The Romance of Heroism and Heroic Leadership

George R. Goethals, Scott T. Allison

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781787566583
• eBook ISBN:
  9781787566576
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Management

Heroes permeate our culture. From superheroes on screen to the everyday heroics of our public services, the word 'hero' is a familiar descriptor in every form of media. But what makes a hero? And what makes heroes 'heroic'?

Leadership experts George R. Goethals and Scott T. Allison explore how the romantic conceptions of heroes and heroic leaders are constructed, both in real life and in our heads. Looking at the dichotomy of heroism and villainy, they offer insights into Donald Trump's ascension to the US presidency, particularly detailing the correspondence between the needs of the US public and the promises the former reality TV star made in reply. They also consider how three highly charismatic men dramatically and fundamentally changed American society in the mid-twentieth century - Martin Luther King (1929-1968), Elvis Presley (1935-1977), and Muhammad Ali (1942-2016), called here the "Three Kings" of the US.  

This exciting and innovative study explores how charisma and human needs create images of individuals as heroes and villains. For researchers and students of psychology and leadership, this is a fundamental text on the creation of both genuine heroes, and false idols.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: THE ROMANCE OF HEROISM

In the last decade, an exciting new field of study has emerged. Its subject is heroes and heroism. It is fast growing, multidisciplinary, and international. There is now enough of a corpus of scholarship to warrant referring to these various studies as constituting a scholarly discipline of heroism science. One manifestation of this new domain of study is the new journal, Heroism Science. Two other signs are new special issues on heroes and heroism in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and in Frontiers in Psychology. Another is the 2017 publication of the Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership. There is also a new biennial conference series in Heroism Science, the first held in Perth, Australia, in 2016, and the second in Richmond, Virginia, USA, in 2018. We have been privileged to be part of this new research endeavor.

Heroism Science includes a sprawling set of theoretical and empirical explorations of who heroes are, how they develop, what they do, and what they’re like. In short, these studies explore what makes heroes tick. Two illustrative studies from this vast domain of research are Walker’s (2017) exploration of the moral character of individuals who step up as heroes and Franco’s (2017) work on heroic leadership in times of crisis. Another, smaller body of work examines how people think about heroes. Who comes to mind when people are asked to name heroes? What traits do heroes have? What do people believe heroes do? For example, scholars have explored how perceived heroes inspire or motivate the people who admire them (Kinsella, Ritchie, & Igou, 2017), how groups identify moral heroes (Decter-Frain, Vanstone, & Frimer, 2017), and the way people construct heroic images of underdogs (Vandello, Goldschmied, & Michniewicz, 2017).

Our own work has considered both sets of questions. Who are heroes, what defines heroism, and how do people think about heroes? However, most of our writings have focused on the latter set of questions, questions about how people construct perceptions of heroes. In taking this approach, we have perhaps stubbornly resisted defining what heroism is. We do note that many of the heroes people name are fictional. Some of them are so-called superheroes, while others are characters such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes, or the protagonist Rick Blaine in the classic 1942 film Casablanca, played by Humphrey Bogart. While the array of fictional and real people, from the past or still living, who are named as heroes is immense, there are two central attributes of these perceived heroes. They are almost always highly moral, and they are generally very competent and effective. These qualities are central to the “great eight traits” of heroism that emerge from our studies. Heroes are seen as Smart, Strong, Selfless, Caring, Charismatic, Resilient, Reliable, and Inspiring. These findings have prompted us to assert that heroism is in the eye of the beholder. Again, we resist specifying the defining qualities of heroes ourselves, or naming people as heroes.

Consistent with this approach, we think, we do mention our own heroes in the dedications of our books. In our first book, we acknowledged our grandmothers, but clearly do not believe that anyone else is likely to regard them as heroic. We dedicate our second book to the memory of much better-known heroes, the baseball player Roberto Clemente, and US President Abraham Lincoln. In calling Clemente and Lincoln heroes in the preceding sentence, we must note that they are heroes in our eyes. That doesn’t make them heroes in any objective sense. We can make a case for their heroism in terms of morality and effectiveness, but others might disagree. We are well aware that in our home city of Richmond, Virginia, capital of the Confederate States during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln is perhaps a villain to many. So while we do not designate on the basis of scholarly expertise particular individuals as heroes, we cherish our own heroes.

