THE ROMANCE OF HEROISM AND HEROIC

LEADERSHIP
THE ROMANCE OF HEROISM AND HEROIC
LEADERSHIP

BY

GEORGE R. GOETHALS
and

SCOTT T. ALLISON
University of Richmond
Emerald Publishing Limited
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First edition 2019
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 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
About the Authors

1. Introduction: The Romance of Heroism

2. Mystery and Meaning: Ambiguity and the Perception of Leaders, Heroes,

and Villains

3. The Three Kings: Dissent and Evolving Perceptions of Heroism

4. Heroic Transforming Leadership: Touching the Better Angels of Our

Nature

5. How Heroes Transform Themselves and the World

6. Conclusion: Resolving Ambiguity to Discern and Create True Heroes

References
Index
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For over a decade now we have tried to penetrate the complexities in the
way people choose and perceive their heroes. At the same time, we have
tried to outline carefully how people go beyond the ordinary to transform
themselves in heroes. This books represents our efforts to integrate these
two elements of heroism science. What constitutes and defines heroism, and
how do people construct larger than life images of and stories about the
extraordinary people they deem to be heroes? In attempting to answer these
questions we have been supported by many colleagues, family, and friends.
We are grateful to Dean Sandra Peart of the Jepson School of Leadership
Studies and our fellow faculty members Kristin Bezio, Peter Kaufman, and
Terry Price at Jepson and Karyn Kuhn, Camilla Nonterah, Matt Lowder,
Kristjen Lundberg, Lisa Jobe-Shields, Karen Kochel, and Laura Knouse in
the Department of Psychology. Elizabeth DeBusk-Maslanka has been
exceptionally helpful in all aspects of editing this volume. She has been a
source of wisdom and great generosity. Stephanie Trent helps in many ways
to make it easier to do our work, and we are grateful.
At Emerald, we wish to thank Charlotte Maiorana for her interest and
support and Charlie Wilson for her wonderful step-by-step guidance
through the production process. You have made working with Emerald most
rewarding.
Our families have had our backs throughout the months we have
worked on this project. In particular, our heroic wives, Marion and Connie,
have sustained the romance of marriage that enables us to do our work. We
are forever grateful.
 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

George R. Goethals holds the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished

Professorship in Leadership Studies at the Jepson School of Leadership
Studies at the University of Richmond, Virginia. Previously at Williams
College he served as Chair of the Department of Psychology, Founding
Chair of the Program in Leadership Studies, and Provost. His recent books
include Presidential Leadership and African Americans: “An American
Dilemma” from Slavery to Freedom (Routledge, 2015) and Realignment,
Region and Race: Presidential Leadership and Social Identity (Emerald
Publishing, 2018). With Scott Allison, he has written about heroes and
heroic leadership.
Scott T. Allison is Professor of Psychology at the University of Richmond.
He has authored numerous books, including Heroes (OUP, 2011) and
Heroic Leadership (Routledge, 2013). His other books include Heroic
Humility (American Psychological Association, 2018), Reel Heroes &
Villains (Agile Writer Press, 2015), Conceptions of Leadership (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014), Frontiers in Spiritual Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan,
2016), and the Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership (Routledge,
2016). His work has appeared in USA Today, National Public Radio, The
New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Slate Magazine, MSNBC, CBS,
Psychology Today, and The Christian Science Monitor. He has received
Richmond’s “Distinguished Educator Award” and the Virginia Council of
Higher Education’s “Outstanding Faculty Award.”
 CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: THE ROMANCE OF

HEROISM

In the last decade, an exciting new field of study has emerged. Its subject is
heroes and heroism. It is fast growing, multidisciplinary, and international.
There is now enough of a corpus of scholarship to warrant referring to these
various studies as constituting a scholarly discipline of heroism science.
One manifestation of this new domain of study is the new journal, Heroism
Science. Two other signs are new special issues on heroes and heroism in
the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and in Frontiers in Psychology.
Another is the 2017 publication of the Handbook of Heroism and Heroic
Leadership. There is also a new biennial conference series in Heroism
Science, the first held in Perth, Australia, in 2016, and the second in
Richmond, Virginia, USA, in 2018. We have been privileged to be part of
this new research endeavor.
Heroism Science includes a sprawling set of theoretical and empirical
explorations of who heroes are, how they develop, what they do, and what
they’re like. In short, these studies explore what makes heroes tick. Two
illustrative studies from this vast domain of research are Walker’s (2017)
exploration of the moral character of individuals who step up as heroes and
Franco’s (2017) work on heroic leadership in times of crisis. Another,
smaller body of work examines how people think about heroes. Who comes
to mind when people are asked to name heroes? What traits do heroes have?
What do people believe heroes do? For example, scholars have explored
how perceived heroes inspire or motivate the people who admire them
(Kinsella, Ritchie, & Igou, 2017), how groups identify moral heroes
(Decter-Frain, Vanstone, & Frimer, 2017), and the way people construct
heroic images of underdogs (Vandello, Goldschmied, & Michniewicz,
2017).
Our own work has considered both sets of questions. Who are heroes,
what defines heroism, and how do people think about heroes? However,
most of our writings have focused on the latter set of questions, questions
about how people construct perceptions of heroes. In taking this approach,
we have perhaps stubbornly resisted defining what heroism is. We do note
that many of the heroes people name are fictional. Some of them are so-
called superheroes, while others are characters such as Arthur Conan
Doyle’s “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes, or the protagonist Rick
Blaine in the classic 1942 film Casablanca, played by Humphrey Bogart.
While the array of fictional and real people, from the past or still living,
who are named as heroes is immense, there are two central attributes of
these perceived heroes. They are almost always highly moral, and they are
generally very competent and effective. These qualities are central to the
“great eight traits” of heroism that emerge from our studies. Heroes are seen
as Smart, Strong, Selfless, Caring, Charismatic, Resilient, Reliable, and
Inspiring. These findings have prompted us to assert that heroism is in the
eye of the beholder. Again, we resist specifying the defining qualities of
heroes ourselves, or naming people as heroes.
Consistent with this approach, we think, we do mention our own heroes
in the dedications of our books. In our first book, we acknowledged our
grandmothers, but clearly do not believe that anyone else is likely to regard
them as heroic. We dedicate our second book to the memory of much
better-known heroes, the baseball player Roberto Clemente, and US
President Abraham Lincoln. In calling Clemente and Lincoln heroes in the
preceding sentence, we must note that they are heroes in our eyes. That
doesn’t make them heroes in any objective sense. We can make a case for
their heroism in terms of morality and effectiveness, but others might
disagree. We are well aware that in our home city of Richmond, Virginia,
capital of the Confederate States during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln is
perhaps a villain to many. So while we do not designate on the basis of
scholarly expertise particular individuals as heroes, we cherish our own
heroes.
This general perspective informs the current approach that we call the
romance of heroes. Merriam-Webster defines the noun form of romance as
an emotional attraction, or special quality or feeling that comes from a
person, place, or thing. The verb form of romance is to exaggerate or invent
detail. This book explores these processes as they operate in our human
perception of heroism. We assume that people are motivated to actively
construct reality from incomplete information. There is a long history of
theory and research in social perception and social cognition to support this
idea (Fiske & Taylor, 2013). We also assume, based on our own research,
that people are motivated to have heroes (Allison & Goethals, 2011). Our
contention in this book is that our love of heroes is so strong that we could
call it a romantic longing. Merriam-Webster reminds us that this longing is
a strong emotional attraction that may cause mental exaggeration or
invention. Our desire and drive to designate people as heroes may be
subject to distortion and to motivated perception under conditions of
uncertainty. We’ll also explore how this tendency to exaggerate or invent in
response to strong motives can contribute to our construction of villains as
well as heroes.
From our review of the Heroism Science literature, we find only one
other scholarly article regarding how people may use uncertain and
ambiguous circumstances to create heroes. Kinsella, Igou, and Ritchie
(2017) proposed a model of meaning-making in which they argue the
following: “When events or affective states threaten or reduce a person’s
sense of meaning, psychological processes are mobilized to serve the goals
of meaning maintenance and meaning reestablishment” (p. 1). According to
Kinsella et al., one specific state that triggers a search for meaning is a
situation with high uncertainty. The authors argue that uncertainty leads
people to seek heroes who will provide such meaning. In this book, we
extend Kinsella et al.’s ideas by exploring in considerable detail how
ambiguity begets heroism – and villainy as well. It may sound strange that
people are as driven to construct villainy as they are for heroism from
uncertainty, but there is a wealth of social psychological research pointing
to our strong need to resolve ambiguity at all costs – even if it means
distorting the world by seeing it as darker than it really is.
 Our second chapter on “Mystery and Meaning” explores how basic
processes of social perception, cognition, and motivation operate in
people’s processing of limited or ambiguous information about individuals,
groups, or circumstances. We focus on the perception of individuals who
might be heroes or villains. Our third chapter on “The Three Kings” centers
on three men who had a profound impact on American culture in the late
twentieth century: Martin Luther King, Jr, Elvis Presley, and Muhammad
Ali. Here we describe how Americans’ motives shifted from initially seeing
these men as villains to eventually seeing them as heroes. Our fourth
chapter on “Heroic Transforming Leadership” explores the ways that
leaders activate and elevate followers’ motives and morality to achieve
group goals. We discuss Donald Trump as an example of less morally
developed leadership. Finally, our fifth chapter on “Heroic Transformation”
examines how people transform into heroes. Here we describe the
psychological processes responsible for people’s metamorphosis into their
best, most heroic selves.
There are two conceptual threads uniting all these chapters. The first
main thread is the manner in which people tend to weave together a story of
heroism or villainy from incomplete information in their social
environments. The second thread is that there exists a transcendent type of
leadership that we call heroic transforming leadership. This highest level of
leadership plays a crucial role in guiding people through these states of
social uncertainty. We hope you will appreciate as much as we do how the
machinations of the mind can produce our most prized heroes as well as our
most abhorred villains.
 CHAPTER 2

