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tiny eye search pic # 3 M. C. Escher
What Makes a Hero?
We all have an inner hero, argues Philip Zimbardo. Here's how to find it.
By Philip Zimbardo | January 18, 2011
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The situation provided the impetus to act heroically or malevolently. Why did some people choose one path or the other?
Another key insight from my research has been that there’s no clear line between good and evil. Instead, the line is permeable; people can cross back and forth between it.
This is an idea wonderfully represented in an illusion by M. C. Escher, at left. When you squint and focus on the white as the figures and the black as the background, you see a world full of angels and tutus dancing around happily. But now focus on the black as the figures and the white as the background: Now it’s a world full of demons.
What Escher’s telling us is that the world is filled with angels and devils, goodness and badness, and these dark and light aspects of human nature are our basic yin and yang. That is, we all are born with the capacity to be anything. Because of our incredible brains, anything that is imaginable becomes possible, anything that becomes possible can get transformed into action, for better or for worse.
Some people argue humans are born good or born bad; I think that’s nonsense. We are all born with this tremendous capacity to be anything, and we get shaped by our circumstances—by the family or the culture or the time period in which we happen to grow up, which are accidents of birth; whether we grow up in a war zone versus peace; if we grow up in poverty rather than prosperity.
George Bernard Shaw captured this point in the preface to his great play “Major Barbara”: “Every reasonable man and woman is a potential scoundrel and a potential good citizen. What a man is depends upon his character what’s inside. What he does and what we think of what he does depends on upon his circumstances.”
So each of us may possess the capacity to do terrible things. But we also posses an inner hero; if stirred to action, that inner hero is capable of performing tremendous goodness for others.
Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, a professor at Palo Alto University, a two-time past president of the Western Psychological Association, and a past president of the American Psychological Association. He is also the author of the best-selling book The Lucifer Effect and the president of the Heroic Imagination Project.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_makes_a_hero/
Philip Zimbardo: What Makes a Hero?
87,662 views Jan 12, 2011
Greater Good Science Center
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Philip Zimbardo explores what research knows about
who becomes a hero--and why they act heroically.
https://youtu.be/grMHzqtRm_8
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/profile/philip_zimbardo#articles
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/profile/philip_zimbardo#videos
President of:
https://www.heroicimagination.org/
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