{"id":3642,"date":"2014-10-25T12:09:28","date_gmt":"2014-10-25T16:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/?p=3642"},"modified":"2024-07-12T11:48:34","modified_gmt":"2024-07-12T15:48:34","slug":"how-i-came-to-study-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/2014\/10\/25\/how-i-came-to-study-heroes\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Came To Study Heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>By Scott T. Allison<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The famed comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell<\/a> once said, \u201cWe must be willing to get rid of the life we\u2019ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Studying heroes was not on my to-do list as a young assistant professor at Richmond in the 1980s.\u00a0 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\u2019s welfare ahead of their own individual welfare (e.g., Allison & Messick, 1985, 1990; Samuelson & Allison, 1994).<\/p>\n

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).\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t quite heroism research but my research did focus on the factors that tend to make people behave badly \u2013 or well \u2013 in group settings.<\/p>\n

Then in 1991, I found myself teaching a \u201cgreat books\u201d humanities course<\/a> 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\u2019s Romeo and Juliet<\/em>, Plato\u2019s Symposium<\/em>, Darwin\u2019s Origin of Species<\/em>, the Analycts<\/em> of \"\"<\/a>Confucius, Naguib Mahfouz’s Fountain and Tomb<\/em>, Orhan Pamuk\u2019s The White Castle<\/em>, 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<\/a><\/em> told by the Malinke people of Africa, and the epic novel Monkey<\/em> (also known as Journey to the West<\/em>)<\/a> written by Wu Cheng\u2019en during China\u2019s Ming dynasty.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> and the Odyssey<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Epic of Sundiata<\/a><\/em> tells the story of the hero Sundiata Keita, the founder of the Mali Empire.\u00a0 Born an ugly hunchback, Sundiata was prophesized to become a great ruler of the Mali people.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In Monkey<\/em>, a brave young pilgrim named Tripitaka must travel to strange faraway places to retrieve sacred information needed to enlighten the entire Chinese people.\u00a0 Tremendous courage, wisdom, and virtue are needed by Tripitaka to accomplish this objective.<\/p>\n

People\u2019s fascination with ancient legendary figures caught my attention.\u00a0 Nearly every psychological theory I had encountered was centered on people\u2019s fascination with living<\/em> people, not dead people, and so I sensed an opportunity to study how human beings perceive and evaluate the dead.\u00a0 This led my colleagues and I to write articles on the death positivity bias<\/em><\/a> \u2013 the tendency of people to evaluate the dead more favorably than the living (Allison, Eylon, Beggan, & Bachelder, 2009).\u00a0 It also led to our discovery of the frozen in time effect<\/em> <\/a>\u2013 people\u2019s tendency to resist changing their evaluations of the dead even when new information surfaces that challenges that evaluation (Eylon & Allison, 2005).<\/p>\n

Then, plain old good luck came my way. In 2005, my dear friend and colleague, George Goethals<\/a>, 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 \"\"<\/a>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.<\/p>\n

Yet somehow, there was indeed an indirect connection to heroism.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The first paper we published together, along with David Messick, was inspired by one of our heroes, the boxer Muhammad Ali.\u00a0 We were always fascinated by Ali\u2019s influence and leadership outside the ring, particularly his role in improving race relations in the United States.\u00a0 Ali was always his own man.\u00a0 He insisted on being called Muhammad Ali rather than what he referred to as his slave name, Cassius Clay.\u00a0 At first the media refused to go along.\u00a0 But as we know from his long boxing career, Ali never quit.\u00a0 Eventually sports writers and broadcasters recognized that he was right to insist that they call him what he wanted to be called.\u00a0 He led the way for many, many more African Americans to use names that reflected their pride in their racial identity.\u00a0 There was no doubt that he was the first, and that he led the way.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 We remembered that when Ali was once asked whether he had deliberately \"\"<\/a>faked a low score on the US\u00a0Army mental test, so that he could avoid the draft, he mischievously quipped, \u201cI never said I was the smartest, just the greatest\u201d (McNamara, 2009).\u00a0 That self-characterization led us to research some of the limits on people\u2019s self-serving biases.\u00a0 The result was our Social Cognition<\/em> paper,\u00a0 \u201cOn being better but not smarter than other people: The Muhammad Ali effect<\/a>\u201d (Allison, Messick & Goethals, 1989).<\/p>\n

At that point neither of us had turned to studying heroism or leadership or the connections between them.\u00a0 But we were inching closer in that direction.\u00a0 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\u2019s well-being ahead of their own individual interests.\u00a0 Goethals, meanwhile, returned to Williams and was publishing some great work on group goals, social judgment processes, and eventually leadership.<\/p>\n

