Category Archives: Commentary and Analysis

Does the Villain’s Journey Mirror the Hero’s Journey?

Commentary and Analysis, ,

By Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals

In an earlier blog post, we outlined the various stages of the hero’s journey in mythology and literature as described in 1949 by Joseph Campbell.  In the prototypical hero story, he or she is called to an adventure, sometimes reluctantly, and is swept into another world fraught with danger.  In this strange world the hero undergoes many tests and trials, gets help from unlikely sources, and is often distracted by a romantic interest.  In the end, the hero overcomes great obstacles, returns home as a person transformed, and is the master of both worlds.  It is a timeless story structure that has assumed countless forms in hero tales across the globe.

But what of the villain?  Nearly every hero story has one, yet far less attention has been devoted to understanding the life story of the prototypical villain in myth and legend.  Do heroes and villains travel along a similar life path?  Or do villains experience a journey that is the inverse of that of the hero?

The answer to the first question appears to be, yes, there are parallels between the lives of heroes and villains.  Christopher Vogler, a noted Hollywood development expert and screenwriter, once wrote that villains are the heroes of their own journeys. Vogler believed that whether a character is working toward achieving great good or great evil, the general pathway is similar.  Both heroes and villains experience a significant trigger event that propels them on their journeys.  Heroes and villains encounter obstacles, receive help from sidekicks, and experience successes and setbacks during their quests.

While we do not disagree with this general parallel structure, we’ve observed that many stories portray villains as following the hero’s life stages in reverse.  We first came across this idea from writing expert Greg Smith, who found an interesting writer’s web discussion board post by an individual going by the username of RemusShepherd.  The idea is compelling:  Whereas heroes complete their journey having attained mastery of their worlds, the story often begins with villains possessing the mastery.  That is, hero stories often start with the villains firmly in power, or at least believing themselves to be superior to others and ready to direct their dark powers toward harming others.

Examples abound.  Consider the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, the shark in Jaws, Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, and Annie Wilkes in Misery.  In these examples, the story begins with the villain securely in power, the master of his or her world.  The heroes of these stories, in contrast, are weak and naive at the outset.  Only after being thrust into the villains’ worlds do these heroes gather the assistance, resources, and wisdom necessary to defeat the villains.

The villain’s story is thus one of declining power while the hero’s story is one of rising power.  But before this pattern is made clear, there must be one or more epic clashes between the hero and villain, with the hero embodying society’s greatest virtues and the villain embodying selfishness and evil.  In defeat, the villain’s mastery is handed over to the hero.  The villain’s deficiencies of character have been exposed; the hero’s deficiencies have been corrected.  The two journeys, one the inverse of the other, are completed.

And so here we see that Vogler and RemusShepherd may both be correct – heroes and villains may follow similar life journeys but these journeys are often staggered in time within the same story structure.  This temporal staggering may create the illusion that heroes and villains follow inverse paths.  Consider the opening act of a typical hero story; the naïve and deficient hero is just beginning his journey while the villain is at the height of his powers.  Movie franchises may later release prequels that reveal how the villain acquired such power in the first place.  In these prequels we witness a villain backstory that parallels the first movie’s portrayal of the hero’s journey.

A fine line often separates heroes from villains, a line that is clearly delineated in their opposing moral ambitions.  But the line can also be blurred when we recognize that all transforming journeys — whether for good or for evil — must share many common storytelling elements.

References

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., & Hensel, A. (2012).  Sensitivity to the changing fortunes of others.  Personality and Social Psychology Connections.

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

 

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Can Dogs be Heroes? The Day A Dog Saved Me

Commentary and Analysis,

By Scott T. Allison

One of the most memorable moments of my life occurred when I was about 10 years old.  At that time, I walked about one mile each day to school – Woodlake Avenue Elementary School, located in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California.   I just googled the school and sure enough, 40 years later, it’s still there.

One morning I was walking to school and was no more than a block away from home when suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, I was startled to see a large, brown, and very angry dog running directly at me at full speed.  I stopped in my tracks, terrified.  The dog rushed at me with fuming growls, snarling teeth, and unmistakable hostility. There was absolutely nowhere for me to run or escape.  No tree to climb, no shelter available.  I was sure that I was about to be ripped to pieces.

