What makes us good? What makes us evil? We
know a lot about one of these two.
So when I ask about why did some
people to turn evil? Here’s a shopping list.
There is a research in every one: dehumanization,
diffusion of
responsibility, obedience to authority, unjust
system, group pressure, power and control,
moral disengagement—my colleague Al Bandura has
studied this in great detail—and anonymity.
When we ask the question, why do others become
heroic, we don’t have an answer. It could be
compassion, it could be empathy, maybe there’s
a hero gene, maybe oxytocin, the work of Paul
Zak at Claremont, I guess at Claremont McKenna,
showing that this mother-love chemical in
the brain increases the likelihood you behave
empathic or altruistic, but heroism is something
different, as we’ll see.
The interesting thing, what we do know about,
is the very same situation that enflames
the hostile imagination in some people making
them villains—war corruption, fraud—instills
the heroic imagination in other people to do
heroic deeds. So Christians who helped Jews
in the Holocaust were in the same situation as the
Nazis and other people other civilians
work to imprison Jews. Few people do
evil; fewer people act heroically. Between these
extremes in the bell curve of humanity are
the masses, the general population who do nothing,
who do no imagination at all. In thinking
about it, I’m going to call these reluctant heroes,
who refuse the call to action, and we know by doing
nothing when something is needed, they implicitly
support the perpetrators of evil.
Edmond Burke says, “All that matters for
evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”
So on this bell curve of humanity, villains
and heroes are the outliers. I’m going to say the
reluctant heroes are the rest. And our job
is, how do we give a call to service of
the general
population. How do we make them aware of the
evil that exists? How do we make them, at
the same time, how do we prevent people on
the evil side, the people who promote these
these evil systems, to keep them from seducing them to
their side? When we do, we convert the “me” into
the “we” because the egocentric “me”
has to become a sociocentric “we.”
Heroism is about one thing: It’s about a
concern for other people in need, a concern
to develop, to defending a moral cause knowing there
is a personal cause or risk. That’s the key.
And you do it without expectation of reward. So
altruism is heroism light. Compassion is a
virtue that may lead to heroism, but we don’t know.
Nobody’s established said link. So we want
to have
new research looking at these links. Uh. Which
leader would you follow? It could all depend
on the circumstances. You like to not believe
that, but here are these great leaders also with
their masses clearly obeying them. There are
many ways for ordinary people to become evil,
to become heroic, I’m sorry.
The equal number, that’s another side, so
here’s just a quick run-through. We know
that the Chinese student—the tank man—who
stopped this
row of tanks from coming, crushing, killing
Chinese students who were simply there saying,
"We want our freedom.” We know in 911
the firefighters from Brooklyn from
Brooklyn Heights Fire Department did extraordinary
deeds of heroism. In fact, when I was president of APA,
I gave a presidential citation to Richie Murray on behalf of the other firefighters.
But these are these are men who show extraordinary
courage essentially in battle or in disaster.
Abu Ghraib stopped because this guy—the
most
ordinary guy in the world, Joe Darby—his
buddy showed him this CD. He looked at it,
and he was horrified. He said, we’re supposed to
be bringing dignity to these people, we’re
humiliating them. He took that. He’s a private in the
army reserve, gave it to his senior investigating officer:
“Sir, you have to investigate this,” and
that whistle blowing had great cost to him.
They had to put
him in hiding for 3 years, and his mother,
and his wife because not only people in his battalion wanted to kill him,
people in his little hometown in Pennsylvania
wanted to kill them because they embarrassed
the military and the Bush administration.
Here's a wonderful kid, a 9-year-old. I call
him a dutiful hero. In 2008,
there was a massive earthquake in Schezuan
province. The ceiling fell down on a school, killing
almost all the kids. He escaped, and as he was
running away, he noticed two kids struggling
to get out.
He ran back and saved them. They said, “Why
did you do that?” He said, “I was the hall monitor!
"It was my duty, it was my job to look after
my classmates!”
So this is gonna become really important in
a minute, when I talk about our new project:
the Heroic Imagination Project. We think that
heroism starts with this imagination, with
this focus on the other. What can I do? What is
my obligation to society?
Irena Sendler was a Polish hero, a Catholic
who documented saved at least 2,500 Jewish
kids who were holed up in the Warsaw Ghetto
that the Nazis erected before they brought 
people in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
She went in and had to convince Jewish parents
to give her their kids because she’s saying
the kids are gonna die. We will, we will,
we will try to
hook them up with you if everybody
lives. And she was able to, to smuggle out,
2,500 kids, but what she did—and this is critical—she
organized the network.
So one of the principles of the talk, heroes
are most effective not alone, not the, the
soldier in, in battle who takes a bullet for
his buddy, but forming a network.
Now, the other thing is the evil
of inaction. We said few people do evil, fewer
act heroically. Most people, most of the time,
do nothing. And that’s the ones we have
to focus on.
Both the greater good and our heroic imagination
project. Dante says, “The hottest places in hell
are reserved for those who, in times of great moral
crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
Martin Luther King
says, “We must learn that passively to accept
an unjust system is to cooperate with that system
were forced to watch Serbs brutally
rape gypsy girls, and they were not allowed to
intervene. I met one of these guys who still
has, years later, post-traumatic stress disorder.
Canadian forces in Rwanda witnessed the same thing and because they were peacekeeping
were not allowed to intervene, and many of
these people have long-lasting psychological consequences.
Here’s a very different kind of hero. “On
the New York City subway,
it’s hard enough finding someone who will
give up his seat to a stranger, let alone be willing to
give up his life for one. ‘The train was
coming in like that. It happened just ...'
50-year-old Wesley Autrey—a construction worker and
navy veteran—was standing on a subway platform
with his two little girls when right in front
of them, a man started having a seizure. 
'He kind of stumbled off his own
feet and fall backwards. I see the train
coming, but the train is so close. I’m like,
what do I do?’
Wesley jumped onto the tracks and thought
if he could just lie on top of the man, keep
him from
flailing, maybe the train would roll right
over them. The clearance was exactly 21 inches.
and the man? 20 and a half. ‘There’s no
way the train can stop before this gentleman could get 
and the man? 20 and a half. ‘There’s no
way the train can stop before this gentleman
him up off the tracks, so he covered him with his body and pushed him down to a point where the
train wouldn’t hit his head and held him
down under the tracks while the train came
and rolled
right over the top.’ It gave Wesley’s
children the scare of their young lives. ‘I
was scared he was
going to get killed.’ And Wesley, the scare of
his, too. ‘I’m like talking to him, sir, you can’t move, I got two
kids up here looking for their father to
come back. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me,
but don’t panic. I’m here to save you.’
As for the guy Wesley saved? He’s 20-year-old
Cameron Hollopeter, and other than a few scrapes and
bruises his father says, he’s doing fine.
'Mr. Autrey's instinctive and unselfish act saved our son’s
life.’ You know, the word hero gets thrown around
a lot nowadays. 'What a better a way to 
start off the New Year than to say you saved a life.'
Nice to be reminded of what one really looks
like.” Steve Hartman, CBS News, New York.
So what, what it looks like it's the most
ordinary person in the world, he’s 50 years
old, he’s never done anything like that.
There were 75 people on the platform, and the
question to
psychologists is, could you have picked him out, and I don’t think so.
