ABSTRACT
What psychological processes realistically explain the extraordinary moral actions of heroes? These courageous individuals engage in behavior that promotes others’ betterment but, at the same time, invariably involves considerable cost for them. Their behavior fascinates and inspires us because it is largely outside of our own lived experience. Heroism is so enigmatic, but its study has the potential for considerable advances in our understanding of human nature, its development, and our collective efforts to promote civil and caring societies. In this chapter I intend to examine aspects of the moral character of heroes. It may be appropriate right at the outset to advance the case for the study of the character of
moral heroes. First, heroism entails real-world behaviors that have obvious validity and significance (in contrast to behaviors in the lab involving inconsequential experimental manipulations). Second, the study of the character of heroes has the potential to enlarge the moral domain, particularly if it entails a broadband assessment of their functioning. Because the approach fosters a focus on persons, rather than mere variables, it forces us to consider the breadth of psychological functioning. The study of persons has the potential to draw our attention to aspects of the domain that may be obscured or overlooked by a conceptual focus on particular variables that are core to competing theoretical perspectives. Third, understanding the character of heroism helps to inform our ethical ideals by revealing what is humanly attainable and what various forms that might take. Fourth, empirical comparisons contrasting heroes with ordinary folk essentially serve to amplify effects (since these represent relatively extreme groups), allowing operative processes to be more clearly identified. Fifth, within-person analyses capture the “dynamic organization within the individual” (Allport, 1937, p. 48) and so can yield more holistic understandings of the complexities of heroism and the balancing of various virtues. And sixth, the study of heroes is conducive to an investigative process of “reverse engineering” in which we initially identify and analyze the “finished product” and then work backwards in deconstructing it to gain understandings of the trajectories and causal processes in development. This chapter is organized around ten issues, pivotal to our understanding of heroism, and
presented in a progressively unfolding manner:
1 Do heroes have distinctive aspects to their character, evidence of the operation of personality dispositions?
