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 11^th 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.

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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.

By Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals

When you think of specific heroes, what people come to mind?  In our initial survey of people’s heroes, we would often get two different kinds of answers to this question.  Some people would list the names of their parents, teachers, coaches, and other individuals close to them.  But other people would list the names of some of the classic heroes that every American learns about in school: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and other legendary figures.

Why two different lists?  It turns out that how you word the survey question makes a big difference.  We discovered that when you ask people to “list your heroes,” they list their family members and mentors.  But when you ask people to “list the names of heroes,” they list the more famous, larger-than-life, cultural heroes.  Apparently, we have two separate mental reservoirs of heroes, one that contains the names of people who heroically made a difference in our own personal lives, and another that contains the names of society’s most heroic legends.

You may not be surprised at all by this.  But it caught us off-guard.  We didn’t think that the inclusion of the pronoun “your” in the question would make a difference. But it certainly did.  Our survey respondents appear to be telling us that Gandhi is a hero but not their hero.   We apparently claim ownership of heroes who personally affect us.  They are our heroes.  But we deflect ownership, or perhaps share ownership, of famous heroes who have re-shaped entire societies.

When we first set out to study heroes, we had no idea that there were so many different distinctions and dichotomies that characterize heroes.  This distinction between personal and cultural heroes is the latest, and there have been many others.  Moral heroes versus ability-based heroes.  Global heroes versus specific heroes.  Direct heroes versus indirect heroes.  True heroes versus false heroes.  Split-second heroes versus lifetime heroes.  The list goes on and on, and it is proof that heroism is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon.

Our experience here also illustrates the perils and pitfalls of psychometrics.  Psychologists always must be careful in how they measure responses in a survey.  Sometimes we think we’re measuring one thing but we’re actually measuring something entirely different.  And seemingly minor changes in the wording of a question can often yield very different results.

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By Jesse Schultz

The admiration of heroes is something that comes easy to most. The firefighters and medical personnel who protect your safety and health. The soldiers who defend the borders and protect your way of life. Even the heroics of everyday people who rise to the occasion. Yet ironically, while the picture of a hero is one who defends and protects your well being, we also seem capable to admiring people who, under normal circumstances, would be our enemy.

One of the earliest examples is the legend of King Arthur. In the ancient lore of the British Isles, Arthur was a Briton who defended the island from invading Saxons who had been brought in by King Vortigern. The stories still resonate to this day of a noble and heroic king and his knights fighting a ruthless enemy bent on conquest. Yet this is the irony of the Arthurian myth. A majority of the English who revere King Arthur are in fact descendents of the very Saxons whom he fought.

An even more curious case comes from the time of the Crusades. Starting in 1096 AD Christian Europe started a series of campaigns in an attempt to “liberate” the Holy Land from Muslim domination. It was during their Third Crusade that a Saracen leader by the name of Saladin became known to the West. Born around 1138 Saladin rose to become the Sultan of Egypt, despite being of Kurdish descent, and eventually in 1187 retook the Kingdom of Jerusalem from the Crusaders who had held it since 1099. Usually this would have been enough to insure Saladin’s role as a villain in the West, but instead he came to be looked on fondly by Europe. Tales of his wisdom and compassion seemed to present the picture of a man who lived by the code of chivalry at a time when it was lacking in many European knights. In fact, Saladin came to be more fondly remembered in the West, by the very people he was fighting, than in the Middle East.

Even in modern times there are still examples of individuals who having fought a particular society become celebrities in that very society. On June 25, 1876, a Hunkpapa Sioux chief named Sitting Bull led a combined force of Lakota and Cheyenne against the United States 7th Cavalry at the Little Big Horn river. It was a stunning defeat for the United States and insured that the names of Sitting Bull and Custer would go down through history. Sitting Bull was eventually forced into surrender and later was recruited into Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1884. Less than a decade after Little Big Horn crowds were cheering the man who led the defeat of Custer. After leaving the show Sitting Bull even made a good living selling his autograph. And in later movies he was often portrayed sympathetically.

Why were these men revered by people who under most circumstances should have viewed them as villains? Simple understanding certainly plays some role. Arthur, Saladin, and Sitting Bull were all merely defending their way of life against invaders. It’s hard to criticize anyone for that. But there are likely deeper reasons. An admiration. The myth and romance of the Arthurian tale. The chivalry of Saladin. The underdog victory of Sitting Bull against an overconfident opponent. And perhaps opposing heroes are among the most honest kind of hero. Not people who achieve their notoriety for what they can give us, like protection or conquests. But notoriety for just being who they are.

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The author, Jesse Schultz, has also written entries Merlin: Supporting Hero of Myth and Those Whom We Forget: The Makers of Fire and perversely seeks the admiration of people who don’t like him.