In recent years, the idea of heroism has attracted research interest in social psychology. One of the main concepts in this research has been the idea of what makes a hero, or what makes an act heroic. One paper conducted three studies to examine this question (Kraft-Todd & Rand, 2019), and this article will briefly present the findings of these studies.
Study 1 methods
The first study was simple. The authors surveyed 102 people from Amazon Mechanical Turk with the following prompt:
- “Please name at least 3 and up to 10 real-life acts of heroism”
Study 1 results
The average number of heroic acts named was 4.2. After excluding answers that did not fit the format (such as names or traits) and simplifying the acts into behaviors, 80 unique responses were generated. Most of these were “explicitly prosocial”. These behaviors were used in the next study.
Study 2 methods
The next study was conducted with 205 new participants from mTurk who were not in the first study. Each respondent was presented with a random selection of 20 of the 80 acts collected through study 1. They were then asked to rate each behavior as either heroic or not heroic. In addition, respondents further scored the acts on a scale of 1-7 (from “Not at all heroic” to “Very heroic”). In total, 51 respondents rated each of the 80 behaviors. This was due to the fact that each respondent only rated 20 behaviors.
Study 2 results
Regarding the results of study 2, “the median percentage of subjects classifying the behaviors as ‘heroic’ was 82%”, suggesting that the list gathered from study 1 was appropriate. However, these behaviors were rated at varying levels of heroism. These varying levels of heroism were of interest to the researchers, so they selected 10 acts. Based on their ratings, five of these acts were considered to be “exemplary” and five were considered to be “ambiguous” acts of heroism. These acts of heroism were then used in the next study to elucidate what affects an act’s level of heroism.
Study 3 methods
For this study, 101 more participants were recruited from mTurk. The respondents were asked to rate each of the five “exemplary” acts of heroism and each of the five “ambiguous” acts of heroism on the following factors:
- descriptive normativity (“In your opinion, how many people in your community do this behavior?”)
- injunctive normativity (“In your opinion, how much do people in your community think doing this behavior is what you are supposed to do?”)
- benefit to the recipient (“In your opinion, how much benefit (in terms of money, time, effort, etc.) does the recipient of this behavior receive”?)
- cost to the actor (“In your opinion, how much cost (in terms of money, time, effort, etc.) does the person who does this behavior incur?”)
The behaviors were ranked on 0-100 sliding scales ranging from “Very little” to “Very much”.
Study 3 results
The following results were obtained:
- “More heroic acts were perceived as less descriptively normative … and more costly to the actor”
- Neither injunctive normativity nor benefit to the recipient were significantly related to level of heroism
Put simply, acts that are less descriptively normative and more costly to the actor are perceived to be more heroic than other acts, but injunctive normativity and benefit to the recipient are not relevant factors.
Wrapping up
At the end of the day, acts of heroism that come at substantial cost to the actor and that are not believed to be normal instances of behavior are rated as more heroic. Interestingly, the gain by the recipient does not appear to affect how heroic an act is perceived. This suggests that something will be viewed as heroic if it is out of the norm and if it is perceived to be difficult, in which case it does not matter what the recipient receives as a result of the act.
This elucidates the specific factors that make a particularly behavior seem heroic. This was an interesting design, as they used simple experiments to design study 3, which ultimately measured the topic of interest. The researchers did not make any assumptions about acts of heroism, but instead gathered empirical data on what constitutes heroism.
References
Kraft-Todd, G.T., Rand, D.G. (2019). Rare and Costly Prosocial Behaviors Are Perceived as Heroic. Frontiers in Psychology, 10(1), 234. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00234.
