By Greg Smith

At Agile Writers we are guided by the principles of storytelling that were exposed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces.   In it, a hero (the central character) has a missing inner quality and must go on a journey to discover that quality and satisfy it.  The hero starts out in his ordinary world where “something happens” that pushes him into some other “special world” where he meets friends and enemies.  He accomplishes some goal and in so doing he fulfills his missing inner quality.

The classic super hero story is often just such a journey.  The hero has some character flaw that is exposed early in the story.  The hero attains a power that throws him into a special world of being “super.”  He spends the next part of the story learning how to master the power.  By the end of the first 30 minutes of the film, our hero has mastered his powers and he has an enemy to overcome.  Meanwhile, we’ve also learned that the hero has a severe inner pain that must be salved.  And we’re off.

Today I’d like to look at three very similar films.  These films depict ordinary people who take up the cause of the super hero and attempt to right the wrongs of society from behind the mask.

In Kick-Ass (2010) we meet young Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) who has all the problems of the typical teenager.  He wants to meet girls, he gets his lunch money stolen by older boys, and he feels powerless in a world of adults.  Dave becomes so tired of being a victim and of watching others play the victim that he dons a green scuba outfit and becomes Kick-Ass the crime fighter.  He confronts the local hoodlums who quickly stab him and throw him under a bus.  Dave undergoes multiple surgeries to reinforce his bones with steel and as a result of his accident he has a reduced sensation to pain.  He befriends other local self-made heroes and takes on the crime syndicate.

In Super  (2010) we’re introduced to Frank Darbo (Rain Wilson) who is a thirty-something short order cook.  He’s done little with his life – so little in fact that the two main events of his life are getting married to his lovely wife (Liv Tyler) and pointing out a thief at a fruit stand.  His recovering addict wife of seven years leaves him for Jacques (Kevin Bacon) who supplies her with drugs.  Frank becomes inspired by watching late night Christian broadcasts depicting a super hero who leads children away from the devil and into a life of righteous living.  Frank decides that he is going to recover his wife by becoming the Crimson Bolt.  He befriends a young girl who clerks at the local comic-book store and together they take on the local drug syndicate.

From Australia comes Griff the Invisible (2010), the story of an ordinary office worker who believes that he has harnessed the power of invisibility.  Griff (Ryan Kwanten) dons a black scuba suit and lurks around at night looking for evil-doers. Along the way he meets a pretty girl who recognizes Griff for his ability to maintain a child-like innocence and sense of wonder.
What these characters have in common is a sense of powerlessness.  They feel so powerless, in fact, that the only way they can overcome it is if they cocoon themselves in garb and mask and change their identities.

Unlike the super heroes of comics and film, they aren’t hiding their identities to protect those they love, but to protect themselves from detection.  Once hidden, they are able to distance themselves from the limitations they feel when they are their ordinary selves.

And that is the message of these films. We each have the capacity to go beyond who and what we are right now.  The things that often hold us down are the preconceptions that we have about ourselves, and the prejudging that others impose upon us.  When these heroes don the mask and cape, they isolate and separate themselves from these limitations.  They are telling us that when we ignore the ties that society uses to bind us, and we unleash ourselves from our self-imposed limitations, we each become super.

Kick-Ass, Super, and Griff all follow super hero patterns that you’ll recognize.  There is an origin story, the definition of the villain, a pretty girl to acquire, a deep disappointment followed by a gathering storm and finally a climactic battle to set things right.  What is different about these films from other super hero films is that in the end, each hero returns to his origin:  ordinary, healed, and newly super.
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This essay is reprinted from Matthew Killorin’s excellent Capes on Film blog.  Greg Smith founded Agile Writers in 2011 with the mission to discover a method for helping beginning writers complete a first-draft novel in 6 months.  The Agile Writer Method is based upon the writings of experts in mythology, screenwriting, and psychology. His seminars on the Agile Writer Method have delighted hundreds of writers, scholars, and university students.  In 2012 Agile Writers completed 12 first draft novels, 5 published novels, and two members of the Workshop have been nominated for the coveted James River Writer Best Unpublished Novel Contest.

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.

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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