When the dog was about ten feet from me, a second astonishing thing happened.

From the right, another dog, a different breed but just as big, appeared.  This second dog also seemed to appear out of nowhere, and it instantly positioned itself between me and the attacking dog.  The second dog snarled and barked at the first dog and did not allow it to harm me.  The two dogs squared off, barking and growling at each other.  Each time the first dog tried to lunge at me, the second one cut it off and sent the attacking animal backwards.

Perhaps 15 seconds passed as I watched in amazement, and relief.  One dog was doing everything it could to save me from another.  I gradually recovered from the shock of the situation and resumed my walk to school, at a quick pace, looking back over my shoulder to see what was happening.  When the first dog attempted to follow me, the second one blocked its path.  The two dogs continued to bark and snarl at each other, and soon their noises faded and they were both out of sight.

One remarkable fact about this incident is that I had never seen either dog before that day.  And I never saw them again afterward.  Where in the world had they come from?  And where did they go?

A skeptic might say that the second dog was not protecting me.  Perhaps I just happened to get caught in the middle of a showdown between the two canine superpowers in the neighborhood.

I’m certain this isn’t the case.  I am absolutely sure that the first dog was directing its anger at me, and me alone.  It had made a bee-line toward me, it made clear eye contact with me, and it’s intention was to do harm to me.  And I am equally certain that the second dog’s sudden intervention surprised the first dog as much as it surprised me.  That big beautiful second dog simply would not allow the first animal to hurt me.  There is no doubt in my mind that second animal arrived on the scene to protect me.

There is one intuitive gut feeling about this incident that I must also share.  And I must confess that while this is a leap of inference from the facts that I have just described, it is a powerful feeling that I can’t dismiss.  As I stood there, amazed that a second dog had arrived to thwart the attack, I could sense an amazing presence of love and goodness in that second dog.  It was doing everything in its power to save me and protect me.  I sensed pure selfless love.

I felt, and still feel, overwhelming gratitude toward this altruistic animal.

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For the past three years, I’ve had Google send me every online story it can find involving a hero saving someone’s life.  Every day I get stories from all over the world.  The vast majority are stories of humans saving humans.  But several times each month, there is a story about a dog saving a human life.  A dog who barks in the night to wake her owner because of smoke in the house.  A dog who drags another injured dog off of busy highway.  A dog who alerts someone when his owner falls unconscious.

Yes, there are cat hero stories, too, but they are far fewer in number.  Dogs seem to be hardwired to love and protect people, and there are numerous stories of dogs saving people.  Some of them are amazing and quite moving.  You can read some of these stories here, and other ones here.

Do you have a story about someone who has saved you?  I’d love to hear about it.  It doesn’t matter to me if the creature saving you was a human being, an animal, a god, or a martian.  I’m interested.

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You can contact Scott Allison at sallison@richmond.edu.

Heroes in the Movies: Five Myths That Need Busting

Commentary and Analysis,

By Scott T. Allison

For the past several months, I’ve been reviewing movies with my good friend Greg Smith at our Reel Heroes website.  Our reviews focus not only on the quality of a movie but also on the quality of the hero and the hero story within the movie.  It’s been great fun, and I’ve gotten a lot out of it, particularly a love for those cookie-dough bites that our local theater sells.

We’ve reviewed about 35 movies and I’m noticing some interesting trends.  Yes, I’ve been going to movies my whole life and have always enjoyed good movies and good hero stories.  But writing these reviews has sensitized me to story details and character analysis.  Whereas I used to sit in the theater, mindlessly munching on popcorn, now I’m sitting there with my cookie-dough bites actually thinking about the various characters, the functions they serve, and whether their actions are consistent with current theory and research on heroes.

So are movie heroes good heroes?

The conclusions I’m reaching are not terribly encouraging.  Granted, it’s the summer blockbuster season and Greg assures me that the movie studios are saving their best films for the fall and winter seasons.  Still, as we watch each movie, I’m asking myself, “Well, that was fun, but didn’t we just see this same movie last week?”  It’s true that the names of the characters are different, and the costumes they’re wearing are different.  But these summer movies are becoming almost interchangeable.

