The Hero Project

[The Bard]

Just read this interesting article on neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer's blog about a new initiative operating out of San Fran (which kinda makes it seem more of a hippy ideal...) to use recent studies and discoveries in psychology and neuroscience to "create" a tribe of altruistic "heroes" who rescue kittes from atop trees and help their landladies carry out their garbage...

 

The Hero Project

 

My latest column in the Wall Street Journal is about a new project started by Phil Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford. The goal of the project is simple: Zimbardo wants to use the research of social psychology to create the next generation of heros. There are two things that interest me about this non-profit: 1) We could use more heroes and 2) I’m always interested in any attempt to translate the experimental findings of psychology to the messy real world. Psychology, after all, is a science of human nature – it shouldn’t feel remote or abstract. I think this also has epistemic benefits: The more closely the edge of psychology is “kept squared with experience” (to quote Quine) the less likely we are to indulge in errant theories.

 

Can modern science help us to create heroes? That’s the lofty question behind the Heroic Imagination Project, a new nonprofit started by Phil Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University. The goal of the project is simple: to put decades of experimental research to use in training the next generation of exemplary Americans, churning out good guys with the same efficiency that gangs and terrorist groups produce bad guys.

 

At first glance, this seems like a slightly absurd endeavor. Heroism, after all, isn’t supposed to be a teachable trait. We assume that people like Gandhi or Rosa Parks or the 9/11 hero Todd Beamer have some intangible quality that the rest of us lack. When we get scared and selfish, these brave souls find a way to act, to speak out, to help others in need. That’s why they’re heroes.

 

Mr. Zimbardo rejects this view. “We’ve been saddled for too long with this mystical view of heroism,” he says. “We assume heroes are demigods. But they’re not. A hero is just an ordinary person who does something extraordinary. I believe we can use science to teach people how to do that.”

 

The curriculum, which lasts four weeks and is targeted at adolescents, is rooted in decades of psychological research. (Mr. Zimbardo is best known as the scientist behind the Stanford Prison experiment, which demonstrated that even liberal-minded undergrads can be turned into sadistic prison guards.) After taking a “hero pledge”—research shows that public commitments boost rates of adherence—the “heroes in training” begin their education.

 

The first lessons focus on human frailties, those hard-wired flaws that allow evil to flourish. The students are taught, for instance, about the research of the psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose famous experiment in the early 1960s showed that ordinary people would blindly obey authority and give what they thought were strong electrical shocks to strangers. They are also warned about the bystander effect—our reluctance to help a person in need when others are around—and the prevalence of prejudice. It’s a crash course in all the different tendencies that lead good people astray.

 

After being “fortified against the dark side,” the student heroes are trained to be more empathetic. Most of these lessons revolve around perception, on becoming more attentive to the feelings of others. The students learn how to interpret micro-facial expressions—a fake smile looks different than a real smile—and practice listening to their classmates. Another important lesson revolves around the fundamental attribution error, a prevalent psychological bias in which people neglect the influence of context on behavior. “One of the main reasons we don’t help others is because we assume they deserve what happened to them, that they must have done something wrong,” Mr. Zimbardo says. “But most of the time it’s just the situation playing itself out. We teach people how not to blame the victim.”

 

The next phase of instruction has a grandiose title: “Internalizing the Heroic Imagination.” The students begin studying the behavior of other heroes, past and present. They look at Harry Potter and Abraham Lincoln, Achilles and Martin Luther King. (Mr. Zimbardo is trying to create a “Heropedia,” so that people can search a vast database to find heroes in their neighborhood or age group.) Because human behavior is profoundly shaped by those around us—we are all natural “peer modelers”—the project attempts to give students a more heroic set of peers. “Just look at the Milgram experiment,” Mr. Zimbardo says. “Everybody uses that as an example of how bad people are. But the actual data aren’t so depressing. If subjects watched someone else refuse to issue shocks, then they almost always refused, too. The hero created another hero.”

 

The last step of hero training is the most important. The students begin rehearsing their heroism in the real world, translating the classroom lessons into positive changes. (No cape required.) The students start with baby steps, as they are instructed to do one thing every day that makes someone else feel better. Perhaps it’s complimenting a bus driver, or helping mom make dinner, or spending quality time with grandpa. The goal is to break down the barrier that keeps good intentions from becoming virtuous actions. Though real heroes take risks, Zimbardo notes that one can’t begin with reckless acts of altruism. Courage requires practice.

 

At the moment, the Heroic Imagination Project remains a modest endeavor, operating out of a single storefront in San Francisco. The project has just begun pilot programs at several middle schools and high schools in the Bay Area, with plans to develop additional seminars for business executives and young children next year. After graduating from the course, the heroes will be encouraged to stay in touch via a special online social network, a kind of Facebook for heroes. Mr. Zimbardo also plans on monitoring the long-term effects of the project, as he revises the curriculum to maximize its impact.

 

One day, though, Mr. Zimbardo hopes to have a hero project in every city. “One of the problems with our culture is that we’ve replaced heroes with celebrities,” Mr. Zimbardo says. “We worship people who haven’t done anything. It’s time to get back to focusing on what matters, because we need real heroes more than ever.”

