My Stanford psychology professor, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, and Zeno Franco, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology at Pacific Graduate School of Psychology wrote a terrific article called “The Banality of Heroism.”
Dr. Zimbardo ran the (in)famous Stanford Prison Experiment, so he knows how circumstances can make good people do bad things. This article is different—it’s concerned with how ordinary people can do heroic things. One example in the article is Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara (pictured here) who helped more than 6,000 Jewish people escape from Lithuania during World War II.
The short explanation of what it takes to be a hero is the presence of “heroic imagination” which the authors describe as “the capacity to imagine facing physically or socially risky situations, to struggle with the hypothetical problems these situations generate, and to consider one’s actions and the consequences.” Nurturing a heroic imagination takes five actions:
See full Article.
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