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<\/em><\/a> \u2013 the tendency of people to root for disadvantaged entities in competition.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Goethals and I embarked on a research program exploring people\u2019s love for underdogs (Kim et al., 2008), and this research evolved slowly into work examining triumphant underdogs who became exemplary leaders and heroes.\u00a0 Our interest in underdogs, Goethals\u2019 scholarship on U.S. Presidents, and my own research on people\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n

Our first book on heroes, Heroes: What They Do & Why We Need Them<\/em><\/a> (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\u2019s (1997) Leading Minds<\/em>, 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.\u00a0 Those connections were explored more fully in our review article in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology<\/em><\/a> (Goethals & Allison, 2012), where Goethals and I proposed a conceptual framework for understanding heroism in terms of the influence<\/em> that heroes exert.\u00a0 Heroes, we argued, vary in their depth<\/em> of influence, their breadth<\/em> of influence, their duration<\/em> of influence, and the timing<\/em> of their influence.<\/p>\n

But there was clearly much more to consider.\u00a0 This became increasingly clear in 2010 when we started to blog about heroes<\/a>.\u00a0 Within four years we have written more than 150 hero analyses, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors to the blog<\/a>.\u00a0 Exactly 100 of our hero profiles were included in our book on Heroic Leadership<\/em><\/a> (Allison & Goethals, 2013, 2025).\u00a0 Profiling so many great individuals made it increasingly clear that all of our heroes were also leaders.\u00a0 They might not fit traditional leader schemas, or people\u2019s implicit theories of leadership, but they were clearly leaders in the sense that Gardner defined it in 1997.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 These reflections speak more to the path I have taken in my work than they do to any destination I have reached.\u00a0 My first observation is that I have benefited from researching the concept of heroism from multiple paradigmatic angles and methodological perspectives.\u00a0 For over thirty years I\u2019ve 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).\u00a0 Adopting multiple scientific perspectives expands what one can observe and thus can learn about a phenomenon (James, 1899\/1983b).\u00a0 I have found this idea to be certainly true in my study of heroism.<\/p>\n

My second observation relates to the Joseph Campbell quote that began this essay. \u00a0We 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.\u00a0 What exactly are these \u201coutside forces\u201d?\u00a0 They are the influential people, resources, circumstances, luck, and zeitgeist which are forever lurking and shifting around us.\u00a0 For me, these factors included David Messick\u2019s willingness to serve as my advisor in graduate school, George Goethals\u2019 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 \u201cgreat books\u201d course, Richmond\u2019s school of leadership offering a position to Goethals in 2004, and many, many more happy chance events.<\/p>\n

The serendipitous events that shape our lives are inescapable.\u00a0 During my career, I have been swept and swayed by these influences and have tried not to fight them but to embrace them.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Dan Gilbert, the eminent social psychologist at Harvard University, was once asked, \u201cWhat\u2019s the key to success?\u201d\u00a0 His immediate reply:\u00a0 \u201cGet lucky.\u00a0 Accidentally find yourself at the right place at the right time and with the right people.\u201d\u00a0 The idea here is that while we\u2019d 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Gilbert later went on to explain this idea more fully in his best-selling book entitled, appropriately enough, Stumbling on Happiness<\/em> (Gilbert, 2007).<\/p>\n

\u201cSerendipity,\u201d wrote scientist Pek van Andel, \u201cis the art of discovering an unsought finding.\u201d\u00a0 Many unsought events had to come together for George Goethals and me to embark on our exploration of heroes.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 The wondrous thing about serendipity is that it has our best interests in mind, as long as we trust it.\u00a0 We need only remain open to receiving, and capitalizing on, the unexpected gifts and opportunities that sly happenstance throws our way.<\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Allison, S. T., Eylon, D., Beggan, J.K., & Bachelder, J. (2009).\u00a0 The demise of leadership: Positivity and negativity in evaluations of dead leaders.\u00a0 The Leadership Quarterly<\/em>, 20<\/em>, 115-129.<\/p>\n

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2008). Deifying the dead and downtrodden:\u00a0 Sympathetic figures as inspirational leaders. In C.L. Hoyt, G. R. Goethals, & D. R. Forsyth (Eds.), Leadership at the crossroads: Psychology and leadership<\/em>. Westport, CT: Praeger.<\/p>\n

