The Nature of Heroism

Heroes permeate our culture, from mythic archetypes and pop-culture superheroes to real-life humans who risk their lives for others. But from where does heroism emerge? Robert and Christian explore the question in this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind Podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey wasn't the stuff to blow your mind?
My name is Robert Lam and my name is Christian Sager.
So a question that I think a lot of us
are asking ourselves right now is who are heroes? Or

(00:25):
maybe that's something that every generation asks him so, but
but especially it just it feels like right now like
people are wondering like, could I be a hero? Who
are my heroes? Uh? What? What is a hero? Like?
What do we even mean when we say that? Right? Yeah,
or don't be a hero? We often yeah, that can
here that that phrase thoughts about every time I'm trying

(00:46):
to stop a bank robbery, somebody tells me, don't be
a hero. Well, this is a It's interesting. This is
something we'll get into because it kind of boils down
the nature of the hero. The hero is an individual
who stands outside of expectation and traditions, social norms, and
we love the hero. But when you start trying to
to boil down exactly what a hero is, even if

(01:10):
you just if you set aside say literary traditions, mythic heroes, etcetera,
and you just try and say in daily life. What
is a hero and what what is heroism? And what
makes a person heroic? It gets tricky. Yeah, It's almost
like the qualities that would make up a hero are
also qualities that we may I guess depending on your culture,

(01:31):
but we may associate with somebody that's kind of a jerk. Yeah,
I mean, it's entirely time dependent. It's entirely culture dependent.
You know, one one culture's heroes and other cultures, um,
you know terrorist one time. And and by time as well.
I mean, some heroes stand the test of time and
last for centuries even millennia. Other times, the heroes here,

(01:55):
uh heroic nature in their heroic reputation doesn't even like
last beyond their own lifetime. Yeah. So when we were
researching for this episode, I found this quote in one
of the papers from Lord Tennyson's poem The Charge of
the Light Brigade, which everybody knows this quote, but maybe
not that that's where it came from. There's is not

(02:16):
to reason why theirs is, but to do and die,
which encapsulates the heroic duty of the soldier, and it
also suggests that the motivation for heroic action doesn't really
come from reason or rationality, right, and so that's part
of what we're going to examine here today is really
looking at We're gonna break down and look at, you know,

(02:38):
what heroes have meant through myth which is something that
Robert and I have covered on the show before. There'll
be a little overlap with our previous episodes on mythology
but also culture. And then there's this fantastic paper that
we read by Franco Blow and Zimbardo Uh that really
breaks down the modern definition of what a hero is

(02:58):
and then empirically studies with a group of people to
try to get their interpretation, and it turns out that
the um what they thought a hero was wasn't what
their study group. Yeah, it's a fascinating paper and we'll
definitely get into it. Uh. Just to to throw this
out though at the beginning, if you're looking for just
quick and easy definitions of heroism, you often see it

(03:21):
summed up as anyone who acts in a pro social
manner despite personal risk. So keep that in mind as
we start rolling through the you know, the mythic, the legendary,
um storytelling, human psychology, all the different avenues that one
might explore um the hero. So as we're doing the
research on this, I found myself thinking back to an

(03:44):
old girlfriend of mine. This is strange, but but she
had she acted like a hero one day, and when
when I was thinking about the definition of it, I thought,
the only person I think in my day to day
life that I've encountered that's been heroic is this woman
that I used to date. Um This one time we
were on a bus and there was a guy sexually

(04:07):
harassing a woman across from us. He was just really
like leering and kind of like purposely sitting next to
her and like rubbing up against her, and the the
woman who was being harassed was traumatized. She was very upset,
but also like very meek and just didn't talk and
was just kind of curling up. And my girlfriend at
the time got up physically went over, uh, confronted the guy,

(04:30):
and then when he stood up, sat down in the
seat and made sure that he didn't continue it. And
she didn't like cause an altercation or anything, but she
just made sure that she that the other woman was
safe and felt like, you know, like she was I
guess protected, and that could have gone any number of
bad ways, right and at the time, and and to

(04:52):
this day. I mean it's been probably twenty years since
this incident. I h I think to myself, why didn't
I do that? I could have done that and I didn't. Um.
And there are situations now, especially like you know, we've
talked about on the show before about how there's a
rise in bullying right now, where I think to myself, like,
I need I need to be the person who does

(05:13):
that if something like that happens again in in my
you know, uh, immediate circle, you know, in my presence
in public or whatever. Uh. And I hope that I can.
But I was just I that was one of the
few moments I was just it was remarkable to me
because you know, that guy could have like, I don't know,
you could have been crazy. He could have like gone
off and like punched my ex girlfriend in the head

(05:34):
or something like that or whatever. Um. But it worked
out in the end, and it it sort of falls
along that description that you gave. You know, she was
pro social, uh, and she did it despite any person
or risk that she might have faced herself. Yeah. And
in a hero acts, that's one of the key things now,
the nature of that act, the level of the risk,

(05:54):
then the nature of the risk may vary, but at
hero acts, hero actually does the thing that they're thinking about, Uh,
you know, and isn't just looking back and saying, hey,
that event that occurred two hours ago, if I'd done this,
that or the other, maybe I could have I could
have helped. Yeah, exactly, And so I think that's maybe
maybe this is just me, but I think that's what

(06:14):
a lot of us are coming back to now, is
that the rise in bullying, thinking about that and then
thinking would I act heroic in in the case of
something like that happening in front of me. Now, that,
of course is only one minute example of heroism. Uh,
We're going to go through and and really break it down,

(06:36):
especially with that article by Franco Blow and Zimbardo. I
mean they break it down to was like ten or
twelve Yeah, various types of heroism. And so as you're listening,
maybe think to yourself, Okay, so does this apply to
me or do I agree with this? Is that what
my definition of a hero is? Yeah? Yeah, definitely definitely
keep all this in mind your own personal take as

(06:58):
we move forward. So I think the first place to
start here is to start with the mythic, especially since
these mythic ideas of of of heroism are often the
models that we kind of draw from you and maybe
not like literally, you know, if you're on the bus
and somebody's uh, you know, acting weird, you're not thinking

(07:21):
I am going to be Hercules, right, Hercules was the
immediate when I went to That's like the prototype, and
he'll he'll definitely come up here there. But of course
there are various forms of mythic heroes. Uh. Two distinct
forms that emerge, particularly in Eastern traditions but with the
parallels and other traditions is the conquering, dominant hero, which

(07:41):
you know Hercules, and then the opposite, the noble, failed hero.
So sometimes you slay the dragon and sometimes the dragon
slays you. Right, it's true in life, it's true in
myth So you can you can have a hero who
who tries to get something done and fails, but there's
still a hero. Yeah, And this is where it connects
back to episodes that Robert and I have previously done

(08:02):
on mythology. So if you've heard those episodes, some of
this might sound familiar to you, but we're really going
to focus in on the hero aspect here. So as
a reminder. You know, mythology informs culture, and the arctypical
hero is this character that serves a purpose in that
it's a it's a it's a symbol. There I are
ideal person, right um. But it's also worth noting these

(08:23):
were the traits that we've associated with heroes, I'd say
up until maybe the last twenty or thirty years, maybe
maybe even sooner, I don't know. Uh. Their mail first
of all, almost always male courage leadership, they have noble sentiments,
they are willing to do self sacrifice, they're brave and strong. Usually, uh,

(08:46):
heroes are divine or of some kind of royal ancestry,
and they had great physical prowess. Think uh, Luke Skywalker, right, Like,
Luke Skywalker seems like he's just some schmuck kid from
a fall arm. But it turns out that he's got
this divine ancestry, that his father is, you know this
a great warrior, and that he's inherited his abilities and

(09:09):
so he's got all these amazing powers. There's your physical prowess,
right um. And that's not a coincidence. By the way,
as we'll get into George Lucas is pretty heavy in
the hero mythology camp. But these heroes always have a mission. Uh.
It's usually some kind of quest where they have to
face great danger and perform some kind of amazing feats.