I have no doubt that the makers of Hollywood films are smart people.  The problem isn’t with their intelligence, or with the effort put into film-making.  In fact, the effort is astounding.  There is no shortage of breathtaking scenes and scenery in today’s movies.  The CGI effects are simply jaw-dropping.  And at the end, during the film credits, hundreds and hundreds of people’s names scroll down.  Each film is an amazing collective effort.

The problem, I suspect, is that filmmakers’ goals are somewhat askew.  Instead of aiming to produce great movies with great hero stories, they aim to make movies that make money. Armed with tried-and-true formulae and professional script doctors, movie studios will only invest vast sums of money into films that aim low and then invariably hit that mark.

Movie-makers appear to worship at the altar of five myths about heroes:

1) The bigger the muscles, the better the hero.  Maybe I’m just envious, especially in light of my cookie-dough bite obsession, but Hugh Jackman is now “Huge” Jackman.  Dwayne Johnson isn’t a rock, he’s a continent.  Apparently, heroism doesn’t involve selflessness and self-sacrifice.  It’s more about being able to lift enormous amounts of weight in the gym.  Look how superheroes have evolved into muscle-bound freaks.  Christopher Reeve’s Superman is downright anorexic compared to Henry Cavill’s rendition.

2) The more times a hero fights the villain, the better the hero.  The great comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell, identified a pattern in the structure of the classic hero story from his observation of thousands of ancient hero myths.  Yes, in a good hero story there is a fateful encounter with a villain.  No, these encounters do not need to continue ad infinitum.

3) Heroes’ bones are unbreakable.  In almost every movie, we see heroes surviving several hundred-foot falls, impossibly violent collisions, and fiery bomb blasts.  Movie heroes get clobbered by steel beams, leap off speeding trains, and are punched senseless by bad guys.  Yet they suffer nary a scratch.

4) The longer the story, the better the hero.  Hollywood filmmakers are epic-philes who fail to realize that after two hours, most audiences are done.  Finished.  We don’t need two and a half or three hour-long marathons.  My cookie-dough bites just don’t last that long.

5) Heroes are only male.  Over 90% of the movies we’ve reviewed feature a male hero. The Heat, The Call, and Epic were exceptions to the rule.  Apparently, when the emphasis is on muscles and fighting, women don’t fit the bill.  How sad that the movies industry has virtually blacklisted women from heroic roles.

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Earlier this year, Greg and I watched a delightful movie called Mud that runs only two hours and garnered a meager $20 million at the box office –- chump change compared to the hundreds of millions earned by Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Fast & Furious 6.

None of the characters in Mud has huge muscles. There aren’t endless fight scenes or constant explosions or dramatic falls from great distances.  Instead, we meet a young boy who tries to help a mysterious stranger, and who falls in love with a young girl.  Both of these relationships cause him pain and he is forced to grow emotionally.

This is hardly exciting stuff if you worship at the altar of the five myths above.  But as of mid-July, Mud is the best movie of the year.  The hero of the story does the right thing and discovers his missing inner qualities that help him rise above adversity.

In the movies, we need more Muds and fewer duds.

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Why Scientists Who Study Good and Evil Are Vulnerable To Criticism

Commentary and Analysis, ,

By Scott T. Allison

Roy Baumeister, an eminent professor of psychology at Florida State University, has spent much of his professional life studying the causes of evil.  Last year he published an article in which he lamented a problem with approaching evil from a scientific standpoint: “Social scientists are not supposed to let their values cloud their judgment, because doing so can impede the impartial search for truth,” he said.  Yet when scientists remain impartial about evil, they are often criticized for seeming to condone it.

Scientists who study evil attempt to understand perpetrators’ motives and attitudes, and while doing so, scientists may begin viewing evil actions as less atrocious than how others judge them.  After all, those who commit evil do not regard their actions as evil. And so understanding an evil-doer’s mindset may diminish (even slightly) the scientist’s beliefs about the evilness of the perpetrator’s actions. According to Baumeister, scientists who study evil “carry the moral risk of mitigating their condemnation of some of the worst things that human beings do.”

