blog about heroes.  Within four years we have written more than 150 hero analyses, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors to the blog.  Exactly 100 of our hero profiles were included in our book on Heroic Leadership (Allison & Goethals, 2013, 2025).  Profiling so many great individuals made it increasingly clear that all of our heroes were also leaders.  They might not fit traditional leader schemas, or people’s implicit theories of leadership, but they were clearly leaders in the sense that Gardner defined it in 1997.  Either directly or indirectly, through face-to-face contact or through their accomplishments, products and performances, heroes influence and lead significant numbers of other people.

While I will leave it to others to assess the significance of my body of work on heroes, I do wish to share two observations about the history of my ongoing research on heroism.  These reflections speak more to the path I have taken in my work than they do to any destination I have reached.  My first observation is that I have benefited from researching the concept of heroism from multiple paradigmatic angles and methodological perspectives.  For over thirty years I’ve looked at selfless behavior using case studies, interviews, surveys, experimentation, dispositional analysis, and contextual approaches. Philosopher William James once wrote that science is best served when scientists not only remain open to fresh perspectives, but actively seek them out. James believed that a single perspective offers but a mere, limited slice of the world (James, 1909/1977).  Adopting multiple scientific perspectives expands what one can observe and thus can learn about a phenomenon (James, 1899/1983b).  I have found this idea to be certainly true in my study of heroism.

My second observation relates to the Joseph Campbell quote that began this essay.  We may think that we can plan how our careers will unfold, but in reality outside forces are always at work that have a far more powerful effect on our professional lives than anything we could ever imagine.  What exactly are these “outside forces”?  They are the influential people, resources, circumstances, luck, and zeitgeist which are forever lurking and shifting around us.  For me, these factors included David Messick’s willingness to serve as my advisor in graduate school, George Goethals’ decision to choose Santa Barbara as the location for his leave in 1985, my choice to work at a small liberal arts school like Richmond which offered that “great books” course, Richmond’s school of leadership offering a position to Goethals in 2004, and many, many more happy chance events.

The serendipitous events that shape our lives are inescapable.  During my career, I have been swept and swayed by these influences and have tried not to fight them but to embrace them.  These ever-present and ever-changing forces underscore the truism that nothing we can plan in life is ever as special as the unintended route we ultimately take.  Dan Gilbert, the eminent social psychologist at Harvard University, was once asked, “What’s the key to success?”  His immediate reply:  “Get lucky.  Accidentally find yourself at the right place at the right time and with the right people.”  The idea here is that while we’d like to think we are the architects of our own destiny, we are more the product of forces beyond our control than we would like to think.   Gilbert later went on to explain this idea more fully in his best-selling book entitled, appropriately enough, Stumbling on Happiness (Gilbert, 2007).

“Serendipity,” wrote scientist Pek van Andel, “is the art of discovering an unsought finding.”  Many unsought events had to come together for George Goethals and me to embark on our exploration of heroes.  The beautiful orchestration of unpursued circumstances led to the books and articles on heroism that we published (Allison & Goethals, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2015; Goethals & Allison, 2012, 2015; Goethals, Allison, Kramer, & Messick, 2015).  The wondrous thing about serendipity is that it has our best interests in mind, as long as we trust it.  We need only remain open to receiving, and capitalizing on, the unexpected gifts and opportunities that sly happenstance throws our way.

References

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.

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2008). Deifying the dead and downtrodden:  Sympathetic figures as inspirational leaders. In C.L. Hoyt, G. R. Goethals, & D. R. Forsyth (Eds.), Leadership at the crossroads: Psychology and leadership. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2011).  Heroes: What They Do and Why We Need Them.  New York: Oxford University Press.

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2013).  Heroic Leadership: An Influence Taxonomy of 100 Exceptional Individuals.  New York: Routledge.

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2015). “Now he belongs to the ages”: The heroic leadership dynamic and deep narratives of greatness. In Goethals, G. R., Allison, S. T., Kramer, R., & Messick, D. (Eds.), Conceptions of leadership: Enduring ideas and emerging insights. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2015). Hero worship: The elevation of the human spirit. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.

Allison, S. T., & Messick, D. M.  (1985).  Effects of experience on performance in a replenishable resource trap.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 943-948.

Allison, S. T., & Messick, D. M.  (1990).  Social decision heuristics and the use of shared resources.  Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 3, 195-204.

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