MYSTERY AND MEANING: AMBIGUITY AND

THE PERCEPTION OF LEADERS, HEROES,
AND VILLAINS

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the
Baskervilles, Dr Mortimer reads aloud the lengthy manuscript describing
the huge canine that years before had ripped out the throat of Sir Hugo
Baskerville at the conclusion of a night of debauchery. The manuscript was
written by one of Sir Hugo’s descendants as a warning about the curse that
still seems to haunt the clan. It concludes “Such is the tale, my sons, of the
coming of the hound which is said to have plagued the family so sorely ever
since. If I have set it down it is because that which is clearly known hath
less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed” (Doyle, 1901,
italics added). This passage is but one of many in fiction that seem to
illustrate that the unknown or partially revealed can be terrifying. Often
they suggest villainy. But not always. We wish to argue here that depending
on context, mystery can arouse either thoughts of frightening danger and
villains, or positive, hopeful expectations and images of wonder, awe, and
heroic leadership. We will explore theory and research on the cognitive and
motivational elements that combine with mystery to make meaning, often
resulting in cognitive constructions of heroes or villains, security or threat,
and good or evil.
Mystery is perceived uncertainty or ambiguity resulting from partial
information about a person, object, situation, or event. It is experienced in
people’s minds. Mystery may be ignored or suppressed, but often it
generates arousal, positive or negative, fear or hope, and the search for
answers. In this way, such arousal and uncertainty can stimulate meaning-
making (Kinsella, Igou et al., 2017). Sometimes this occurs automatically,
following principles well-defined by perception and social cognition
research. Or, it may be undertaken deliberately, through vigilance and
information seeking, perhaps through one’s own individual inquiries, or
through some kind of informal social communication or social comparison.
Thus a hint, suggestion, or clue may lead people to construct mystery or
ambiguity resolving answers in the form of images, beliefs, or conclusions,
with or without the acquisition of new information.
In many cases, the mystery and its cognitive resolution may involve
leaders or potential leaders, who are also potential heroes or villains. A
further example from fiction provides an illustration of mystery surrounding
a frightening potential villain whom social comparison information reveals
to be a hero. The classic Western song Big Iron (Robbins, 1959)1 describes
a mysterious figure who rides into town holstering a large gun. Then people
talk and rumors spread, as townspeople strive to get a fix on the mysterious
individual, before it turns out that the outsider is an Arizona lawman out to
get a vicious killer, and he becomes transformed by local residents into a
hero, himself in grave danger from the villain of the song. Of course the
transformed stranger/ranger prevails in the last verse.
Resolving mystery through meaning-making is, of course, one facet of
the more general human tendency to take small bits of information and
engage in some kind of cognitive construction that feels as if it makes sense
or meaning out of what is known or perceived.