This general perspective informs the current approach that we call the romance of heroes. Merriam-Webster defines the noun form of romance as an emotional attraction, or special quality or feeling that comes from a person, place, or thing. The verb form of romance is to exaggerate or invent detail. This book explores these processes as they operate in our human perception of heroism. We assume that people are motivated to actively construct reality from incomplete information. There is a long history of theory and research in social perception and social cognition to support this idea (Fiske & Taylor, 2013). We also assume, based on our own research, that people are motivated to have heroes (Allison & Goethals, 2011). Our contention in this book is that our love of heroes is so strong that we could call it a romantic longing. Merriam-Webster reminds us that this longing is a strong emotional attraction that may cause mental exaggeration or invention. Our desire and drive to designate people as heroes may be subject to distortion and to motivated perception under conditions of uncertainty. We’ll also explore how this tendency to exaggerate or invent in response to strong motives can contribute to our construction of villains as well as heroes.

From our review of the Heroism Science literature, we find only one other scholarly article regarding how people may use uncertain and ambiguous circumstances to create heroes. Kinsella, Igou, and Ritchie (2017) proposed a model of meaning-making in which they argue the following: “When events or affective states threaten or reduce a person’s sense of meaning, psychological processes are mobilized to serve the goals of meaning maintenance and meaning reestablishment” (p. 1). According to Kinsella et al., one specific state that triggers a search for meaning is a situation with high uncertainty. The authors argue that uncertainty leads people to seek heroes who will provide such meaning. In this book, we extend Kinsella et al.’s ideas by exploring in considerable detail how ambiguity begets heroism – and villainy as well. It may sound strange that people are as driven to construct villainy as they are for heroism from uncertainty, but there is a wealth of social psychological research pointing to our strong need to resolve ambiguity at all costs – even if it means distorting the world by seeing it as darker than it really is.

Our second chapter on “Mystery and Meaning” explores how basic processes of social perception, cognition, and motivation operate in people’s processing of limited or ambiguous information about individuals, groups, or circumstances. We focus on the perception of individuals who might be heroes or villains. Our third chapter on “The Three Kings” centers on three men who had a profound impact on American culture in the late twentieth century: Martin Luther King, Jr, Elvis Presley, and Muhammad Ali. Here we describe how Americans’ motives shifted from initially seeing these men as villains to eventually seeing them as heroes. Our fourth chapter on “Heroic Transforming Leadership” explores the ways that leaders activate and elevate followers’ motives and morality to achieve group goals. We discuss Donald Trump as an example of less morally developed leadership. Finally, our fifth chapter on “Heroic Transformation” examines how people transform into heroes. Here we describe the psychological processes responsible for people’s metamorphosis into their best, most heroic selves.

There are two conceptual threads uniting all these chapters. The first main thread is the manner in which people tend to weave together a story of heroism or villainy from incomplete information in their social environments. The second thread is that there exists a transcendent type of leadership that we call heroic transforming leadership. This highest level of leadership plays a crucial role in guiding people through these states of social uncertainty. We hope you will appreciate as much as we do how the machinations of the mind can produce our most prized heroes as well as our most abhorred villains.

CHAPTER 2

MYSTERY AND MEANING: AMBIGUITY AND THE PERCEPTION OF LEADERS, HEROES, AND VILLAINS

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr Mortimer reads aloud the lengthy manuscript describing the huge canine that years before had ripped out the throat of Sir Hugo Baskerville at the conclusion of a night of debauchery. The manuscript was written by one of Sir Hugo’s descendants as a warning about the curse that still seems to haunt the clan. It concludes “Such is the tale, my sons, of the coming of the hound which is said to have plagued the family so sorely ever since. If I have set it down it is because that which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed” (Doyle, 1901, italics added). This passage is but one of many in fiction that seem to illustrate that the unknown or partially revealed can be terrifying. Often they suggest villainy. But not always. We wish to argue here that depending on context, mystery can arouse either thoughts of frightening danger and villains, or positive, hopeful expectations and images of wonder, awe, and heroic leadership. We will explore theory and research on the cognitive and motivational elements that combine with mystery to make meaning, often resulting in cognitive constructions of heroes or villains, security or threat, and good or evil.

Mystery is perceived uncertainty or ambiguity resulting from partial information about a person, object, situation, or event. It is experienced in people’s minds. Mystery may be ignored or suppressed, but often it generates arousal, positive or negative, fear or hope, and the search for answers. In this way, such arousal and uncertainty can stimulate meaning-making (Kinsella, Igou et al., 2017). Sometimes this occurs automatically, following principles well-defined by perception and social cognition research. Or, it may be undertaken deliberately, through vigilance and information seeking, perhaps through one’s own individual inquiries, or through some kind of informal social communication or social comparison. Thus a hint, suggestion, or clue may lead people to construct mystery or ambiguity resolving answers in the form of images, beliefs, or conclusions, with or without the acquisition of new information.

