This is a question posed in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal about the Heroic Imagination Project. It is a new project founded by Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Dr. Zimbardo is perhaps best know for his work leading the famous Stanford Prison Study.

The Heroic Imagination Project website says,

What leaves so many people silent and paralyzed in the face of injustice or physical peril? Is heroic behavior a rare exception to the norms of human nature?

We at the Heroic Imagination Project believe the answer is absolutely not. We believe heroism can be learned by example and reinforced with practice.

Yet an article in The Telegraph in February of last year has a different story. It is about a presentation given by Professor Deane Aikins, a psychiatrist at Yale University, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. He asserted that “Heroes are born not made” based on a study which found “some people just naturally have more grace under fire”.

All of this is very interesting to me. After all, what is “a hero”? Joseph Campbell, in his book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” presents the idea of the monomyth, the basic pattern found in many stories about heroes. Perhaps ‘hero’ is a literary and social construct.

As I discussed this with friends, one person noted there are women are less frequently presented as heroic exemplars, and that perhaps the concept of a ‘hero’ is not only a literary and social construct, but it is a construct of a patriarchal society. My friend pointed to Miriam Polster’s book, Eve’s Daughters: The Forbidden Heroism of Women. In a subsequent email, she cited the definition of hero from Wikipedia, “A hero is a person who performs extraordinary deeds for the benefit of others.”

This returns us nicely to the idea of “hero” as a social construct. What is extraordinary? What people from one group might consider extraordinary, people from another group might find ordinary, and perhaps many people go through their daily lives doing what seems ordinary to themselves while people around them find what they are doing extraordinary.

Another friend responded that perhaps heroes are realized. I like this idea. Therapy can be a means of helping people recognize their own heroism. Helping people to write, to find their voices can be a means of helping people recognize their own heroism. Such recognition can inspire others to move beyond the ordinary as well.

This friend also raised for me the question of how Zimbardo’s latest effort is really that different than encouraging people to practice random acts of kindness.

Whether it is ordinary or extraordinary, recognized or not, or labeled heroic, encouraging people to be a little kinder and show a little more compassion is something we all ought to be doing.