MEANING-MAKING: THE BASICS

While our focus here is on mystery leading to constructions of potential

leaders, heroes, or villains, and Big Iron provides one example of how this
might happen, such hero/villain constructions are only one instance of the
many ways that partial information is used by active human information
processors to construct thoughts (images, perceptions, beliefs, schemas, and
conclusions) that go far beyond the original information.
A good starting point is the early work in the Gestalt psychology
tradition which emphasized this fundamental point. Kurt Koffka famously
wrote, “The whole is other than the sum of the parts” (not greater than the
sum of the parts (Dewey, 2007, p. 178)). Gestalt means “unified whole” and
Gestalt theorists attempted “to describe how people tend to organize visual
elements into groups or unified wholes” (p. 178). Of particular relevance is
the Gestalt principle of “closure” which states that when visual information
is incomplete, perceivers fill in the blanks (or connect the dots) to construct
a whole or complete image. The way they fill them in is often determined
by context. One classic example is a constellation of an incomplete and
ambiguous vertical line with two left facing loops to its right. The separated
elements appear to be the number 13 when the ambiguous figures appear in
a sequence of 11, 12, […], 14, 15. However they appear to make the letter B
when they appear in a sequence of A, […], C, D. This is but one illustration
of active perceivers quickly, and in this case automatically, completing an
ambiguous visual stimulus, rendering it whole to give it meaning. In the
sections that follow, we will first consider meaning-making that occurs
without any sense of mystery or ambiguity. Sometimes such meaning-
making involves heroes and leaders, sometimes not. Sometimes motives
guide the meaning-making, sometimes not. Sometimes the meaning-making
creates novel schemas which guide the sense made of new information, and
sometimes the meaning-making is guided by existing schemas or
archetypes that are activated by initial information. We will then consider
instances such as those in our Hound of the Baskervilles and Big Iron
examples where people are consciously trying to make sense of incomplete
information which has created feelings of mystery and aroused motivations
or emotions leading to meaning-making. Again, sometimes such mystery
may involve potential leaders, or potential heroes or villains.

Automatic Meaning-Making

The Gestalt “closure” principle provides one basic illustration of the way
people process incomplete, ambiguous information. More complex but
essentially similar examples of “filling in the blanks” are seen in many
studies of the role of schemas in social perception. People notice
information that is consistent with their schemas, and often ignore or distort
information that is inconsistent. They will perceive attributes consistent
with their schemas even when there is no such information presented. A
fascinating example of the working of schemas is supplied by baseball
statistician Bill James. A gifted writer, James discusses baseball writers’
perceptions of Chicago Cubs MVP and Hall of Fame shortstop, Ernie
Banks. Banks was a prolific home run hitter, but because the image of a
home run hitter (large, slow, muscle bound) is different from the image of a
smooth fielding shortstop (quick, lithe), Banks was never given credit for
also being a great fielder, which he was, as well as a power hitter (James,
1985). People’s schema-guided social perceptions often seem to illustrate
the quip about how scientists ignore data that contradict their hypotheses:
“If the data don’t fit the theory, so much the worse for the data.” Fielding
statistics did not dent supposed experts’ image of Banks as an indifferent
shortstop.
People’s tendency to allow their preconceived stereotypes to color their
social judgments is illustrated in Malcolm Gladwell’s (2007) discussion of
the Warren Harding Error in his book Blink. Warren Harding, one of the
worst presidents of the United States, was nominated and elected in 1920
partly because he so looked the part. His physique, bronzed complexion,
sonorous voice, and smooth motions activated the leader or even hero
schema such that voters saw him as kind, intelligent, honest, etc. They filled
in the missing pieces of the “leader schema” so as to see the whole leader
package. The tendency to do so may have been accentuated by the need for
a charismatic leader many Americans might have felt during the turbulent
post-World War I financial panic, the ensuing influenza epidemic, and the
“red scare.” Such a need could have strengthened automatic tendencies to
take a little bit of leader-related information and make a great deal of it; in
this case, far too much.
An example from the US Civil War shows how new information
combined with the need for a leader can lead to the automatic
reinterpretation of earlier information in a way that would satisfy that need.
In March of 1864, the fourth year of the Civil War, a very ordinary looking
Union Officer and a young boy approached the registration desk of the
prestigious Willard Hotel in Washington, DC. One observer commented that
the soldier he had seen had “rather a scrubby look withal […] as if he was
out of office and on half pay.” The desk clerk treated him casually, nearly
disdainfully, until he saw the officer’s signature in the hotel register: “U.S.
Grant & son, Galena, Illinois.” The greatest Union hero had finally arrived
in the nation’s capital. Now everything changed. The bystander then took a
second look and “The ‘blue eye’ became a ‘clear blue eye’, and the once
stolid-seeming face took on ‘a look of resolution’, as if he could not be
trifled with” (Foote, 1974, p. 4). Grant was never very impressive looking,
but his appearance was certainly more heroic when the hopeful observer
knew he who he was.
Social identity theory suggests another way that people can take small
amounts of information and automatically construct perceptions of leaders
(Hogg, 2001). This approach suggests that group members come to be
perceived as leaders not only on the basis of having qualities that activate a
leader schema, such as Warren Harding apparently did, but also on the basis
of perceived prototypicality. Psychological groups are defined by a
prototype, a “multidimensional fuzzy set” of attributes specifying the
group’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Group members are perceived
along a prototypicality gradient, such that they are seen as being more or
less prototypical of the group in terms of its defining attributes. The
prototypicality gradient has implications for perceptions of leadership.
Prototypes exert conformity pressures such that group members, to the
extent that the prototype is salient, will attempt to conform to the beliefs,
attitudes, and behaviors that the prototype specifies. Members of a college
sorority, for example, will conform to the prototype defining how to dress,
how to party, how to balance social and academic activities, and how to
participate in philanthropic activities. Because the most prototypical group
member will have to change her/his behavior less than less-prototypical
group members, it will appear as if the latter are following the lead of the
former, and that the former is the group leader, even if she/he has not
attempted to influence anyone else in the group or otherwise lead it.
Furthermore, once a person is perceived to be the leader on the basis of
prototypicality, other qualities of leadership, such as charisma, may be
attributed to the individual in ways that solidify her/his status as a leader.
 It is easy to see how having both prototypical qualities as well as
attributes that fit the leader schema gives an individual a significant
advantage in asserting leadership. Sigmund Freud summarized this edge in
stating of an aspiring leader, “He need only possess the typical qualities of
the individuals concerned in a particularly clearly marked and pure form,
and need only give an impression of greater force […]” to exert influence.
In that case, Freud argued the group’s need for a leader would “invest him
with a predominance to which he would otherwise perhaps have had no