In many cases, the mystery and its cognitive resolution may involve leaders or potential leaders, who are also potential heroes or villains. A further example from fiction provides an illustration of mystery surrounding a frightening potential villain whom social comparison information reveals to be a hero. The classic Western song Big Iron (Robbins, 1959)¹ describes a mysterious figure who rides into town holstering a large gun. Then people talk and rumors spread, as townspeople strive to get a fix on the mysterious individual, before it turns out that the outsider is an Arizona lawman out to get a vicious killer, and he becomes transformed by local residents into a hero, himself in grave danger from the villain of the song. Of course the transformed stranger/ranger prevails in the last verse.

Resolving mystery through meaning-making is, of course, one facet of the more general human tendency to take small bits of information and engage in some kind of cognitive construction that feels as if it makes sense or meaning out of what is known or perceived.

MEANING-MAKING: THE BASICS

While our focus here is on mystery leading to constructions of potential leaders, heroes, or villains, and Big Iron provides one example of how this might happen, such hero/villain constructions are only one instance of the many ways that partial information is used by active human information processors to construct thoughts (images, perceptions, beliefs, schemas, and conclusions) that go far beyond the original information.

A good starting point is the early work in the Gestalt psychology tradition which emphasized this fundamental point. Kurt Koffka famously wrote, “The whole is other than the sum of the parts” (not greater than the sum of the parts (Dewey, 2007, p. 178)). Gestalt means “unified whole” and Gestalt theorists attempted “to describe how people tend to organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes” (p. 178). Of particular relevance is the Gestalt principle of “closure” which states that when visual information is incomplete, perceivers fill in the blanks (or connect the dots) to construct a whole or complete image. The way they fill them in is often determined by context. One classic example is a constellation of an incomplete and ambiguous vertical line with two left facing loops to its right. The separated elements appear to be the number 13 when the ambiguous figures appear in a sequence of 11, 12, […], 14, 15. However they appear to make the letter B when they appear in a sequence of A, […], C, D. This is but one illustration of active perceivers quickly, and in this case automatically, completing an ambiguous visual stimulus, rendering it whole to give it meaning. In the sections that follow, we will first consider meaning-making that occurs without any sense of mystery or ambiguity. Sometimes such meaning-making involves heroes and leaders, sometimes not. Sometimes motives guide the meaning-making, sometimes not. Sometimes the meaning-making creates novel schemas which guide the sense made of new information, and sometimes the meaning-making is guided by existing schemas or archetypes that are activated by initial information. We will then consider instances such as those in our Hound of the Baskervilles and Big Iron examples where people are consciously trying to make sense of incomplete information which has created feelings of mystery and aroused motivations or emotions leading to meaning-making. Again, sometimes such mystery may involve potential leaders, or potential heroes or villains.

Automatic Meaning-Making

The Gestalt “closure” principle provides one basic illustration of the way people process incomplete, ambiguous information. More complex but essentially similar examples of “filling in the blanks” are seen in many studies of the role of schemas in social perception. People notice information that is consistent with their schemas, and often ignore or distort information that is inconsistent. They will perceive attributes consistent with their schemas even when there is no such information presented. A fascinating example of the working of schemas is supplied by baseball statistician Bill James. A gifted writer, James discusses baseball writers’ perceptions of Chicago Cubs MVP and Hall of Fame shortstop, Ernie Banks. Banks was a prolific home run hitter, but because the image of a home run hitter (large, slow, muscle bound) is different from the image of a smooth fielding shortstop (quick, lithe), Banks was never given credit for also being a great fielder, which he was, as well as a power hitter (James, 1985). People’s schema-guided social perceptions often seem to illustrate the quip about how scientists ignore data that contradict their hypotheses: “If the data don’t fit the theory, so much the worse for the data.” Fielding statistics did not dent supposed experts’ image of Banks as an indifferent shortstop.

People’s tendency to allow their preconceived stereotypes to color their social judgments is illustrated in Malcolm Gladwell’s (2007) discussion of the Warren Harding Error in his book Blink. Warren Harding, one of the worst presidents of the United States, was nominated and elected in 1920 partly because he so looked the part. His physique, bronzed complexion, sonorous voice, and smooth motions activated the leader or even hero schema such that voters saw him as kind, intelligent, honest, etc. They filled in the missing pieces of the “leader schema” so as to see the whole leader package. The tendency to do so may have been accentuated by the need for a charismatic leader many Americans might have felt during the turbulent post-World War I financial panic, the ensuing influenza epidemic, and the “red scare.” Such a need could have strengthened automatic tendencies to take a little bit of leader-related information and make a great deal of it; in this case, far too much.