Baumeister concludes that “if we as social scientists restrict our focus to actions that everyone, including the perpetrator, agrees are evil, we will have almost nothing to study.  It is therefore necessary to define evil as in the eye of the beholder.”  In short, evil must be defined in a way that is “not strongly tethered to objective reality.”

In my studies of heroism, I’ve encountered a similar issue.  There isn’t as much consensus about what defines a hero as one would think.  Most people agree that heroes perform great actions, but one observer’s idea of a great action may be very different from that of another observer.  Just as evil-doers dismiss the idea that they are evil-doers, heroes themselves often dismiss the idea that they are heroes.  As such, my co-author George Goethals and I have adopted a view of heroism that is identical to that of Baumeister’s definition of evil:  It’s in the eye of the beholder.

This definition is very unsatisfying to people who claim to know the objective definition of heroism.  Goethals and I have asked hundreds of people to list their heroes and our position is that it’s not our place, as social scientists, to judge people as “wrong”.  If tennis players report that tennis great Roger Federer is their hero, we are not going to tell them they are mistaken.  If aspiring actresses list Meryl Streep as their hero, we will report it without condemning their judgment.  Our goal is to try to understand their reasoning behind their choices.

Can I, or should I, instruct my daughter about what a hero is from my own personal perspective?  Yes.  In my role as a father, I should probably share my values about heroic action with my child.  But as a social scientist, I just report the results of our surveys and try to make sense of them.  In doing so, I know I open myself up for criticism.

I may believe that athletic prowess is not especially heroic, but that won’t stop me from reporting what people say when asked who their heroes are.  Goethals and I believe that people’s beliefs about heroes, however misguided they may or may not be, are worth studying from a scientific perspective.

People have very different ideas about who society’s heroes are.  My goal isn’t to support or refute their choices, but merely to explain them.  People believe their heroes are either highly moral, highly competent, or both.  Some people believe that heroism requires a lifetime of self-sacrifice; others believe that one self-sacrificing action is sufficient for heroism.  Opinions vary widely.  But we have found some common patterns.  For example, people tend to believe that heroes possess many or all of The Great Eight traits of heroes:  smart, strong, caring, reliable, resilient, selfless, charismatic, and inspiring. 

Here’s some encouraging news for people who don’t like many of the individuals that people list as their heroes:  Goethals and I have found that as people get older, they become more discriminating in their choice of heroes.  People tend to outgrow celebrity  and sports heroes who only show signs of competence but not much morality.  In our 2012 article and in our Heroic Leadership book, we call heroes whom we outgrow transitional heroes.  We’ve found that as people get older, they are less likely to list LeBron James, Roger Federer, or Meryl Streep as heroes. They are more likely to list Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Wesley Autrey, the New York subway hero who threw himself on the train tracks to save the life of a complete stranger.

As a social scientist who should remain objective about my reporting of heroes, I shouldn’t express my opinion about the natural maturation process leading people to place greater weight on morality than on competence when choosing heroes.  But I can’t resist saying I’m glad to hear it.

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Heroes Coming and Going: Our Sensitivity to the Changing Fortunes of Others

Commentary and Analysis

By Scott Allison, Athena Hensel, & George Goethals

People are highly sensitive to changing fortunes. We closely monitor our own changing fortunes, of course, but we also show strong sensitivity to the shifting fortunes of others. We want to know who’s doing better and who’s doing worse than they were before. Is Obama’s approval rating going up or down? Is China’s economy still growing rapidly? Are public schools in decline? Is my friend’s health improving?

We’re drawn to changes in our social environment because they may have implications for our own well-being, or because we find those changes to be a source of drama or entertainment. We are especially dazzled by unexpected changes in fortunes – the triumphs of obscure underdogs and the failures of established powerhouses.

In short, when we witness changing fortunes, we are often witness to either the creation of heroes or the demise of heroes (Allison & Goethals, 2011).

