As a Psychology teacher, one of the key questions which I always am asked by new students is ‘how do we know someone is a murderer?’ or ‘what makes someone become a psychopath?’. Not the lightest start to a new subject but it becomes clear that as humans, the dark area of humanity is something we are seemingly interested in exploring further, at least on an intellectual and explanatory level. However, is there a possibility for budding Psychologists to want to explore the opposite of these initial questions? Can we steer the understanding of Psychology as a subject beyond the study of ‘evil’ and move towards an understanding of what contributes to a good deed, kindness and compassion? Ultimately, can interest of humanity be adapted to consider the psychology of heroism?

Paolo Gallo writes in his article ‘The time has come to change our model of heroism’ based on the idea that he is “convinced that we are all potentially heroes”. Here an ideology is proposed that heroes are not necessarily celebrity figures in powerful positions but those who prosper daily despite significant challenges that present themselves. Words such as faith, responsibility, pride, serve and protect come to mind when attempting to describe a daily hero.

Yet, there is still the question of how can we distinguish between the daily hero from those that do not possess these characteristics? The danger of creating a criterion-based understanding of heroism is apparent and not the aim of raising this question. My task here is to not highlight the difference between heroes and those who are not, but highlight the conditions that can aid us all to become a hero. I agree with Gallo, we must change our model of heroism yet we should also explore the choice we have as humans and the choices we can be making to move towards this concept of a ‘daily hero’.

This proposal to adapt to the shift towards heroism can be found within media under different dimensions. One example being the mentality that we can make ourselves the hero. Changing the way in which we think about our past experiences to appreciate the skills of resilience we demonstrated, can amend our perceptions of a past event.  Thus affecting future decisions in our actions and behaviours within similar challenging situations to be portray our successes instead of failures. Seeing ourselves as a ‘hero’ might be considered as self-centred by some, but arguably can represent a form of self-acceptance resulting in further room for heroic behaviour in everyone.

Moreover, the theme of the ‘everyday hero’ is extensively explored by psychologist, Professor Philip Zimbardo, who is coined as the “grandfather of the hero movement”. His significant contribution being the ‘Heroic Imagination Project’, has worked with children and teenagers to encourage “ordinary people to do extraordinary things”. Reflecting that teaching and promoting this conceptual understanding of heroism can provide tools for individuals to refocus positive change in theirs and others’ lives when faced with difficult scenarios, the fundamental aims of the project are to transform the compassion found in daily lives to support a significant contribution to other’s existence.

So like Zimbardo and Gallo,  the aim to focus on personal and social growth from a positive perspective through promoting the nature of an everyday hero, rather than understanding the negative aspects of social influence, feels more promising and inspiring.  I hope that students interacting with Psychology will agree that celebrating the true potential of human nature to show compassion to others will continue to activate the idea of a growth mindset in not only an educational setting but a social setting too.

References:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2017/08/10/the-time-has-come-to-change-our-model-of-heroism/#6e7328f71a7b

http://heroicimagination.org/