An example from the US Civil War shows how new information combined with the need for a leader can lead to the automatic reinterpretation of earlier information in a way that would satisfy that need. In March of 1864, the fourth year of the Civil War, a very ordinary looking Union Officer and a young boy approached the registration desk of the prestigious Willard Hotel in Washington, DC. One observer commented that the soldier he had seen had “rather a scrubby look withal […] as if he was out of office and on half pay.” The desk clerk treated him casually, nearly disdainfully, until he saw the officer’s signature in the hotel register: “U.S. Grant & son, Galena, Illinois.” The greatest Union hero had finally arrived in the nation’s capital. Now everything changed. The bystander then took a second look and “The ‘blue eye’ became a ‘clear blue eye’, and the once stolid-seeming face took on ‘a look of resolution’, as if he could not be trifled with” (Foote, 1974, p. 4). Grant was never very impressive looking, but his appearance was certainly more heroic when the hopeful observer knew he who he was.

Social identity theory suggests another way that people can take small amounts of information and automatically construct perceptions of leaders (Hogg, 2001). This approach suggests that group members come to be perceived as leaders not only on the basis of having qualities that activate a leader schema, such as Warren Harding apparently did, but also on the basis of perceived prototypicality. Psychological groups are defined by a prototype, a “multidimensional fuzzy set” of attributes specifying the group’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Group members are perceived along a prototypicality gradient, such that they are seen as being more or less prototypical of the group in terms of its defining attributes. The prototypicality gradient has implications for perceptions of leadership. Prototypes exert conformity pressures such that group members, to the extent that the prototype is salient, will attempt to conform to the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that the prototype specifies. Members of a college sorority, for example, will conform to the prototype defining how to dress, how to party, how to balance social and academic activities, and how to participate in philanthropic activities. Because the most prototypical group member will have to change her/his behavior less than less-prototypical group members, it will appear as if the latter are following the lead of the former, and that the former is the group leader, even if she/he has not attempted to influence anyone else in the group or otherwise lead it. Furthermore, once a person is perceived to be the leader on the basis of prototypicality, other qualities of leadership, such as charisma, may be attributed to the individual in ways that solidify her/his status as a leader.

It is easy to see how having both prototypical qualities as well as attributes that fit the leader schema gives an individual a significant advantage in asserting leadership. Sigmund Freud summarized this edge in stating of an aspiring leader, “He need only possess the typical qualities of the individuals concerned in a particularly clearly marked and pure form, and need only give an impression of greater force […]” to exert influence. In that case, Freud argued the group’s need for a leader would “invest him with a predominance to which he would otherwise perhaps have had no claim” (Freud, 1921, p. 101). One can imagine how helpful it was for leaders like George Washington or Andrew Jackson, who were arguably highly prototypical among American men of their time and certainly gave an impression of “greater force,” to be able to assert both military and political leadership, and to be endowed with heroic qualities by many of their followers – and villainous qualities by others.

Classic work on primacy effects in impression formation also illustrates automatic meaning-making when perceiving a person about whom there is some mystery. An early study by Asch (1946) presented participants with information about a person described as follows: envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and intelligent. We suggest that the reader pause here and form an impression of this individual. Then consider that other participants were presented with the same information in reverse order. The person was described as intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and envious. The person characterized by the list in the second order, which begins with a positive trait, intelligent, and then lists increasingly negative attributes, is viewed more positively than a person described by the list starting with “envious.” As a reader, you may get your own sense that the impressions suggested by the two lists are different, and are more heavily influenced by the earlier information than the latter. This is the classic primacy effect. Perceivers resolve mystery about a new person they encounter by forming impressions on the basis of the initial information they get and then interpreting later information in line with the evolving impression.

Another primacy effect study illustrates making meaning from partial information in a more dramatic and somewhat more realistic manner. Participants read two paragraphs about Jim that were woven together to present one complete description. One paragraph described an extraverted Jim, who went out of his way to interact with other people, while the oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter 1. Introduction: The Romance of Heroism
• Chapter 2. Mystery and Meaning: Ambiguity and the Perception of Leaders, Heroes, and Villains
• Chapter 3. The Three Kings: Dissent and Evolving Perceptions of Heroism
• Chapter 4. Heroic Transforming Leadership: Touching the Better Angels of Our Nature
• Chapter 5. How Heroes Transform Themselves and The World
• Chapter 6. Conclusion: Resolving Ambiguity to Discern and Create True Heroes
• References
• Index