claim” (Freud, 1921, p. 101). One can imagine how helpful it was for
leaders like George Washington or Andrew Jackson, who were arguably
highly prototypical among American men of their time and certainly gave
an impression of “greater force,” to be able to assert both military and
political leadership, and to be endowed with heroic qualities by many of
their followers – and villainous qualities by others.
Classic work on primacy effects in impression formation also illustrates
automatic meaning-making when perceiving a person about whom there is
some mystery. An early study by Asch (1946) presented participants with
information about a person described as follows: envious, stubborn, critical,
impulsive, industrious, and intelligent. We suggest that the reader pause
here and form an impression of this individual. Then consider that other
participants were presented with the same information in reverse order. The
person was described as intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical,
stubborn, and envious. The person characterized by the list in the second
order, which begins with a positive trait, intelligent, and then lists
increasingly negative attributes, is viewed more positively than a person
described by the list starting with “envious.” As a reader, you may get your
own sense that the impressions suggested by the two lists are different, and
are more heavily influenced by the earlier information than the latter. This
is the classic primacy effect. Perceivers resolve mystery about a new person
they encounter by forming impressions on the basis of the initial
information they get and then interpreting later information in line with the
evolving impression.
Another primacy effect study illustrates making meaning from partial
information in a more dramatic and somewhat more realistic manner.
Participants read two paragraphs about Jim that were woven together to
present one complete description. One paragraph described an extraverted
Jim, who went out of his way to interact with other people, while the other
described an introverted Jim, who crossed a street to avoid others. When
participants read the combined paragraphs with the extraverted piece first,
they perceived Jim as more extraverted than when they read the combined
paragraphs with the introverted piece first. Participants made meaning out
of the initial information and used that construction as a framework to
interpret what came later. More interesting, participants also made
inferences about how assertive Jim would be based on what they read,
finding him more likely to stand up for himself when they read the
extraverted information first. They consciously or unconsciously
extrapolated from the initial impressions they formed to make further
inferences about how Jim would behave (Luchins & Luchins, 1986).
A later research tradition in social perception illustrates the ubiquity of
meaning-making. Attribution theories outlined the elaborate causal analyses
that perceivers might go through in order to decide whether a target’s
behavior reflects something about herself or himself, or whether it reflects
forces in the situation (Kelley, 1972). However, studies have shown that
perceivers do not in fact follow the logic of causal analysis but rather jump
to conclusions about the person even when the situation provides an equally
plausible explanation for the behavior. As Fritz Heider put it decades ago,
behavior often “engulfs the field,” such that people fail to notice or think
about external circumstances (Heider, 1958). People seem to make
“spontaneous trait inferences” (Winter & Uleman, 1984). They take a small
amount of information and run with it, making meaning that other available
information should logically cast doubt on it.
An especially interesting study reveals some subtleties in the way
people do and do not use partial information to construct an image or draw
a conclusion (Darley & Gross, 1983). In one variation, participants were
shown videos of a young girl that revealed her socioeconomic background,
either working class or upper-middle class. Then they were asked to predict
how she would perform on a difficult math test. In this case, participants
seemed to suspend whatever social class stereotypes they might have had.
Performance predictions for the girl were the same in the two social class
conditions. In completely different variations, participants were shown not
only the photo of the little girl, and the areas surrounding her home, they
were also shown a video of her working on the math test. All participants,
regardless of what they had been led to believe about her background, saw
the same video of the little girl working through the test items. In line with
typical class stereotypes, subjects who thought she was from a working-
class background perceived her to be struggling more and ultimately
performing worse than those who thought she came from the more
privileged background. The information about social class provided an
interpretive frame for making sense out of the performance film. While
people may consciously refrain from making snap judgments, when they
begin processing further information the tendency to make inferences based
on initial information seems irresistible.
We can see the same kind of completion tendency and schema-driven
construction in perceptions of leaders. Research on implicit leadership
theories (Emrich, 1999; Kenney, Blascovich, & Shaver, 1994) or leadership
schemas provides a useful framework. Leadership schemas contain three
elements: beliefs about the characteristics or traits of leaders, beliefs about
what leaders do, and beliefs about what leaders cause, or leadership
causality. The first two elements are similar to schemas or stereotypes about
other social categories. We have expectations or beliefs about how
individuals such as men, women, athletes, nerds, African Americans, sales
people, etc. act and what traits they have. And we have such schemas about
leaders. The causal element of leader schemas is somewhat different.
People tend to see leaders as causing group success or failure. This has been
referred to as the romance of leadership (Meindl, Ehrlich, & Dukerich,
1985). When a group does well, that’s because it has good leadership. When
the group is floundering, blame the person in charge. So we have the
romantic schema that a good leader can turn things around, and make things
better. The romance of leadership is an attribution bias that is reminiscent of
the well-known correspondence bias (Gilbert & Jones, 1986), also known
as the fundamental attribution error. Just as we tend to attribute an
individual’s successes or failures to his or her personal qualities, we tend to
attribute a group’s successes or failures to its leader’s personal qualities.
An important study by Emrich (1999) explores the implications of the
romance of leadership bias and illustrates how the need for a leader,
unconscious or unconscious, can lead people to construct leader perceptions
on the basis of limited information and to assimilate available information
into a leader perception. Participants were given a description of a work
group that was doing well or was having difficulty (a Tranquil or Troubled
group). Their job, they were told, was to choose between two candidates for
membership in the group. Before they were given information about the
first candidate, they were given information about a previous group
member, so, they were told, they could become familiar with the kind of
information they would be reading about the candidates. There are two
important results. First, participants who were evaluating candidates for a
Troubled group saw more leadership potential in the one candidate they
actually read about than those responsible for a Tranquil group. The fact
that the group was in trouble activated a need for a leader, and people saw
leadership qualities when they wanted to. Second, and more revealing about
the cognitive construction of leader images, people in the Troubled group
systematically misremembered leadership-relevant information about the
earlier group member as pertaining to the candidate, but not so much
unrelated information. Participants in the Tranquil group condition did not
show this biased false recognition pattern.