With the NCAA basketball tournament soon reaching a crescendo, conversations at the electronic watercoolers — Facebook and Twitter — are focusing on the changing fortunes of various teams. Ohio University, for example, is this year’s surprise success in the tournament. Earlier the twitterverse exploded with Duke University’s surprising exit at the hands of unheralded Lehigh University.

The labels we assign to teams such as Ohio and Lehigh tend to reflect our observations of their changing fortunes. Historically unsuccessful teams that finally enjoy some success are said to be plucky underdogs, up-and-coming programs, rising upstarts, and Cinderella stories. We seem to have fewer labels for fallen giants. We briefly revel in their misfortune, as befitting our schadenfreudian tendencies, but our focus is usually more on celebrating the unexpected successes of the downtrodden.

Changing fortunes can result in changing categorical labels. Gonzaga University’s sustained success in basketball has expelled them from the category of underdog. Butler University’s back-to-back appearances in the final championship game placed them on a strong trajectory toward top dog status, but the school’s relatively poor year this past season may have put their graduation from underdog standing on hold. Sometimes we just aren’t sure whether a team meets the criteria for underdog status, and when a team is in category limbo we may become especially attentive to cues that will pull them into one grouping or another.

Whereas our categorization of teams into underdog or top dog groups would seem to depend on their history of success, a change in that categorization would appear to depend on the direction that a team is heading and whether the team has sustained that directional change.

Let’s first look at the history variable. No team better fit the underdog prototype than did the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. The Soviet Union had won every gold medal since 1960 and the U.S. was a predictable flop during those years. Stunningly, the 1980 U.S. team defeated the Soviets to win the gold medal, but the Americans had been entrenched underdogs for so long that no one dared to suggest that their change in fortune was anything more than an aberration. The dismal U.S. performance at the subsequent Olympic hockey competitions confirmed their continued status as underdogs.

In some areas of human judgment, the direction of change appears to matter more than one’s absolute position. For example, people are happier when their 3 dollars grows to 5 dollars than when their 8 dollars shrinks to 6 dollars. Similarly, we’re more attracted to people who dislike us but are starting to warm up to us than we are to people who like us but are beginning to criticize us. Sensitivity to direction of change is high in these contexts.

But the direction of change would appear to matter less in our practice of labeling people. Our categorizations of people into underdog and top dog groups are glued tightly in place, especially in the sporting world. Even during lean years, baseball’s New York Yankees are viewed as behemoths. Duke, the UNC Chapel Hill, and Kentucky have enjoyed so many decades of sustained success in basketball that it would take decades of futility for their top dog labels to wear off.

Outside the world of sports, categorical changes are volatile and more permanent. Consider the case of MySpace, which a decade ago was the unquestioned king of social media. MySpace had no rivals and was firmly entrenched as the top dog when Facebook took the social media world by storm and quickly rendered MySpace irrelevant. Almost overnight in the business world, a David can beat a Goliath and there is no question that Goliath will never get up again. Google+ is currently trying, without much success, to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace. If Google+ fails, it will be yet another David we’ll never hear from again.

Other corporate examples abound: In the mobile phone industry, the BlackBerry quickly went from being cool and hip to becoming a dinosaur thanks to the cooler and hipper iPhone. Sometimes top dogs fall, not because of the new top dog on the block, but because several hungry underdogs eat into their business. Crocs shoes – those multicolored rubber clogs – came and went because cheaper knock-offs appeared on the market.

Whereas no one gives MySpace or Blackberry much of a chance of regaining their top dog status, there is always plenty of hope for individual athletes or sports teams to rebound from a downturn. The Pittsburgh Pirates have suffered 19 consecutive losing seasons, the longest streak in North American professional sports history. In a non-sporting business environment the Pirates’ survival prospects would be bleak indeed, but every year brings new hope for the lowly in athletics.

And speaking of hope for the underdog, the story of Jeremy Lin is a fascinating one. Deemed a marginal player from Harvard University, Lin was cut from two NBA teams and was languishing at the end of the New York Knicks bench for a long time before his coach, out of desperation, brought him into a game on February 5, 2012. He stunned everyone by scoring 25 points and leading the Knicks to victory. His greatness on the court continued game after game, and “Linsanity” was born – fans were erupting into a Beatlemania-like frenzy whenever Lin touched the ball.