 

So...its interesting, what do you guys think makes a hero? Is it some intrinsic qualities that we are born with or the way we are brought up, or simply the situation that dictates how we act?

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

I like what the article describes. Though I'm more interested in the initial "fortification against the dark side" and empathy training. I believe these elements alone would make the world a better place to live.

[Ashley]

 

Anyway. It kind of loses all respectability by lumping in Harry Potter with people who actually made a difference and aren't a fictional little twat. Or at least in my eyes.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

 

Anyway. It kind of loses all respectability by lumping in Harry Potter with people who actually made a difference and aren't a fictional little twat. Or at least in my eyes.

 

He's better than Achilles, I reckon. Most Greek "heroes" were actually arrogant, selfish twats who were just skilled on the battlefield.

[The Bard]

Haha yeah, the Harry Potter shit was a bit eye roll worthy, but I donno, I think the purpose of the thing was to just create a register of people, fictional and real that have a tendancy to act "selflessly." Of course, I don't believe that there is any real thing such as selflessness, since everything you do and believe is moderated through the self. If you act a certain way, it is first and foremost because you have been trained to associate pleasurable or positive feelings with that action.

 

And yeah, Achilles was a bit of a shit head most of the time.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Haha yeah, the Harry Potter shit was a bit eye roll worthy, but I donno, I think the purpose of the thing was to just create a register of people, fictional and real that have a tendancy to act "selflessly." Of course, I don't believe that there is any real thing such as selflessness, since everything you do and believe is moderated through the self. If you act a certain way, it is first and foremost because you have been trained to associate pleasurable or positive feelings with that action.

 

And yeah, Achilles was a bit of a shit head most of the time.

 

But I think this is exactly the points of this project: To associate positive feelings with "heroic" actions. Whether this is "true selfishness" or not is not actually not that relevant. It's about changing inherent negative traits in human beings.

[The Bard]

Totally, yeah. The thing is, I think theres something to be said for letting those feelings grow organically, because I think the human mind is sophisticated enough to know when its being duped, or when its learning is artifical. What I mean is that I think for these studies to be effective, they should inform how we bring up our children rather than a seemingly rigid four week crash course in heroism. Of course, Lehrer pretty much says that these are humble beginnings so...

 

I also am kinda getting a sense of it usurping the sort of traditional upbringing model centered around the family and cultural heritage. Whether thats good or bad I'm not gonna comment on, but it does seem like it would have the effect of homogenising the actions of people who are taught this stuff...

[heroicjanitor]

If a woman pushes her child out of the way and gets hit by a truck I don't see how she is getting pleasurable feelings from it. You could spin it to be selfish probably but that is in the interests of the child she just gets a truck in the face.

[MoogleViper]

If a woman pushes her child out of the way and gets hit by a truck I don't see how she is getting pleasurable feelings from it. You could spin it to be selfish probably but that is in the interests of the child she just gets a truck in the face.

 

You could say that she was doing it to prevent feeling bad.

 

 

It's all a load of bollocks anyway. It has no relevance. The deeds are what matters. Viewing it optimistically/pessimistically doesn't change a thing.

[The Bard]

If a woman pushes her child out of the way and gets hit by a truck I don't see how she is getting pleasurable feelings from it. You could spin it to be selfish probably but that is in the interests of the child she just gets a truck in the face.

 

Of course, the action you describe is an act of love, which, if you buy a Freudian conception of love (which is sorta corroborated by contemporary neuroscience) being when the subject can no longer tell itself apart from the object of love (ie. feels what they percieve it to feel, vicariously), then yeah, it is a selfish act. And my use of the word "selfish" doesn't have negative connotations, its a simple fact of being human. We do, after all, experience life as ourselves, not through the perspective of anyone else; any attempt to empathise, is hypothetical. This is not to say that our judgement can't be spot on; a lot of the times it is.

 

And by pleasurable feelings, I mean strictly to do with paradigms and belief structures or what psychology calls your "programming" (which everyone has). If your belief structure is centered around human altruism, its inevitably going to reinforce itself whenever you act in an altruistic manner. It works on the basis of pattern recognition; we percieve an event in the external world, and respond how we think we should. If this process results in the conclusion we predicted, our dopamine pathway in the nucleus accumbens is activated; we feel pleasure (which can range from, not even consciously noticable, incredibly subtle, to euphoric) and internalise the series of events which will then further inform how we act in future.

[Jonnas]

Ignoring the raw perspectives of human selfishness/selflessness for now. I hate that kind of discussion.

 

I think this "hero upbringing" project could be something good. I've always defended that anything wrong with any sort of society can be traced to its education/values system (by which I don't mean schools or anything like that. Just culture and moral values), so an effort made to improve society from the root is welcome.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Ignoring the raw perspectives of human selfishness/selflessness for now. I hate that kind of discussion.

 

I think this "hero upbringing" project could be something good. I've always defended that anything wrong with any sort of society can be traced to its education/values system (by which I don't mean schools or anything like that. Just culture and moral values), so an effort made to improve society from the root is welcome.

 

The central point nicely summed up and wrapped in pretty paper.