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2011).\u00a0 Heroes: What They Do and Why We Need Them.<\/em>\u00a0 New York: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2013).\u00a0 Heroic Leadership: An Influence Taxonomy of 100 Exceptional Individuals<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2015). \u201cNow he belongs to the ages\u201d: The heroic leadership dynamic and deep narratives of greatness. In Goethals, G. R., Allison, S. T., Kramer, R., & Messick, D. (Eds.), Conceptions of leadership:\u00a0Enduring ideas and emerging insights<\/em>. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n

Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2015). Hero worship: The elevation of the human spirit. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Allison, S. T., & Messick, D. M.\u00a0 (1985).\u00a0 Effects of experience on performance in a replenishable resource trap.\u00a0 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49,<\/em> 943-948.<\/p>\n

Allison, S. T., & Messick, D. M.\u00a0 (1990).\u00a0 Social decision heuristics and the use of shared resources.\u00a0 Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 3<\/em>, 195-204.<\/p>\n

Allison, S. T., McQueen, L. R., & Schaerfl, L. M.\u00a0 (1992).\u00a0 Social decision making processes and the equal partitionment of shared resources.\u00a0 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 28<\/em>, 23-42.<\/p>\n

Allison, S. T., Messick, D. M., & Goethals, G. R.\u00a0 (1989).\u00a0 On being better but not smarter than others:\u00a0 The Muhammad Ali effect.\u00a0 Social Cognition, 7, 275-296.<\/p>\n

Eylon, D., & Allison, S. T. (2005).\u00a0 The frozen in time effect in evaluations of the dead.\u00a0 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31,<\/em> 1708-1717.<\/p>\n

Gardner, H. (1997). Leading minds \u2014 An anatomy of leadership<\/em>.\u00a0 Harper & Collins, London.<\/p>\n

Gilbert, D. (2007). Stumbling on happiness<\/em>. New York: Vintage.<\/p>\n

Goethals, G. R. & Allison, S. T. (2012).\u00a0 Making heroes:\u00a0 The construction of courage, competence and virtue.\u00a0 Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 46<\/em>, 183-235.<\/p>\n

Goethals, G. R., & Allison, S. T. (2015). Kings and charisma, Lincoln and leadership: An evolutionary perspective. In Goethals, G. R., Allison, S. T., Kramer, R., & Messick, D. (Eds.), Conceptions of leadership: Enduring ideas and emerging insights<\/em>. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n

Goethals, G. R., Allison, S. T., Kramer, R., & Messick, D. (Eds.) (2015). Conceptions of leadership:\u00a0Enduring ideas and emerging insights<\/em>. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.<\/p>\n

Goethals, G. R., Messick, D. M., & Allison, S. T.\u00a0 (1991).\u00a0 The uniqueness bias:\u00a0 Studies of constructive social comparison.\u00a0 In J. Suls & B. Wills (Eds.), Social Comparison: Contemporary theory and research<\/em> (pp. 149-176).\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Lawrence Erlbaum.<\/p>\n

James, W. (1977). A pluralistic universe. In F. H. Burkahradt, F. Bowers, & I. K. Skrupskelis (Eds.), The works of William James<\/em>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1909)<\/p>\n

James, W. (1983b). What makes a life significant? In F. H. Burkahradt, F. Bowers, & I. K. Skrupskelis (Eds.), The works of William James: Talks to teachers on psychology and to students on some of life\u2019s ideals<\/em> (pp. 150\u2013167). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1899)<\/p>\n

Kim, J., Allison, S. T., Eylon, D., Goethals, G., Markus, M., McGuire, H., & Hindle, S. (2008). Rooting for (and then Abandoning) the Underdog.\u00a0 Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38, <\/em>2550-2573.<\/p>\n

Mackie, D. M., Allison, S. T., Worth, L. T., & Asuncion, A. G. (1992). The impact of outcome biases on counter-stereotypic inferences about groups. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18<\/em>, 44-51.<\/p>\n

McNamara, M. (2009).\u00a0 Muhammad Ali\u2019s new fight: Literacy<\/em>. Retrieved from http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/2100-18563_162-2207050.html<\/a> on June 15, 2012.<\/p>\n

Samuelson, C. D., & Allison, S. T.\u00a0 (1994).\u00a0 Cognitive factors affecting the use of social decision heuristics when sharing resources.\u00a0 Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 58<\/em>, 1-27.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Scott T. Allison The famed comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, \u201cWe must be willing to get rid of the life we\u2019ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.\u201d Campbell was profoundly wise. He knew that the hero’s journey was the grand blueprint for each human being’s path in … Continue reading How I Came To Study Heroes<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1182,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5444],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary-and-analysis"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/phawtM-WK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3642"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5764,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3642\/revisions\/5764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}