Not surprisingly, Lin has been unable to sustain his phenomenal level of performance. Linsanity turned into Lin over his head. Perhaps the fragility of underdog success is what makes that success so very special to us. Cinderella may have lived happily ever after, but most sporting underdogs only enjoy the Andy Warhol fifteen minutes of fame before they retreat and ultimately disappear from our radar screens. We revel in their changing fortunes for the better, but we fully expect that change to be an ephemeral one.

The Goliaths of the world attract a peculiar mixture of admiration, envy, and resentment, but those Goliaths give us a sort of comforting stability that we need. Our sensitivity to changing fortunes, and our delight in perceiving those changes, probably depends on people’s stable fortunes remaining the norm in life.

References

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

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The Hero Round Table Conference This November in Michigan

Commentary and Analysis

By Scott T. Allison

This November 9th and 10th, 2013, a one-of-a-kind event will take place — The Hero Round Table Conference, to be held in Flint, Michigan. This is the first interdisciplinary conference on heroism ever held, and it has been masterfully organized by Matt Langdon, founder of the Hero Construction Company.

Matt Langdon (pictured below) has lined up a group of speakers whom he calls “an extraordinary group of experts from the fields of psychology, education, business, sports, philosophy, and entertainment”. Speakers from around the world will be sharing the latest developments on theories, research, and practices of heroism.  And YOU can attend, too!

The star speaker is Dr. Phil Zimbardo, the world famous social psychologist who currently heads up the Heroic Imagination Project.   Yours truly, Dr. Scott Allison of the University of Richmond, will also be speaking, having published two books on heroes and running a blog on real heroes and a blog on ‘reel’ heroes.

In the field of education, speakers will include Zoe Weil, the legendary humane educator, author, and speaker; Christian Long, an international education consultant with experience studying heroism in the classroom; Aaron Donaghy, who transformed the concepts of charity and heroism for students using the GO-effect; and Ann Medlock, who has spent decades discovering and promoting heroes through the Giraffe Heroes Program.

Speakers from the realm of business include George Brymer, author of “Vital Integrities” and “Franciscanomics” and the creator of The Leading from the Heart Workshop; Dr. David Rendall, who shares his freak factor with audiences around the world as a speaker and author; Whitney Johnson, author of Dare to Dream, who suggests tapping into the power of the female hero’s journey; and Doug Knight, a non-profiteer making the connections between heroic action and the non-profit business world.

Additional speakers include Mike Dilbeck, the conference’s keynote speaker, who lays out the steps to heroic action in his everyday heroes presentations to audiences around the country; Jocelyn Stevenson, a star of children’s television and one of the pioneers for educating through television shows; Jeremiah Anthony, who, frustrated with the efforts of professional anti-bullying speakers, changed his school by himself; Pat Solomon, who created the documentary Finding Joe to honor the work of Joseph Campbell; and Dr. Ari Kohen, who teaches heroism at the University of Nebraska and is the host of the podcast, The Hero Report.

Finally, the conference is privileged to have speakers such as Nolan Harrison, who played defense in the NFL for 10 years and now works to help former players as a senior director at the NFL players association; Drew Jacob, professional adventurer, currently making his way from the source of the Mississippi to the mouth of the Amazon River under his own power; and Ethan King, who is changing the world through his project, Charity Ball, which provides soccer balls to kids living in poverty.

There will also be dozens of breakout sessions, featuring Chad Ellsworth from Building Heroes, Andrew Jones from Philosopher’s Stone, Sean Furey from the Hero Support Network, Greg Smith, from Agile Writers and Reel Heroes, Jensen Kyle from Moral Heroes, Elaine Kinsella from the University of Limerick in Ireland.  Students will present posters on their work in the areas of altruism, the bystander effect, personality constructs, and pro-social behavior.

You can attend this great event by visiting the Hero Round Table website.  Please check out the promo video: