ABSTRACT
Tenzin Gyatso is no ordinary man-he is a living, breathing moral hero. Gyatso, also known as His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his leadership role in the non-violent struggle for Tibet’s independence from China (Aarvik, 1989). A community of 100,000+ exiled Tibetans look to Gyatso for guidance and view him as their spiritual champion. Even Americans approve of the Dalai Lama more so than any other world leader-including their own (Corso, 2013). Drawing crowds of more than 10,000 people at a time, the Dalai Lama’s sustained plea for compassion draws in his followers, giving the impression that the Dalai Lama has an inner glow or a “special something.” The Dalai Lama’s story raises the possibility that moral heroism is earned. Perhaps moral
heroes have their standing because of their sophisticated ability to reason through complex moral problems (Kohlberg, 1984) or narrate heart-warming life stories about their lives (Colby & Damon, 1992; McAdams & Guo, 2015; Walker & Frimer, 2007). This notion that moral heroes have an inner greatness has seemed self-evidently true to both the public and scholars (Carlyle, 1840; Woods, 1913). We propose an alternative explanation for the existence of moral heroes. Rather than thinking
of moral heroes as superb individuals that followers discover, we propose that followers manufacture the perception of moral heroism in rather ordinary individuals. That is, followers may turn these ordinary individuals into moral heroes in the eyes of followers by shaping followers’ perceptions. The idea that moral heroes are “Great Men” may overestimate the inner goodness of these leaders, and underestimate the active role of followers in the perception of the moral hero’s greatness. We will set out the view that moralistic groups create moral heroes out of surprisingly ordinary persons. Once again, the Dalai Lama’s story is apt. His beginnings as a spiritual leader were hardly
earned in any meritocratic sense. Rather, they were astonishingly arbitrary. The 13th Dalai Lama died in 1933. According to Buddhist tradition, when a Dalai Lama dies, he reincarnates to another body. His followers’ task is to find that body. A search team followed a series of symbols, which led to a house. There, they found a two-year-old boy (Aarvik, 1989). The search team tested the toddler, for example, by presenting him with a series of two items, one of which the previous Dalai Lama had owned. His task was to select the correct one. Two-year-old Gyatso correctly identified every object (Thondup & Thurston, 2015). The Dalai Lama’s followers anointed him at age four, and he became the official political
leader of Tibet at age 15, almost a decade before he completed his education in Buddhist
philosophy (Marcello, 2003). That is, he had ascended to the rank of spiritual and political leader of his people without having achieving expertise in his people’s politics and philosophy. Hence, at least some of the Dalai Lama’s influence may have arisen not from his own intellectual and moral greatness, but rather through social processes-such as arbitrarily granting of titles like “his holiness” to a 2-year-old toddler. We suggest that groups may catapult relatively ordinary individuals into moral heroism. To
our knowledge, no experimental evidence exists that directly establishes that groups do create moral heroes. However, we rely on a circumstantial approach by describing the motive and mechanism by which groups might do so. Followers may elevate relatively ordinary individuals into the role of symbols of moral heroism by giving them titles and awards, propagating heroic portraits, and encouraging them to give inspiring speeches. Creating a moral hero may benefit a tribe by giving its members a rallying point around which to unite and fight. Finally, we explain how impressing a few can lead to population-wide endorsement.