(09:29):
They're usually warriors. Uh. And that's why, until relatively recently,
our heroes have always been our protagonists to right, yeah, now,
and now, it's worth pointing out here that when we
think about our heroes, we often think about all the
heroes acting for the greater good. But even in our
mythic traditions, you see heroes that are motivated by yeah, ideals,

(09:50):
by nobility, by patriotism or nationalism. But you also see
them motivated by revenge, by pride, by the spirit of
military conflict or just or violence, if you will. So so,
even in the mythic traditions, that they're not always completely
pure in their intentions intentions, right, yeah, I think it
depends on the cultural context that they're within. Right that, Like,

(10:12):
maybe revenge is something that's valued in a culture at
a particular historical moment um. But the thing to remember
about these hero myths is that they're universal. It's really easy,
right now, like to let's say, like watch a bunch
of trailers for movies that are coming out next year,
and you see, I don't know, Spider Man or Transformers
are Fast and the Furious Aid and you go, oh,

(10:34):
these all look silly, These like bubblegum candy Rapper. Uh,
I candy movies. That's I don't know where candy Rapper
came from. Uh, But uh, they're all like following this
tradition of the heroic myth, right right, and if and
if you watch enough of them, especially a lot of
the superhero movies that come out, they follow the exact
same pattern. It's the exact same character with a slightly

(10:56):
different costume, different powers, maybe a slightly different world, but
it's basically the same story because it's a universal thing.
It's it's a human trait, this idea of the hero uh.
And the values of the heroes almost always prize individuality,
which is pretty interesting. Uh. And there's some theories that

(11:18):
the hero myth may have actually provided us, meaning human beings,
with a behavioral model that leads to cohesion and stability
in our societies, especially when we're undergoing conflict and change.
So it's interesting, like when you're when you're in a
period of time where it feels like there's a lot
of change happening. You know, look to your pop culture,

(11:41):
like how are the heroes being represented are they Are
they modeling some kind of behavior that's supposed to make,
I don't know, comfort us as we get through it,
you know. Um, which leads us to our two big
scholars of myth. Do you wanna talk about them now? Yeah? Yeah,
let's go ahead and and hit our Campbell and you. Okay,
so we've we've talked about these guys in the show before,

(12:02):
and we're not going to dive too deep into him
today because we've got a lot to talk about with heroes.
But there are two major scholars that are often cited.
In fact, the Encyclopedia entry on heroism includes both these guys.
Joseph Campbell, who is known as the author of The
Hero with a Thousand Faces. This is a book that
came out in ninete. It is infamously influenced George Lucas

(12:24):
and I would say probably half or more of Hollywood screenwriters. Um.
Campbell's big claim to boil it down was that he
pinpointed the common characteristics of hero myths from across the world,
and he had this formula. I'm not gonna go through
the whole thing today. You can look it up online,
but it has seventeen stages and he it basically breaks

(12:45):
down like this um. The hero leaves his normal life
behind in order to undertake a quest that leads to
a problem. The hero faces a series of challenges from
which lessons are learned, uh, and then they usually receive aid.
It can be from a human help or a non
human helper. So there's like there's already a room in
there for fantastical elements. And then finally the hero finds

(13:08):
the solution to this problem and they return to society
with it. I think this is important to keep in
mind for later discussions because this, this narrative arc is
essentially heroes. Normal hero steps out and does something, heroic
hero steps back into normal life. Yeah, definitely. And so
you can this formula. You can say, you can look
at it one of two ways. One is that like

(13:30):
our storytelling traditions have always used this formula, which is
Campbell's argument, or you can look at it as Campbell
influenced an entire generation of storytellers, and therefore our pop
culture for the last fifty some odd years has incorporated
versions of this formula throughout it, Right, I think about
Community a lot when Campbell comes up. Now, do you

(13:53):
do you know about this? Like, oh yeah, yeah Harmon,
you said this a bit, yeah, Dan Harmon has this fast, anating,
uh like method of breaking down his narrative. And there's
some really great articles out there online that examine it.
It's not exactly what Campbell does, basically the same thing.
Like every episode of Community boils down to this, and

(14:14):
that's a thirty minute sitcom. But then so does Star Wars,
or so does the entire Star Wars trilogy. Right, like
you can. This is like an old professor of mine
used to call it the make it fits model, Like
it's the kind of academia where you take the model
and you just lay it on top of something. You go,
it fits, therefore it's confirmed. Right. But there's some examples.

(14:36):
I think some of the more interesting examples of pop
culture are when we deviate from that formula. Yeah, I mean,
you know there's gonna be a certain amount of confirmation
bias and looking at that when you lay the certainly
one for us. But but it's it's interesting to point
it out here because it's the it's kind of like
our relationship with the mythic We look to that as

(14:57):
the model. We look to that, and we try and
see reflection of our own life or what our own
life could be in the character, but also in the
story and the way that it is story shaped in
a way that life is almost never story ship exactly right.
Our life never fits this formula. I mean, I can't
think of a way to look back on the events
of my life for the last thirty nine years and

(15:19):
lay down Campbell's formula over any period of time where
it lines up with this perfectly. And yet he argues,
and Young also argues that this is kind of a
universal human thing. Now Young's thing. Young was a psychoanalyst
whose main theory was that archetypes reappear in the collective
unconscious and that this is something that all human societies share.

(15:41):
If you go back to our Mythology episode, we dive
pretty deep into this. Young saw this as this kind
of like ancient universal mind that was common to all humans,
like like an ancestral memory. And this explained to him
why we had all these same archetypes across different cultures
that had never even met before. And the hero was
one of the most prominent ones for him if you

(16:02):
go and you look at his how all of his
archetypes breakdown. Hero is a pretty big one in there.
But Robert, you have a pretty big question that I
think is worth revisiting throughout this episode, which is mythic heroes,
any kind of heroes in the modern sense, do they
fit this? Yeah? I think that's a That's the question

(16:23):
I've been trying to ask myself about a number of
these are they you know, we we can look at
at hercules, we can look at some of these other models,
and do they line up with what we think of
is a is a hero today? Yeah? I mean, like
I think of and we'll get to this later, but
I think of like my current heroes, and they don't

(16:45):
they don't really line up with that archetype. Well, let's
let's talk about that. Let's go ahead and talk about
like personal heroes. And everybody I'm sure has their own
list and they can you know, you can share them
with it with us if you want. Yeah, But I
was trying to think, who are the individuals that I
easily go to as heroes, not individuals who like if
I had to say, who are the greatest heroes are

(17:06):
modern times, who's the who's the greatest hero in the
you know, the the history of this country or whatever,
but just personal heroes like I would think, okay, Hunter S. Thompson, Um,
I would say Scott Simon, the NPR reporter, and I
would probably go Stephen King or maybe Brian McNaughton. And

(17:27):
each of these individuals like stands for something a little different, uh,
you know, you know, in my own attempt to figure
out like what I am and who I am? Um,
Like Hunter S. Thompson is a figure that like showed
me that, oh you can you can find this. Uh,
you can you can sort of make your own path
in the world and uh, and you can use writing

(17:47):
and and you can you can still have this free spirit. Uh.
Stephen King, of course is the the the the ultimate
uh mythological modern writer figure for anyone who ever picks
up a in and uh. And Scott Simon is a
guy who more recently was kind of became kind of
a hero to me when I was going through when
my wife and I were going through adoption process, and

(18:10):
I saw, oh, here's a because here's a you know,
he's a very rational guy and he's he's engaged in
the same life journey that I'm about to go down. Yeah,
he provided a model for you to sort of normalize
the process that that was probably scary. Yeah, and you know,
and and certainly he's he's a guy that I wouldn't
have put on the personal hero list prior to that experience. Yeah. Yeah,

(18:33):
it's well, we share Stephen King on this. Yeah, it's
hard not to not to share that one. Well, you know,
and it's it's weird. I I think a lot about this,
especially you know, you and I both right outside of
doing the podcast as well, we right fiction, we're right
horror fiction. But um, I think my argument for people
like Stephen King and and other people like I've mentioned,

(18:55):
you and I both talked about Grant Morrison on the show,
I think I think of him as a hero on
the guy I think of is Ian Mackay from Fugazi.
Really these people, and I know this sounds strange, but
they they modeled and influenced my life. And I don't
think that's what we mean by heroism, especially when we
go back to these definitions and and and when we

(19:17):
talk further about the academic definitions of it. But yeah,
because any of these lists. If I have to say,
what did Hunt Thompson do that was heroic? What did
Stephen King do that was heroic? I mean there and
there's their particular cases. With all these individuals who can
make you could make a case for for for heroism.
But I'm not sure it's the kind of any of
them that would make the list of examples of everyday heroism,

(19:40):
you know, unless there's something that I'm forgetting one of
their timeline. Well, I wrote an article about Stephen King
a couple of years ago, um, sort of celebrating him
as my hero. And the thing that I hit upon
that there's some academic literature on is that he has
had an influence on people learning to read at an
early age. And that was definitely the case for me.

(20:01):
I mean I started reading his novels when I was
five years old, and a lot of people would say
that's way too young, but I think that is way yeah.
And I saw the shining for the first time when
I was five years old too. Um. But it I
have to say, like Stephen King always like helped, I

(20:23):
don't know, teach me the moral complexities of the world.
As I was growing up in a way that like,
frankly I didn't get from my parents. Um, and that's
for better or for worse, right, Like, yeah, I also
maybe a little bit screwed up because I saw an
elevator filled with blood when I was five years old,
you know. Um. But it's also weird to reconcile this,
especially this hero idea, because let's be honest, the man

(20:46):
that Stephen King was in the eighties when I was
growing up and reading his stuff wasn't anything close to
a hero. He was an addict who was abusive, He
took risks. I think I've told this story on this
show before. Reportedly, the cinematographer on the set of Maximum
Overdrive lost vision and his one of his eyes. There
was apparently an accident. Maximum Motor Drive, of course, is

(21:10):
based on a short story and it is about machines
come into life and running amuck. One of the remote
control lawnmowers allegedly went out of control. Yeah and uh,
and there was like wood splinter situation and this resulted
in a big lawsuit. Uh. The Italian cinematographer whose name
eludes me. Yeah, they ended up settling out of court.
But yeah, there's a big stink. So it's like there's

(21:32):
some cognitive dissonance there where it's like, well, this guy
was a hero to me. You know, I learned so
much from his books growing up, and I and I
want to write. I want to have the same effect
with my writing as he did on me. But then
I'm like, well, he also cost a guy in his eye,
you know. Or maybe allegedly there by the way, there's
apparently a script out there on the Blacklist about the

(21:54):
making of Maximum overdri that right. Oh, I would die
to see that. Um. What's even weirder is I can
think of people who actually meet the hero's status, but
they're not the people who meet my list. Like the
first person I think of when I think, well, who's
the hero, John Lewis, our congressman. I think of him

(22:15):
as a hero civil rights icon. Yeah, and he absolutely
did the pro social stuff and put his personal, uh
life in danger at risk. He took he took a
lot of risks, but he's not who I immediately think
of because he didn't influence my life. That's probably because
I'm a privileged white guy, you know. Um, so I
turned to Stephen King instead. Maybe maybe for other people,

(22:38):
maybe it's like family members in their lives who I
don't know, um, served in the military or where firefighters
or something like that. Um. But that I guess that
tells you a little bit about us, that like our
heroes are writers. Yeah, and when we pick and choose
why we like them. You know, we can all think
of any any number of personal heroes that had severe problems,
problems that we don't actually want to reflect in our lives.

(23:01):
But I don't know, sometimes the fault to make them
attractive in a way like it's they're they're human. These
are human individuals who, yeah, there was all this other
stuff that did not work in their life, but some
of these things did and maybe I can pattern my
successes after their successes. So what about the cultural hero,
which is a little different from the mythic hero, right,

(23:23):
and that it's it's uh, I guess, like glued to
a specific time and place, Yeah, and often sort of
used to summarize, uh, certain points in the timeline of
a culture. Uh. So some of the examples that come
to mind, you have you have the Savior, an example
in the Chinese myth that has come up before in
our episode on Great Floods. You the Great who was

(23:46):
able to solve the Great Flood and Shinea by figuring
out how to do you know, proper um canal systems
and water management. You have culture bears. These are the
you know, the the individuals who who bring some sort
of God Pilford knowledge to the people. And in Chinese
tradition you have the fire drill or a sue gin.

(24:06):
So it's fire. Yeah, I mean that's the Promethean thing,
you know. Uh. Then of course there's the warrior. Achilles
is a great example of this, and then there's the founder,
and a reasonable example here would be Romulus and Remus.
You know, their mythological figures that really kick it off.
Either either they're the first people or they're the you know,

(24:27):
the first of a of a new culture, a new race, etcetera.
Have you ever been to Rome, Georgia? Um, yes, I'm
not remembering any of it, but I'm pretty sure i've
been through it. So Rome's I don't know what, like
maybe thirty or forty minutes north of Atlanta where we're at. Uh.
It has a big statue of it's Romulus and Remus

(24:48):
right weened off of have been to Rome in the
town of Rome, Georgia, there's this giant statue of them,
and you know it's it's a it's a weird thing
because you see that and you're kind of like, well,
that's that's kind of gross, a weird thing. Infants nursing
from a wolf. Yeah, but I think it's supposed to
represent what you're just talking about, this the idea of
founding civilization. But but at the same time, George, this

(25:10):
weird kind of like beast reality thing going on. Yeah. Um, yeah,
it's strange, and I think it's important to work out
here too. And this is definitely like if anybody who's
listened to the show or any other shows that I've
been on before, there's an area of study I'm really
interested in. Our heroes have impact on culture through the

(25:33):
creation of stories, whether it's literature, movies or comic books
or whatever you're consuming, right, and we repeat popular legends
from centuries ago while creating new ones that basically adhere
to the same model. Like when you brought up Hercules
at the beginning of the episode, the first thing that
popped in my mind was that like awful Hercules movie
with the rock that came out like two years ago,

(25:54):
and I was like, man, We're just gonna keep going
back to that well over and over again, you know,
and it makes sense. Uh, And if Hercules doesn't work
out and that I P is a little bit dirty
for a while, then we'll create something new, or we'll
do Spider Man or Batman or whatever. And today's cultural
heroes they might represent some slightly different values, right than

(26:17):
the ones that we already attributed to uh, previous mythic heroes.
Like there's this interior journey of self discovery and growth
that we see now in heroes. And sometimes they're unwilling actors, right,
they're not performing these deeds of heroism of their own volition.
Sometimes their rebels, right, we're what we're like a week
out from Rogue One coming out, and uh, that clearly

(26:40):
is a movie that's all about rebellion. There's already been
uh what like some commentary from I believe the Trump
campaign saying that they think that the movie had rewrites.
That was heard about that they've come out as anti
Star Wars, and I don't think that the campaign itself has.
But there's something going on on Twitter with a hashtag

(27:01):
this is how I sound old. There's a hashtag and
these kids no, um that you know, our colleague Collie
Fry would know exactly what this is. But apparently there's
been some accusation that Rogue One was rewritten as a
criticism of a Trump presidency. And uh, most people are saying, well,
all the Star Wars movies are essentially about rebellion. Uh so, well,

(27:25):
and just art is going to criticize the the status quo.
Art is going to criticize whatever the system is in place.
And that's the way it's always been. It's not gonna
not gonna stop. If you try and stop it, you're
just going to create a new model to for for
that everyone's gonna criticize. Well, yeah, exactly, and that's kind
of what's been going on probably since people first started

(27:46):
telling stories. Right, that's all right, that's storytelling. Um. And
then the other aspect of this as well that's different
is that our heroes cannot be female. They're not always male.
Case in point, Rogue one again is coming out in
the stars female. The last Star Wars movie had a
female star. There's pushback against that because it's like, uh,
it's it's shifting this cultural identity of what we come

(28:06):
to expect from heroism. And then again, it's not to
say that there are not female heroes in older traditions,
not at they have been predominantly male. And in our
cinematic traditions, you have seen predominantly male heroes. Yeah, so
real quick, I just want to touch on this thing
that I've mentioned on the show before. It's a it's
a theory about heroic myth that I find really intriguing, uh,

(28:29):
and it's related to work I've done in the past.
It's called the Captain America complex, or the other term
for it is the American Mono myth, and it was
written up by two academics named Robert Jewett and John
Shelton Lawrence, and basically their idea was that Captain America,
the character which we now I think no popularized Chris
Evans playing him in the movies, but he's from comic

(28:49):
books going back seventy almost eighty years. Um. He defines
this new version of a hero that we've fallen in
love with, which is an anti democratic fantasy, as they
describe it, where a superpowered every man save society by
stepping outside of institutions to violently punish enemies. And if

(29:11):
you think about it like a lot of our uh,
most popular heroes from the last couple of years in
TV or film or novels or whatever kind of line
up with that, right, Like they may be a cop,
but they have to go outside of the system to
do the right thing or something like that. So there's
a that and that always and that tends to do

(29:31):
work for them, whereas generally the actual situation is we
have systems for reason because you're not perfect, but they
more or less work absolutely and and and yet at
the same time, there's this constant cultural push against those institutions. Uh.
In fact, I mean it permeates our media and our
political language. Look at the look at the presidential election

(29:53):
from the last year. I mean the language that really
resonated both for people like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump
was very much in the Captain America complex of that,
you know, they have to step outside of the institutions
in order to reform it um. And so Captain America
is also I mean, he's essentially a time travel right,

(30:15):
I mean, he's Flosen from a different age, so he
is he is stepping outside of his own time exactly. Yeah,
And that's that's always the argument within the text is
that like, well, because he has the values of the
greatest generation, he's able to see what we cannot, uh,
that we're like betraying, you know, what is essentially good
and so uh think about like the Winter Soldier movie

(30:36):
with him right, like he immediately breaks away from the
government in order to do the right thing and uncovers
this grand conspiracy that's going on, you know. Um, So
it's interesting. I think there's something to this, and there's
not a lot in the literature other than what these
guys have done on this in terms of heroism. But
but as we're going through talking about what is a

(30:57):
hero today, I think let's keep that in too, you know. Uh,
these symbols especially, I'm really interested to see what happens
with the Captain America hero symbol over the next couple
of years, Like what does how does he change? How
does he represent what's going on with us as a
people as as a symbol. I'm really curious too about

(31:19):
Like I'm often more interested in villains than heroes. I
think villains can do the same thing as what we're
talking about here, sort of defining values. So I'm curious
to see what happens with that. Well, how many how
many evil comic book characters have we had, say, service
president the United States? I know, likely your Red Skull,
both prime examples, both, especially Red Skull. It's hard for

(31:42):
me to imagine how he got elected. I think he
was in disguise at the time or something like that.
But um, from the work that I've done on Captain America,
here's a here's a funny anecdote from the seventies, this
great run on Captain America by a guy named Steve Engelhardt,
and uh, there's this massive conspiracy going on within the government.
Mint this is pre Watergate, mind you. Okay, Nixon is

(32:04):
the president at the time that these comic books are
coming out, and Captain America chases the lead all the
way to the top, and he ends up at the
Oval Office and it's revealed that the President of the
United States of America is the one who's in charge
of this fascist, uh secret society that's trying to take
control of the world. And you don't see Nixon's face
in the comic book, but he pulls a gun out

(32:26):
of the desk in the Oval Office and blows his
brains out. That's in the nineteen seventies before I was
born Captain America comic books and it's pretty heavy stuff,
you know. Um, But yeah, you're right, how many? How
many villains become the president? I mean I didn't really
watch a lot of twenty four, but wasn't a lot
of twenty four about that? Like is the president a

(32:47):
good guy? Is he not? Can we save him? Should
we save him? Stuff like that. Yeah. I never watched
twenty four either, but I know Homeland got into similar territory,
right there was like the vice president with evil or something. Yeah,
maybe that's what it was in twenty four as well. Okay,
I mean basically, when we're talking about myths and heroes,
the the evil ruler, the evil king is also an
idea that is as old as as time. Yeah. Absolutely.

(33:10):
On that note, we're gonna take a quick break and
when we come back, we're going to get into acts
of heroism. Heroism like the kind of heroism you see
on the subway, the kind of heroism that you might
feel yourself drawn to on a daily basis. So there's

(33:32):
one really great paper that Robert and I looked to
for a lot of what we're going to talk about next.
It's by Zeno E. Franco, Kathy Blow, and Philip G's
Embardo and it's called heroism, a conceptual analysis in differentiation
between heroic action and altruism came out inn and was
published in General Psychology. And it's basically an empirical study

(33:58):
of what we mean when we say here row uh.
And they find some interesting paradoxes within this taxonomy. They
basically locate like subtypes of heroes. And then they, like
I mentioned at the top, sit down and survey an
audience about what they think about this taxonomy, and they
find some paradox is in it. Uh. And it's it's fascinating. Yeah,

(34:19):
it's a great read. We'll try and include a link
to it on the landing page for this episode is
stuff to blow your mind dot com. But just just
begin to break it down a little bit. They presented
the following guidelines for for heroics. So, first of all,
the concept of heroism is a way to unify several
types of courageous or brave actions that have largely been
treated independently in the literature to date. Okay, yeah, and

(34:43):
this is seen as you know, heroism is seen by
many as that's the apex of human behavior, right, Like,
we think of it as something that's reserved only for
an elect few people who have like special skills or
something like that, and yet anybody could technically be a hero. Yeah,
you did. Come back to the comic book example, or
just sort of the fictional example. How many movies, how

(35:07):
many comic books? Uh, feature a story in which a
single character saves the world? Yeah? Absolutely? How many times
does that happened in the history of the human race? Uh,
we just don't know, Robert, because they're so humble about it. Yeah, well,
but you see what I mean if there's never I'm
not saying they're not threats that big, but life is

(35:30):
not so simple that it works that way. Okay. So
other things that they that that does Embardo and his
crew pull out in this study. They say that the
simple presence of risk accompanying pro social behavior is not
enough to define heroism. So just because you did something
to help people and there was a risk involved, that

(35:50):
doesn't necessarily mean you're a hero. Yeah, Okay, that's important
to keep in mind as we transition into thinking about
the differences between altruism and heroes. Right. Also, they say
heroism is viewed as distinct from other pro social activities
such as compassion and altruism, and that this may represent
an entirely different behavior, you know, onto itself. Because yeah,

(36:13):
just being compassionate about somebody, I mean that's great, that's important.
That doesn't mean your hero doing something pro social. Like
so you make an anonymous donation to a really good charity,
your nonprofit, that's great, But were you a hero? Uh No.
It makes me think of like the rhetoric from a
couple of years ago when we started calling certain politicians
compassionate conservatives, and now like I wonder, like if there's

(36:36):
a point where we'll like label politics is heroic, Like
you're heroic liberal something like that. Yeah, I mean compassion heroism. Yeah,
it's kind of two separate whatever it works to sell it. Yeah, Yeah,
that's that's all. The the the the the positive descriptive
terms are always going to be co opted, right. Another

(36:56):
statement the Simbardo and company make, while heroism is primarily
a positive and pro social act, a simplistic view of
this behavior, this is important and sometimes negative aspects of
the phenomenon. Yeah, so this is this should be noted
like what we mentioned earlier. Uh, one person's hero could
be another person's villain, right, So take suicide bombers for example.

(37:17):
And like I said earlier, this is this is really
what interests me more is what defines our villains. I
think that it really gets to the bottom of what
our culture values when we we can pinpoint, you know,
like look next year at all the you know, Fast
and the Furious that all these like big budget crazy
movies that I mentioned earlier, Like who are the villains

(37:38):
in those? What do they represent? Does that does that
stand in for what we all actually believe? Yeah? Indeed,
now in this um, in this paper, they drive home
the idea that the heroism demands noble purpose, which of
course is subjective, it's time sensitive, and that the hero
must transcend fear so they're not fearless. Uh. You know,

(37:59):
certainly have these examples of mythic heroes and they're they're fearless,
man without fear, etcetera. But that the idea here's they're
driven by such noble purpose as to push through the
force field of fear that what otherwise hold them back? Yeah,
there's a point in the paper they they say, you know,
this is contrary to the myth Most people are capable

(38:20):
of heroism regardless of whether they're fearless or not under
the right conditions. In Zimbardo and his his cohorts actually
referred to this as the banality of heroism, which I
really like because it's a it's a purposeful antonym of
Hannah Arrant's finality of evil, that phrase that she came
up with when she was examining Nazi war criminals on
trial in Jerusalem. And it's just interesting to think about

(38:43):
that that we think of it being an extraordinary thing,
but maybe it's not. Maybe it's just something we're all
we've all got. It makes me think, So Superman most
pretty much indestructible, right, sure? Is it? Is he a
hero if he's indestructible and he saves somebody from a
burning building, Like they're not like you were going to
burn up Superman, you were gonna You're you're gonna mess

(39:04):
up your costume. Maybe that definitely plays with the risk
assessment part there. Yeah, it would be interesting to take
their formula and apply it to various like heroes of
pop culture and see how they line up. All Right,
so we have the hero go pushing through that force
field of fear. So hero has to break psychological barriers
to carry out their acts, such as the bystander effect.

(39:27):
By what and this is the effect that uh that
we've covered on the show before in the past. This
is where everyone just stands there watching the horror or
the misfortune happen. Um. Think of like car crash on
the highway and everybody just slows down and drives and
watches it. Yeah, or something. You say, You're on a
train and somebody is acting out, somebody's acting a little

(39:48):
bit threatening, and everyone's kind of frozen because who's gonna act?
What's the social contract here? There's a great bit I
always come back to from the TV show Louis where
I believe he's walking with walking with his daughter her
or a younger person. I think maybe it's his daughter.
And there is a that there's like a homeless person
with you know, begging for for for money, for food,

(40:09):
for anything. Uh, there by the subway entrance and the
other the person as Louie, who is that what should
do they need our help? Should we do something? And
he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, he really needs our help.
He needs to help more than more than anybody on earth. Uh.
But we just we just ignore him, that's what we do.
So and then we also have normalcy bias uh and

(40:32):
also psychogenic death. So this is these two uh situations.
These sort of summarize this temptation to freeze up or
just continue doing what you're doing even though everything is
going wrong. Um. For instance, Uh, the plane is crashing,
but instead of trying to you know, jump to action

(40:52):
or do something, you just you know, press play on
your iPad again. Uh. And there examp plenty of examples
of this kind of thing happens in In fact, I
imagine a number of listeners can think too traumatic or
semi traumatic times in your life where like there's nothing
to do, you don't have the how do you react?
You just keep going with the normal path because you
have no you have no training for the abnormal path.

(41:14):
You have no training for for any kind of emergency response.
I think back to that moment I brought up at
the top of the episode. You know, Uh, this guy
was harassing a woman in front of me. I was
watching it, but my brain was like disconnected from the
reality in front of me, and I was like, what
am I supposed to do here? And you know, uh,
the my girlfriend at the time clearly didn't have that
same thing and she acted. Yeah. And now, of course

(41:36):
this gets into a key area like who would act
clearly a like a police officer or someone with training
of the police officer might act. And that gets into
this idea that it's also been argued that here heroism
requires knowledge and preparation. And indeed there are plenty of
cases where you can say, well, the the hero can
only act efficiently if they know what to do specialized

(41:58):
task at hand, using CPR, swimming into dangerous waters to
save someone, etcetera. Though of course we can also think
of heroic scenarios in which the hero jumps in and
does something that they're not trained to do, you know,
like a non firefighter jumping into a flaming building and
carrying babe or something. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So when
you look at the discipline, traditionally, psychology has actually avoided

(42:20):
the term heroism. They like to use terms like civil
courage or extreme altruism, which I like that sounds like
a like a like a caffeine drink or something extreme altruism.
It's a psilocybin read bowl kind of exactly. Um, But
the authors of this paper that we're talking about. They
divided it up into three modes of heroism that they

(42:43):
make sure involves a level of peril or sacrifice that
goes beyond what we think of as pro social behaviors.
And and uh, they also think that, you know, this
requires a willingness to enter a fraud situation despite clear
barriers to entry an obvious paths to exit. And the
final thing is that they think that heroism has got
to transcend considerable fear in order to act decisively. Yeah,

(43:08):
the fear has to be in place otherwise again comes
to Superman, it's not afraid of that fire. Is that
this is like, you know, so many people I've always
kind of felt like this too, But so many people
always say, like I just don't really care for Superman.
I mean, he's got like all those powers. It's just
boring Batman I can relate to that. You know, Batman
can die, yeah, Man, Batman can be shot. To the

(43:31):
heart of the whole thing is that, like super Man
is just intrinsically not heroic, I guess unless like the Kryptonite. Yeah,
the kryptonite create like that makes him human and that
makes him that presents risk, right, right, So Okay, let's
look at these three that they break down, and it's
important to remember that these three came before they did

(43:52):
that survey. So first, we have martial or military heroism,
so physical risk duty bound heroes, and this is usually
within the within a war context military context, though there
is bleed over into certain areas shuch as police, firefighters,
coast guard, etcetera physical risk you're doing your duty by
acting heroically. And Robert and I were talking about this

(44:15):
before we came into the studio, but just before we did,
I found this two thousand nine study by Bloomberg Hessan
Revieve on specifically martial heroism, and they showed empirical evidence.
I don't know how I feel about this, but the
way that they measured it was by looking at the
amount of Congressional Medals of Honor and silver Stars that
have been awarded in the last thirty five years, and

(44:36):
apparently it's been less and less over time. And so
they said, what's going on with that? Why do we
have less heroes? Because that's like I guess, our measurement
system for for heroic at least martial heroic acts. Uh.
And they determined that this is actually a decline because
of technological change, because we have technology now that makes

(44:57):
combat less labor intensive or makes it easier to fight fires. Right, uh,
and so therefore there's less risk and subsequently less reward,
which is kind of strange, but we're thinking about when
you consider this type of heroism. So yeah, on one hand,
I'm thinking about drones of course, yeah, and distancing like

(45:19):
there's what personal risk is there? Right? Is the person
operating a drone in a control room in Washington, d C?
A hero? Right? And then the other way of looking
at it, So in military context, I can't help but
think of or even just any kind of like strategic
situation with risk. I end up thinking about say level
of of X calm or X continent. Yeah, and and

(45:41):
so if you if you get your you get your
power ups in place, you get to the right weapons,
the right armor, the right strategy, and the enemies are
not too difficult. You can kind of pull it off
like clockwork in some cases. And so you're not having
these risky, ultimately empowering situations where like a character barely
survived and like fall through a burning floor and still

(46:02):
managed to shoot the alien. I suppose that's where what
we refer to as intelligence in like you know, foreign
diplomacy and also combat comes into play, right, Like, if
you have enough intelligence ahead of time, then you can
prepare adequately. I don't know if that makes these people
less of heroes or not, but then they may not
necessarily be rewarded. Well, if you're the same way that

(46:24):
we used to do, you really don't want heroic Like,
if the system is is perfected, there should be no like,
for instance, we're recording podcasts in here, there's no um
expectation of of heroics because there shouldn't be. Nothing should
catch on fire all of a sudden. Let's hope not,
and it should, you know, But it's gonna be the

(46:45):
same with a you know, a really a refined um,
you know, emergency response plan. Yeah yeah, true. Yeah. So
that's interesting that we have so many systems in place
to to make sure we don't have to be heroes.
Right alright, The next one is so full heroism. This
is physical risk but non duty bound heroism. The classical
example here is just the civilian bystander who performs an

(47:08):
emergency rescue. Right. Yeah. The idea of like somebody, I
don't know, there's a car So the car crash example, again,
you pull over, you immediately run over. Maybe the engines
on fire. You don't know if it's gonna blow up
or something. You get the adrenaline, you're able to pull
the door open and carry the person away. Right, it's average,
The average Joe or Jane saves the life and steps
back into normal. Yeah. And then there's social heroism. This

(47:30):
is the third category they presented the start of the paper.
Then this one's interesting because in the short term it's
often non physical risk, non duty bound heroism. But the
authors point out that while the physical risk in the
previous scenarios are generally short term, uh, and the hero
returns to a safe life almost immediately afterwards. So the
social hero was likely to face risk in the long term,

(47:53):
even prolonged insidious risk in the long term. While the
previous forms of heroism usually not controversial, the social hero
often is. So the idea here is a social hero
may stand up for something that's important, and they may
never live a normal life again. Yeah, and but because
it's over a long period of time, we don't often

(48:14):
comprehended as such. Instead of facing like physical peril, they're
associated with things like taking financial risks and having consequences economically,
or losing their social status or having long term health problems,
or even social ostracism. Right, But we don't traditionally think
of those as heroic. And this is where it gets

(48:35):
interesting with this study. Well, you know, it also makes
me think Superman again. Superman stands for one thing, right,
and he's been around around long enough that you can
speak to this better than than me. I don't know
if he's ever been an outright villain, but there have
been cases where Superman takes on villainous tones. Oh, it's
good old red Kryptonite every time in the new Supergirl

(48:58):
TV show that yes too, Yeah, it's always the red Kryptonite.
It does something that makes them weird and they go
evil and yeah, and then they have to face the
consequences afterwards because people think of them as being a monster. Okay,
or um, what was the classic The Dark Knight? Right? Yeah?
Is Superman kind of villainous in that is he takes
on like Reagan as qualities, right, Yeah, it's supposed to be.

(49:20):
The Dark Knight is a complicated comic to talk about
in these terms, especially, but yeah, the idea is that
he's sort of like a government stooge, and like Batman
is more like I guess you describe him today as
like a libertarian hero maybe, yeah, Okay, So in any
of these cases someone stands up, if they're heroic socially,
they're going to be the villain for the people who

(49:41):
have different social values and different political values, and the
the the trends may turn, the tide may turn, and
they might be cast as a villain by whatever the
predominant narrative is in the future. Yeah, yeah, absolutely true.
That gets back to what I was saying about villains earlier,
that like how to how does it demonstrate the limits

(50:01):
of what we conceive as being uh, culturally acceptable? And
so it's interesting when you go back to this paper,
their definition of hero then boils down to this, Uh,
it's somebody who is in service to others that are
in need, people who are possibly defending a social standard.
They engage voluntarily, they have recognition of what the possible

(50:24):
risks are to themselves. They are willing to accept the
anticipated sacrifice that goes along with their actions, and they
don't think about any external gain at the time of
the act. It's not like trying to think of an
example here, like somebody like John McCain or John Kerry
who were like in combat and then came back and

(50:45):
were able to um use the risks that they saw
in combat to become great political figures. Right, It's not
like they were thinking about I don't know, I don't
know those two guys, but hopefully they aren't thinking about
that while they're in the act, right right, Yeah, So
it's it's one thing too, of course, to capitalize. Capitalized

(51:07):
might even I don't think might be an unfair terms.
It's one thing. I mean, an heroic act may have
a profound impact on the hero's life, either sort of
altering their course, or there also been cases where it
has a negative effect. I think that the paper we're
looking at here referred to some anecdotal evidence that showed

(51:27):
like an increased suicide rate among individuals who acted heroically. Say,
you know, in the classic someone falls on the subway tracks?
Uh situation. Yeah, we'll think about how much we've talked
about PTSD on this show before in relation to military service. Yeah,
but certainly a case where someone stops and thinks somebody

(51:49):
fell on some train tracks. Is there anybody watching? Should
I jump on and save them. Um, that could be
good for me. I better do it. Like, that's that's
not a hero. So right, they they took these three
categories that we mentioned, and then they busted out into
twelve classifications. Uh, and let's let's remember to remind ourselves here.

(52:11):
One hero is a social construction. Okay, So what they
come up with here, they're not They're just saying, this
is what we think the current social construction is. It
may not actually reflect the merits of somebody's actions. And
then one of the paradox is that they point to
is that it's considered to be a pro social behavior,
as we've mentioned earlier. But to be so, it has

(52:32):
to be witnessed. Right, are you a hero? It's like
the thing like can anybody hear a tree, uh, falls
in the forest if there's nobody there or whatever? You know, Like,
is somebody a hero if there's nobody there to witness it? Um?
What about the heroes who don't have an audience but
are heroic in private somehow? So okay, let's go through
this list. You wanna bounce back and forth, Let's just

(52:55):
go back and forth. So the first two we're gonna
hit are the definite physical peril examples, the first one
being military or other duty bound physical risk heroes. Yeah.
And then we've got the civil heroes. These are the
non duty bound physical risk heroes. Uh. And then all
of the ones after this they line up under that
social heroes and category. Uh. So they're they're facing social

(53:18):
sacrifices rather than physical peril. That's right. So we have
religious figures, political religious figures, martyrs, political or military leaders.
This one's interesting. Adventurers, explorers, and discoverers. Yeah. And then
after that they have scientific discovery heroes Okay, and then

(53:38):
good samaritans, somebody who you know helps out complete stranger
for no gang yeah. Uh, odds beater which is a
strange phrase, or just like the underdog basically. And then
we have bureaucracy heroes. So this is so someone who
serves as an agent of change within a bureaucratic system. Yeah.

(53:59):
And then finally we've got whistleblowers, which I think it's
pretty interesting because of how many biopics we've seen lately
about whistleblowers and they're celebrated as heroes in these films.
And I'm sure as we go through it went through
that lift you know, everybody can think of multiple examples
from either history. Are certainly current events that line up

(54:19):
with some of these, and you can probably think of
examples that you can say, oh, well, so and so
it's technically technically they were an underdog, but I don't
see them as a hero at all. But then we're
getting into the the the subjective nature of the thing.
Oh yeah, totally. I mean, think of um, oh, this
is a perfect example. Edwards Snowdon is Edward Snowden a hero,

(54:40):
He's a whistleblower. Yeah, but some people hate him. Some
people think he's uh he should be tried, uh and
like executed. Right. Yeah, well, Donald Trump is another polarizing
figure who he was an underdog, you defy the odds
and uh and won the election. Therefore, you know, plenty
of people see him as a heroic figure. Others e
m as a villainous figure. So let's take a quick break,

(55:02):
and when we come back, we're gonna look at the
findings that this team had when they observed what people
actually thought about these twelve categories they came up with,
and whether or not they're heroes or not. So by
and large, psycho psychologists tend to look at heroism in

(55:23):
terms of other psychological situations. We've touched on this already,
civil courage, courageous resistance, extreme am altruism, and of course
moral courage. Yeah. Yeah, So the question here really is
how does heroism align with altruism? Are there the same thing?
So far it seems like they're not right. Yeah, that
seems to be the consensus. So altruism is of course

(55:46):
this is a topic unto itself grounded in the concern
or welfare of others. But is there is there such
a thing as a truly altruistic act? That's I think
there's an old episode of this podcast that that even
tackled that, because can there's a strong argument that you
can say, well, it's always about yourself. It's always about
what people are going to think about you for saying

(56:07):
you think of it as as simple as donating to
a nonprofit. Did you push that share button on Facebook
to share the fact that you donated or to let
people know that you donate it? Yeah, exactly. And even
if nobody is told about it, are you still doing
it just for that own personal boost of like, oh
I did something good, I feel better about myself now,

(56:27):
And and are you nitpicking too much to say that
that is a negative thing. This gets to the heart
of the whole safety pin or no safety pin argument
over the last month or so here in the States,
which is like, are you doing that for other people
or are you doing it for yourself? And even if
you are doing it for other people, should you be Yeah? Yeah,

(56:48):
So it gets it, and yeah you can you can
kind of nitpick it to death until you're like, all right,
I guess I'm not gonna do anything good because there's
it's impossible for me to do a purely good thing. So,
but what can definitely agree on here is that heroism
is very often altruistic. Though some of the examples that
we just touched on, you know, and that that twelve

(57:08):
point list, Uh, some of those examples buck the trend.
You know, is an explore truly altruistic? Was Christopher Columbus altruistic?
I don't know. I think there is a very strong
argument to say that he was not. But you can
think of other explorers who were. So how do how
do they break down the difference? Then these Franco Blowan Zimbardo. Okay,

(57:28):
So the authors here argue that the key differences between
mere altruism and i'ltry heroics. It all boils down to risk, velocity,
and barriers to entry. So risk, this is pretty obvious.
There is a real immediate or lasting risk to acting, death, injury,
the ire of opposing factions, government crackdown, imprisonment, et cetera.

(57:50):
And they point out to they say, the level of
risk that's incurred in altruism is typically lower than even
the minimum risk threshold we think of to achieve heroic status. Right. Yeah, Again,
donating to a good cause the altruistic, but nobody even
needs to know about it. Yeah, all right, next velocity,

(58:12):
So there is typically a very small window of opportunity
for the hero to act. Uh, the building is burning now,
the swimmer is drowning. Now. It's not the the ideal
time to to speak out within the strict confines of
a governing system, but it's the ideal time from the
human perspective. Ye. And this definitely lines up with what
they described as military and civil heroism, right, because you

(58:34):
have to act in the moment, whereas the social heroism
is longitudinal, it occurs over time. Right. But even in
the social situation, you know, it's it's just you look
at the say certain uh, you know civil rights heroes
for instance, there are many forms of protest for example
that uh that either you know, skirt the limits of

(58:56):
legal protest or certainly just are more problematic. Model like
certainly you know a sit in Um he's an even
Rosa Parks you know, like it's not like she filed
paperwork about the situation. She acted and she gets go
in a way that that was problematic and risky. That's true, yeah,
because but ultimately more potent and powerful. Yeah. To uh,

(59:20):
another way to to to think about this, I like
to think of The Big Lebowski. The stranger in The
Big Lebowski would be sam Elious Sam Elliott. That's right,
he said beef, it's what's for dinner. No, that's that's uh,
you're you're breaking into Brimley. It's a James a Dummian joke. Anyways, sorry,

(59:41):
um so, so the quote is uh, I only mention
it because sometimes there's a man. I won't say a hero,
cause what's a hero. But sometimes there's a man and
I'm talking about the dude here. Sometimes there's a man. Well,
he's the man for his time and place. He fits
right in there. Yeah, is the dude a hero? I
think that's one of the big questions about the big lebalty.

(01:00:03):
It's the big question of our generation. I think if
we can answer that one, we can solve everything. Sometimes
being a hero is just being in the right the
right place at the right time and then doing something.
Yeah that's true. Yeah, all right. And then the third
one barriers to entry. And for this let's consider once
more that the bystand or effect. And remember that acts

(01:00:24):
of altruism in public scenarios tend to follow several seconds
or or minutes of frenzied indecision. You may go back
and forth on it, but ultimately you have to act.
You have to be able to enable and willing to
break through social norms, and in some cases that means
you have to be a deviant. Yeah. And so this
is where things get interesting with this study. So when

(01:00:46):
they applied their taxonomy to the survey that we mentioned,
they found that civilian fire rescue was deemed as the
most purely heroic act, while a soldier laying down his
life for others to escape is actually rated as slightly less.
And they saw this as suggesting that um perception ascribes
more heroic value to actions that are taken when there's

(01:01:10):
no specific duty that exists. Right, so if a civilian
runs into a burning building, that's somehow more heroic to
us than if a firefighter does, even though they're both
they both have the same risks. Although I guess you
could say that a firefighter has training, true, and that's
weird that we would. We would then devalue the important
the importance of training and being a hero because ultimately,

(01:01:34):
like that dude just ran into the flaming building, he
could have died too, because he didn't know what he
was doing. Absolutely yeah. Uh. They also found the social
heroism activities were seen as less heroic and more as altruism.
Only four of their forms of social heroism were actually
seen as heroic by the people who took this survey,

(01:01:54):
and those were the good Samaritans, the politico religious figures,
individual is fighting against an unjust bureaucracy, and whistleblowers. Uh.
And this led to them reconfiguring it. So they broke
social heroism into two different categories, those who defy systems

(01:02:15):
and those who defy reality. And so that gets back
to the explorer um the Christopher Columbus thing. So an
explorer that's making a discovery. It seems great. They're defying reality,
they're not defying systems. Um, Whereas physical risk heroes are
viewed as more prototypically heroic. I guess it comes down

(01:02:36):
there's just there's less ambiguity of uh, you know that
saving someone from burning fire, Like there's no like, what's
the fire's point of view? Right now, it's pretty clear
what's going on, the fire is consuming? How do you
fire feel about that? Yeah? But you know, I love
this idea of the deviant hero. And that's that's from
the Franco Blao and Zimbardo study. You know, they point

(01:02:59):
out they hear ois m is ultimately kind of crazy.
You have to deviate from social norms, from social expectations,
individual expectations. You gotta breakthrough, not just one, not just
the force field of fear, but like multiple force fields
you gotta you ultimately kind of have to be a little,
a little superhuman to do that. You have to be
a special kind of crazy. You have to be a deviant.

(01:03:22):
This makes me feel slightly less bad about not being
the person to stand up on that bus all those
years ago and defend that young woman. But at the
same time, it's still and this is something before we
even came up with this as a topic, I've been
questioning lately in myself is what do I have what
it takes to to do something heroic if it comes

(01:03:42):
to it, you know, can I break through those force fields?
Maybe we're all asking that question. Yeah, I mean, you know,
I couldn't help. But think of all these different superheroes. Again,
to bring up superheroes is that they're all ultimately deviants, right,
I mean, they're all they're all costumed individual and not
you know, not every superhero has a costume, but a
lot of them are costumed individuals. There. They have screwed

(01:04:05):
up backstories, they have pain, they have disfigurements, they have
you know, mutant genes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Um.
On my other podcast, Super Context, we just did an
episode about Luke Cage and I don't know if you've
watched that TV show. I watched about half of it
and it's it's yeah, so that's about the same as me. Uh,

(01:04:25):
And it's it's a really interesting example when you think
about heroism, especially in relation to African American culture today,
and they really had some themes in that TV show
where they were they were attempting to show um both
the culture on sort of like a street level, but
also Luke Cage as a hero that really represented things
that were seen as like traditionally non heroic, like, for instance,

(01:04:49):
wearing a hoodie, you know, like they purposely had scenes
where he was wearing a hoodie while he was getting
shot to show a contrast to the example of young
black men getting shot at for wearing hoodies. Yeah, it's
a From what I've seen of the show so far,
it's very good and the music is phenomenal. Yeah, the
music is great. The guy who wrote it was a

(01:05:10):
music journalist and so he just really really brought in
all of his old contacts to make the music right
on that show. I believe it's Adrian Young is the
one of the producers, and then one of the guys
from Trip called Quest Cool. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, So definitely
definitely check that out and if you don't have time
to watch it, just listen to uh so. You know
we're gonna bring this bringing this back around to fictional

(01:05:31):
heroes like Luke Cage, like Superman and Batman. Uh. I
think it's it's nice to bring it back to these
mythical and fictional heroes, because there's that inevitable interplay that
we discussed at the top. These models inform us how
to act, how to be heroes. They show us what
we can be if we just break through the fear
and break through those psychological norms. Yeah, I wanna, I

(01:05:55):
wanna close this section off with just a quick quote
from that Franco Blau and Embardo paper that we've been
talking about. Quote. The construct of heroic imagination is central
to our view of heroism. Although it remains largely theoretical
and has not been adequately characterized to date, our initial
work in this area suggests that the heroic imagination functions
in three distinct ways. How heroes are imagined in classic

(01:06:18):
writing and by the general public a mental state of
anticipation and readiness for any person to act heroically when
opportunities arise, calling for heroic actions as a contrast with
the hostile imagination or the psychology of enmity, which instills
fear and hatred of enemies, and, at least in some individuals,
the ability to envision and communicate a new way of

(01:06:41):
ordering a social system or an entire society. So I
think this is a good place for us to close out.
We've asked a lot of questions. I don't think that
this is something that psychology is a discipline, is really
nailed down. Yet myth is constantly changing, so it hasn't yet.
But I'm curious what you the audience think. Are these

(01:07:02):
examples that we provided, especially from this paper, by these
these three academics, are these heroes? You know? Where where
do you think this falls? Are you more on the
side of it's the people who take physical risk or
do you think social heroes fall into and who are
your heroes? And more importantly, do you think you could
be a hero if it came down to it? So
let us know. Uh, there's lots of ways to contact us.

(01:07:25):
You could reach out to us on social media. Were
on Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter, and Instagram. Uh. You can visit
us at stuff tobleow your mind dot com to find
links to all those social media platforms. What else is
over there, Robert Oh at the website. Oh well, we
have all the podcasts, all the blogs, all the videos.
We have links out to all those various social media

(01:07:47):
accounts as well. Uh. Oh, and hey, before we we
close it out here. I also want to point out
that Dr Philip Zimbardo, one of the authors on the study, UH,
he actually has a five oh one nonprofit organization and
called the Heroic Imagination Project or HIP UH and it
teaches people how to take effective action and challenging situations. Yeah.
So this is a thing that we're trying to do

(01:08:08):
occasionally on the show. You know, uh, find a charitable
organization that relates to the topic at hand, and this
seems like a really cool one. I was looking at it,
and it's funny. I was looking for groups and the
first one that came up, I saw Zimbardo's name and
I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. We gotta
we gotta mention Zimbardo. Yeah, since we got so much

(01:08:29):
out of his study, and yeah, check that out. Will
include a link for it on the landing page of
this episode, or just do a search for the Heroic
Imagination Project. And the last way that you could reach
out to us if you really want to tell us
all your thoughts on heroes is the old fashioned email
at blow the mind at how stuff works dot com.

(01:08:56):
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