The Search for Mystery Resolving Information

Until now, we have been considering how people form impressions of

people – both leaders and non-leaders – automatically, when there is no
experience of mystery. When people do experience uncertainty or mystery,
they may search for further information, just as we saw with the worried
and mystified townspeople in Big Iron. This may be particularly likely as
seen in The Hound of the Baskervilles, when partial information suggests
trouble.
One example of mystery leading to information seeking comes from
classic studies of rumor transmission by Allport and Postman (1947). Their
research led to the so-called basic law of rumor which states that the
likelihood of rumors spreading depends on the importance of something
about which there is uncertainty, and the ambiguity surrounding it. A
college student hearing rumors that her Professor in a required course may
or may not be harshly grading an exam she just took might be receptive to
rumors about the Professor’s grading, and also quite likely to repeat,
embellish, or slant whatever she hears. In short, I (importance) × A
(ambiguity) predicts rumor strength, or the likelihood that it will spread, as
people try to make sense of the ambiguity. Later research by Rosnow and
Foster (2005) distinguished “dread rumors” versus “wish rumors.”
Ambiguity or partial information may trigger hopes or fears, depending on
the specific information received and the context.
Two research traditions are relevant. Studies of collective behavior
(Milgram & Toch, 1969) point out the prevalence of rumors in crowd
situations, reflecting the efforts of individuals in crowds attempting to make
sense of what is happening in a situation of high arousal and ambiguity. In
Roger Brown’s (1965) sketch of a lynching in Leeville, Texas, in 1930,
rumors spread about the extent to which a potential lynching victim would
be protected by law enforcement. Similarly, in 1974, when Evel Knievel
attempted to rocket his motorcycle across the Snake River Canyon, Time
magazine described a volatile situation where rumors of violence spread
through the “gathered tribes” of spectators (Evel Knievel, 1974). In both
instances, the rumors seemed to reflect in part people’s search for
ambiguity-reducing information. Importantly, they can also be seen as
reflecting people resolving the ambiguity by jumping to conclusions about
what has happened or will happen. The rumors that they receive or transmit
typically reflect their fears or their hopes.
One particularly interesting and ultimately important insight from the
study of rumor transmission paved the way for Leon Festinger (1957) to
develop his theory of cognitive dissonance. In an interview recorded in
1975, Festinger stated that he was surprised that studies of rumors in India
following natural disasters showed that stories of death and destruction
were more prevalent in areas outside the stricken sites than in the
immediately affected area. Festinger wondered why people would spread
rumors that caused them to be frightened. His conclusion was that the
rumors were not in fact fear-arousing, they were fear-justifying. He noted
that the people in surrounding areas were already frightened, but there was
no specific reason for them to be frightened. They needed something to
justify their fears, and thus they spread rumors of forthcoming disasters.
Festinger ran with the insight that people require cognitions that justify
what they feel and what they do. Thus, cognitive dissonance theory was
born. For present purposes, the relevance here is that rumors can reflect the
efforts of people seeking information to understand what is happening, or
their efforts to convince themselves or others of some explanation for the
ambiguity. Mystery and uncertainty lead to the seeking of explanations and
the constructive manufacture of explanations.
The classic Hadley Cantril study of The Invasion from Mars (1940)
provides another example of people facing ambiguous potential threats,
wherein all seek further information or explanation and also jump to
conclusions to resolve the uncertainty. Thousands of people listening to
Orson Wells’ 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast worried that New Jersey
was actually being invaded by Martians. But they were unsure. This was a
classic high importance × high ambiguity situation that might have led to
rumor transmission. But some people sought information on their own and
made their own interpretations. There were wide variations in how much
information people sought, and how they made sense of the information
they acquired. For example, some people looked out the window and saw
traffic and concluded that others were trying to escape the Martians, and
that they better hit the road as well. Others decided that normal traffic flow
meant that there was no danger. Similarly, some individuals thought that
empty roads meant that people had already evacuated while others thought
that empty roads were normal at that time and that there was nothing to
worry about.

The Search for Information, and Calling the Search Off: The Need for
Closure

Mystery, such as that created by the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, can
generate a search for information, but at times people to jump to
conclusions while there is still much to be learned from the environment.
How does this happen? While the Gestalt perception principle of closure
discussed earlier shows that at times people automatically – without
experiencing any need – make meaning out of incomplete information, at
other times they may experience the incomplete information as mystery and
feel a need to resolve it. Psychologists have studied what is called the need
for closure (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994), the need to reduce uncertainty
and come to a conclusion. At any given moment, the strength of someone’s
need for closure will be affected by their own personal tolerance for
ambiguity and also whether the situation makes it important to find an
answer and to act on it. In the War of the Worlds situation, a person with a
high need for closure might have decided whether there was trouble simply
on the basis of the inferences they made from traffic flow. An individual
with a lower need for closure may have continued to gather information, for
example, by changing the tuning dial on the radio to see if other stations are
reporting an invasion from Mars.
The need for closure is illustrated in early research coming out of both
the Gestalt and field theory traditions suggesting that, when tasks are
interrupted, a tension system results which makes those incomplete tasks
more available in memory than finished work. Lack of closure focuses our
attention. We all have needs, to varying extents, to finish what we start. As a
result, we are uncomfortable when we are interrupted. Thoughts about those
uncompleted tasks remain close to the surface. The tendency to remember
such tasks is called the Zeigarnik effect, after Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of
famous psychologist Kurt Lewin, who discovered this memory
phenomenon, almost by accident, in the 1920s, in Germany (Zeigarnik,
1927). Lewin and Zeigarnik noticed that waiters at sidewalk cafes
remembered orders that had not been served or had not been paid for better
than those that had been taken care of. Once the order had been served and
the bill had been paid, there was no tension about what still needed to be
done, and memory for the order was lost. The finished task is forgotten. It’s
often impressive how servers at restaurants can remember orders from a
group of diners – until the meals have been served. Then the completion
tendency or need for closure has been satisfied, and the memory disappears
with the tension.

Mystery and Mystification in the Perception of Leaders

Many leaders seem to be implicitly aware of strong human tendencies

toward making meaning from partial information or mystery, and people’s
wish, revealed in narratives like the one in Big Iron, to discover that
powerful but mysterious figures will turn out to be heroes, even though they
initially appear to be villains. The prevalence of stories describing
threatening persons who turn out to be heroes rather than villains suggests
that the narrative itself is archetypical. The Clint Eastwood “Spaghetti
Westerns” offer several versions of this script. The pop song Big John from
the 1960s depicts another. The mysterious Big John worked in a mine, but
said very little to fellow workers. Many were afraid of him and rumors
spread that he had killed a man with one punch in a bar fight over a woman.
Yet when the mine caves in, it is Big John who sacrifices himself so that all
the others can escape. The mine is closed but a plaque placed over it reads,
“At the bottom of this mine lies a big, big man – Big John” (Dean & Acuff,
1961).
Studies of leadership offer several examples of leaders trying to
capitalize on people’s hope that unsettling partial information about a leader
or potential leader will resolve toward revealing a powerful but benevolent
hero. These examples suggest, among other things, the theatrical nature of
successful leadership. In his book on leadership in the military, John
Keegan (1988) discusses mystification as an “imperative of command.”
Keegan argues that uncertainty or “the aura of mystery” about how a
commander may act, often deliberately created by his or her theatrics (e.g.,
by Alexander the Great), worries followers about how the leader may treat
them, with the result that they are more likely to obey (p. 315). Their
anxiety about where the leader is going and what he or she (Keegan suggest
that women may be better “commanders” than men) may do enhances their
authority. The mystery they create adds to the impact that both fear and love
of leaders have on followers.
A specific instance of the impact of leader mystification is suggested by
one of George Washington’s most highly regarded biographers, James
Thomas Flexner. In suggesting the impact of Washington’s mostly silent but
constant psychological if not physical presence at the ratifying conventions
considering the Constitution in 1787–1788, Flexner writes, “The truth was
that not only at the Virginia convention but at all the state gatherings
Washington was always present, a force more powerful for being
insubstantial” (cited in Larson, 2015, p. 79) The mystery about exactly how
Washington would regard the delegates made his implicit support for
ratification even more powerful. Also relevant are studies showing the
preference for charismatic leaders when mortality is salient (Hoyt, Simon,
& Innella, 2011; Solomon, Cohen, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2008). When
people are afraid, the appeal of the mystification often surrounding
charismatic leaders increases.
A slightly different example of leaders using mystery to their advantage
is reported in David Gergen’s (2001) book Eyewitness to Power. Gergen
described how Ronald Reagan used mystery to get television channels to
broadcast the well-known speech in which he announced his Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI, or “Star Wars”). The administration hinted that
something big would be announced. However, the networks were hesitant
to broadcast an address unless they could be assured that it was truly
newsworthy. Was it, they asked? Gergen wrote that people in the
administration had to “show a little ankle,” that is give a little information
about what was entailed, or promise that there would be an important
“surprise” (p. 204). They created mystery, with a hint of something good at
the end, and the media’s wish to unravel it led them to comply with
Reagan’s request.
Gergen’s (2001) use of the phrase “show a little ankle” reminds us of
the role of mystery in romance as well as in leadership. Of course, Freud
highlights the similarity between libidinal attachments to leaders and lovers,
and the way our romantic fantasies overvalue both. That overvaluation is
facilitated when leaders, like lovers perhaps, create a little mystery,
especially mystery suggesting desired outcomes, such as approval or group
success in the case of leaders, and perhaps increased intimacy in the case of
lovers. Showing “a little ankle” or similar suggestions of sexual appeal and
availability can precipitate idealized constructions of the attractiveness of
potential lovers and what might ensue in an encounter with them. Such
hints would seem fundamental to seduction by both leaders and lovers.
Again, mystery or incomplete information can facilitate building ideal
images of leaders (Hogg, 2001) and may also ignite idealization about
lovers, too. Songwriter Paul Simon (1973) touches on the construction of
ideal images of lovers in his song Kodachrome. Referring to hypothetically
reuniting with past lovers, he sings that “they could never match my sweet
imagination.” We actively construct ideal images of leaders, and of course
heroes, and lovers. The mystery that they on occasion contrive fuels those
ideal constructions.
One interesting social psychological study, conducted by Whitechurch,
Wilson, and Gilbert (2011), suggests how uncertainty and mystery about a
potential lover can increase attraction to that individual. College women
were shown Facebook profiles of men who apparently liked them a great
deal, liked them an average amount, or liked them either a lot or an average
amount. That is, the liking of the third man was mysteriously uncertain.
Results showed that the mysterious individual was liked the most by the
women in the study. The authors suggest that uncertainty led the women to
think the most about the mysterious young man and that thinking about him
led them to like him more. The authors discuss the “pleasures of
uncertainty,” suggesting that mystery turns loose what Paul Simon calls his
“sweet imagination.”

Our “Sweet Imagination” and Perceptions of Leaders and Lovers

At the beginning of this chapter we quoted Arthur Conan Doyle suggesting

that what is “hinted at” can spark extreme thoughts, in that case, thoughts of
a terrifying family curse. Such hints of danger often activate truly
horrifying images of evil forces, based on schemas of evil, villainy, and
danger. Some of these schemas may be based on experience but others may
be based on inherited archetypes of villains or evil as suggested by Carl
Jung (1969). Jung defined archetypes as latent or potential images or
thoughts that can be triggered by something in conscious experience that
corresponds to the unconscious templates of those images or thoughts. Very
often, the image that is activated has emotional valence; it elicits fear,
repulsion, awe, attachment, or some other feeling. How do these schemas or
images – based on life experience or unconscious archetype – affect our
perception of leaders or potential leaders?
Earlier we mentioned the Warren Harding Error, by which voters filled
in the missing pieces of the leader schema based on Harding’s looks and the
sound of his voice. Was the leader schema that Harding apparently activated
based on experience or an evolved archetype? It seems highly likely to us
that widely shared leader archetypes were involved. Simonton’s (1987)
study of historians’ greatness ratings of US presidents concludes that
perceivers consider the match between what they know about individual
presidents and the image of an “ideal or archetypical leader” – who is
strong, active, and good – and evaluate the presidents accordingly. He
suggests that such leader archetypes have “transhistorical, even cross-
cultural relevance” and “may even possess a sociobiological substratum”
(pp. 238–240). What might be the cues or sources of information that
people use to judge a potential leader as strong, active, and good, or even
heroic?
In our studies of political debates, we note four different kinds of cues
that perceivers might use in evaluating a candidate as a potential leader
(Goethals, 2005). First is the individual’s words. Does the candidate’s
language make sense, does it have appealing rhetorical features, such as
metaphor, alliteration, etc.? Second is the sound of the individual’s voice –
its timbre, pace, pitch, etc. Is it reassuring, inspiring, authoritative? Third is
the individual’s looks. Is the face attractive, the body symmetric and
athletic, the posture erect? Fourth is the way the individual moves. Is his or
her motion fluid, athletic, controlled? In a televised debate, all four kinds of
cues are available. In a radio broadcast, there is no information about looks
or motion. Still photographs convey only looks, transcripts only words, and
content-filtered speech only voice quality. In theory, it is possible to present
almost any combination of these four cues to explore their interactive
impact for any candidate. For example, a radio broadcast could be
combined with still photos to convey every element except motion. For our
purposes, here we can consider how each of these four kinds of information
might affect perceptions of potential leaders or heroes.
An interesting example is Ronald Reagan. Many Americans perceived
him as charismatic. Most Republicans today think of him as heroic. A study
of the impact of silent videos of Reagan speaking at a press conference
showed male college students having psychophysiological reactions
indicating positive affect toward Reagan even when they disagreed with
what he was saying (Masters, 1991). What was it about Reagan’s
appearance and persona that stirred such positive reactions, and even heroic
attributions? One interesting clue comes from David Gergen’s (2001)
aforementioned treatment of Reagan. Gergen describes Reagan as “barrel-
chested” and he clearly had Hollywood good looks. That could account for
the aforementioned student reactions. Also relevant to his perceived
charisma was Reagan’s voice, which Gergen described as “honeyed.” He
suggested that Reagan’s “velvety voice” was almost feminine. That is, it
was calming and reassuring. He wrote that Reagan rode into town like John
Wayne but spoke like Jimmy Stewart. Echoing Freud’s view that
attachments to leaders are essentially erotic, Gergen writes almost as if he is
in love with Reagan, although what we might regard as his Freudian
overevaluation is not uncritical. Comparing him to two iconic actors of
Reagan’s time in Hollywood conveys the heroic image that Gergen and
many others have constructed for Reagan. That construction rests on many
foundational elements, but clearly aspects of Reagan’s persona, as seen in
person and on television, are some of them. It is no wonder that Reagan is
often referred to, particularly by his fans, as “the Gipper,” the heroic young
football player, George Gipp, Reagan portrayed in the 1940 film Knute
Rockne, All American. Of course, sensing political gold dust, Reagan linked
himself as closely as he could to the heroic Gipp and pleaded with
supporters to “win one for the Gipper.” In short, we suggest that Reagan’s
persona, somewhat like Warren G. Harding’s, was sufficient to activate a
hero archetype or at least a leader schema and that perceivers attributed to
Reagan other hero and leader qualities as a result of that activation. Reagan
looked, moved, and sounded like a heroic leader. These were the building
blocks of his charisma. What he said may have contributed less to his
appealing image.
Other US presidents have been more or less charismatic. Two recent
chief executives who were regarded as high on that dimension are John F
Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Studies of reactions to the first 1960 debate
between Kennedy and Richard Nixon suggest that something about JFK’s
appearance triggered a charismatic attribution. Kennedy and his
performance were more highly evaluated by viewers who watched the
debate on television compared to those who listened to it on the radio.
Kennedy’s words and voice quality were the same on TV and radio. What
was it about Kennedy’s appearance that made him “look” good in
comparison to Nixon? In line with our earlier analysis of the four kinds of
cues perceivers might attend to in assessing a potential leader’s persona, we
can consider both Kennedy’s looks, as captured in still photos, and “the
motion,” the way he moved, compared to Nixon. Our viewing of videotapes
of the debate led us to speculate it was not so much Kennedy’s looks
compared to Nixon that made the difference, though he does seem better
looking, but the dynamism and fluidity with which he moved, compared to
Nixon’s somewhat awkward gestures and expressions. To explore this
hypothesis, we presented three versions of segments from the first 1960
Kennedy–Nixon debate to college students. One version contained radio
excerpts, a second included the same excerpts in televised format, while the
third was a “still version” that showed representative still photos of each
candidate taken from when they were speaking. The results were suggestive
though inconclusive. Compared to Nixon, Kennedy’s performance was
evaluated most highly in the television version and least positively in the
radio version. The “still version” was in the middle. Apparently Kennedy’s
“looks” accounted for some of his edge over Nixon on television, but the
way he handled himself physically had additional impact.
Bill Clinton offers another example of a president thought by people
from a range of political viewpoints to be highly charismatic. In his case,
looks and motion seem less important than they did with JFK. Clinton has a
voice that seems to “feel your pain” and his ability to explain complex
matters in a convincing way using plain language is truly extraordinary. His
wife Hillary Clinton, herself a prominent politician, referred to him as her
“explainer-in-chief.” Every leader combines elements of voice, looks, etc.
to more or less advantage in appearing attractive and charismatic to
potential followers, and in activating a leader or hero schema. Franklin
Roosevelt’s voice and manner of speaking, combined with his words,
elicited favorable reactions. For example, it was likely not simply the words
“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” that made FDR’s first
inaugural address so memorable. It was also, we think, his patrician voice,
his pacing, his emphases, and the overall delivery that are so compelling.
These various examples illustrate the general point that leaders or
potential leaders are seen as charismatic when there is something about
their persona that activates a leader schema or hero archetype. We also
suggest that the positive affect that attaches to such figures makes followers
long to see them in a charismatic light. We get pleasure in the presence of a
charismatic, awe-inspiring leader. Our wish to see them in this way varies
according to the situation. Max Weber (1922) reminds us that crisis
increases the appeal of the charismatic figure. Michael Hogg’s (2001) work
similarly suggests that when group membership becomes increasingly
salient, as in situations of intergroup conflict, we are more likely to be
drawn to the prototypical group member as leader, and to view her or him
as being charismatic and therefore emotionally compelling. We may often
view a leader as charismatic or heroic on the basis of just a few cues, such
as command of metaphorical speech, or compelling appearance. We enjoy
being connected to such a special person.
Just as our “sweet imagination” can increase our evaluation of potential
leaders on the basis of minimal cues, perhaps it can, as Paul Simon’s song
suggests, make us view potential love objects or intimate partners in an
overly positive light. Freud suggests we get pleasure from overvaluing
lovers and leaders. Is there a similar dynamic for both? The phrase that
David Gergen used, “show a little ankle,” reminds us that just as a leader
may entice us with a little mystification, so may a romantic partner.
Preening for mates has been part of evolutionary history for thousands of
years. We may be attracted to potential lovers or mates who show hints of
interest in us or desirable qualities in themselves. We want them to be
attractive and attracted to us, just as we want leaders to be great and to
signal that we have value to them. We may display clues to our desirable
qualities in ways that may exaggerate them at least slightly, as suggested by
Goffman (1956). And observers of the display may be all too ready to
accept at least initially what the display suggests. Furthermore, just as our
need to see leaders as charismatic can vary with the situation, so can our
need to see potential mates as desirable. Research suggests, as the song
says, that “girls get prettier at closing time” (Madey et al., 1996).

“On Perceptual Readiness” and Our Construction of Heroic Images

John F. Kennedy continues to provide some of the most interesting

examples of constructions of heroic images, and controversies surrounding
them. The year 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s
assassination. A great deal was written about Kennedy at the time, much but
not all of it in the heroic vein. In 2016, the release of the film Jackie
starring Natalie Portman generated even more discussion, focusing on
Jacqueline Kennedy’s supposed role in creating and nurturing the Camelot
mythology, which portrayed the Kennedy years as a “fleeting wisp of
glory” or “one brief shining moment.” As sung in the 1960 musical
Camelot, “Ask ev’ry person if he’s heard the story, And tell it strong and
clear if he has not, That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory Called
Camelot” (Lerner, 1960). The critiques of Mrs Kennedy as pedaling a false
narrative fail to understand the psychology of heroism.
A starting point to understand the relevant aspect of this psychology is
Jerome Bruner’s (1958) classic article on “Social Psychology and
Perception.” In that brief chapter, Bruner outlined some key ideas regarding
perceptual readiness and the way “need and interest states […] increase
accessibility of those categories of objects that relate to their fulfillment or
furthering” (pp. 93–94). To a large extent people see what they want or need
to see, and furthermore, they create idealized images of what they need and
perceive. A classic study in the “new look in perception” tradition showed
that working-class children exaggerated the size of more valuable coins
compared to middle-class children. In effect, they were highly attracted to
money they really needed and created an oversized image of it. In this
regard, Jacqueline Kennedy didn’t have to push very hard, if at all, to attach
the Camelot image, to her husband’s administration. She may have been the
first person to mention Camelot in relation to JFK, but audiences ran with
the idea. One important example is Samuel Eliot Morison’s classic Oxford
History of the American People, published in 1965, shortly after Kennedy’s
assassination. Morison ends the volume with a verse from Camelot,
including the musical score. It seems that the Camelot image filled a strong
need, understandable in light of the psychology of “deifying the dead and
downtrodden” (Allison & Goethals, 2008), that the image went viral. It
made such complete sense to many that the image seems indelible. It
created an idealized, heroic construction that has made Kennedy one of the
most widely and well-remembered figures of the twentieth century.
The Kennedy case is just one of many where our sweet imaginations
make good images even better. We see this in misremembered quotes that
are altered in ways that better capture the essential idea expressed in the
quote. Returning to the fictional character we opened with, Sherlock
Holmes, we note that the phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson” is used to
express the idea that something is more obvious than initially claimed. It’s a
great quote, but it never appears in Arthur Conan Doyle’s four Sherlock
Holmes novels and many adventures. But it captures Holmes, Watson, and
their relationship, and the idea of making the complex simple exceedingly
well. It won’t go away. Other examples come from films. People often
quote Field of Dreams, saying, “If you build it, they will come,” capturing
the idea that people will respond to and approach desirable, enticing
entities. However, the actual quote from the film is “If you build it, he will
come,” referring to Shoeless Joe Jackson. There are numerous examples
(“play it again, Sam”; “do you feel lucky”) of people making good images
even better.
A fascinating quote transformation from American history comes from
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. It has been well-established
that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, at Lincoln’s bedside at the moment of
his death, solemnly stated “Now he belongs to the angels.” The quote is
often rendered as “Now he belongs to the ages,” which better touches base
with “deep time” (Allison & Goethals, 2014). Stanton himself believed or at
least claimed that he said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” The latter phrase
is so resonant that President Barack Obama used it in announcing Nelson
Mandela’s death. Obama said, “He no longer belongs to us. He belongs to
the ages.” In all these examples, people endow situations with meaning by
conveniently filling in gaps with remembrances that fit a desired image.

“BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD”

People may be motivated to unravel mystery in a stimulus configuration,

but they are not impartial with regard to whether the unraveling yields a
positive or negative result. Earlier we noted that classic old songs such as
Big Iron and Big John depicted people’s beliefs about “stranger danger.” It
is no coincidence that the word “big” appears in both these song titles.
When it comes to heroism and villainy, size matters. Large individuals
enjoy greater success in winning elections to leadership positions (Murray
& Schmitz, 2011), and large threats capture our attention to a greater degree
than equally large nonthreats (Brickman & Campbell, 1971). In an
encounter with a neutral person or situation that is shrouded in mystery,
people by default will likely react with fear, skepticism, or dislike. That is,
there appears to be a negativity bias in our encounters with uncertainty.
Why is that?
Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, and Vohs (2001) have argued that
“bad is stronger than good” (p. 323). The evidence is overwhelming that
people are more sensitive to the possibility of a mysterious person or
situation turning out badly than turning out well. Xenophobic racial
profiling offers a compelling modern example. In 2012, Florida resident
Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a neighborhood watchman whose
interpretation of Martin’s presence in the neighborhood was clouded by
Martin’s African-American heritage and hooded sweatshirt. Muslim-
Americans are also often viewed as dangerous by people trying to unravel
mystery. In 2016, a young Muslim woman wearing an Islamic headscarf
was mistaken for a terrorist and assaulted by Chicago police (Smith, 2016).
The officers threw her down a flight of stairs and then strip-searched her
before realizing she was an innocent, law-abiding citizen. The police later
confessed that the veiled woman was clutching a backpack and exhibited
“suspicious behavior, including walking at a brisk pace, in a determined
manner” (p. 1). In trying to unravel mystery, observers interpreted two
seemingly neutral facts about her – the backpack and “determined” gait – as
signaling sinister activity.
Baumeister et al.’s (2001) argument about bad being stronger than good
is based on evolutionary considerations. Throughout human history, people
who were sensitized “to bad things would have been more likely to survive
threats and, consequently, would have increased the probability of passing
along their genes” (p. 325). Ignoring potential danger might leave one
wounded or dead. Thus when we encounter a mysterious person, we are
better off erring on the side of assuming that person to be a villain rather
than a hero. Our heightened sensitivity to bad in relation to good permeates
our social relationships. In a romantic relationship, negative behaviors have
a stronger effect on the quality of the relationship than do positive behaviors
(Gottman, 1994). Moreover, social attraction and sexual desire are more
strongly affected by negative social interactions than by positive ones
(Reyes et al., 1999). There are even more words in the English language
that describe bad emotions than there are words to describe good emotions
(Averill, 1980).
While studying people’s tendencies to “approach” good things and
“avoid” bad things, Neil Miller (1944) discovered what he called a
“fundamental principle,” namely, that “the strength of avoidance increases
more rapidly with nearness than does that of approach” (p. 433). In other
words, people are more desperate to avoid a looming threat than they are to
approach a looming benefit. Kahneman and Tversky (1982) reported a
similar finding that the pain associated with loss is greater than the pleasure
associated with an equivalent gain. These results suggest that people show
great caution when approaching a mysterious person or situation, and if that
person or situation shows any hints of threat, people will steer clear of
her/him or it to avoid any possibility of incurring a negative outcome.
Clinical psychologists have opined that this fear of any potential negative
experience under uncertainty, and subsequent avoidance of the perceived
threatening experience, serves as the basis of many phobias (Boyes, 2015).
Information about bad events receives greater attention and more
thorough processing than information about good events (Taylor, 1991).
Fiske (1980) showed participants photographs of people performing various
positive and negative behaviors. She found that her participants spent a
longer time gazing at the photos of negative actions. Baumeister et al.
(2001) believe that witnessing negative event is more likely to elicit a
search for a cause of the event, or an effort to attach some type of meaning
to the event. Gilovich (1983) and Weiner (1985) have both found that
people are far more likely to spend time generating causal and
responsibility attributions for negative behaviors than for positive ones. We
appear to have a stronger need to identify and understand the causes of
possible villainy than possible heroism. Oehman, Lundqvist, and Esteves
(2001) showed participants the faces of others that featured either smiling
or threatening facial expressions. Threatening faces were identified as
negative more quickly and with greater accuracy than were smiling faces
identified as good. In general, people are more likely to engage in longer
and deeper processing about someone who seems angry or sad (Krull &
Dill, 1998).
Effective storytellers have long known that novels and plays will only
enjoy success if they are based more on the portrayal of bad events than of
good events (Fiedler, 1982). No successful novel or movie has centered on
a successful marriage, an uneventful flight across the ocean, or a problem-
free career. Good compelling storytelling focuses on people encountering
negative events and then coping with them. As consumers of these stories,
we are drawn to the negative events and may later show selective retention
of that negativity. Bebbington, MacLeod, Ellison, and Fay (2017)
discovered recently that people harbor a bias favoring the social
transmission of negatively valenced information. Their participants were
presented with a story and were asked to share it multiple times with others.
Despite the fact that the story contained both positive and negative
behaviors and occurrences, participants were more likely to share the
negative events than the positive events. This negativity bias increased with
the number of times that the story was shared, suggesting that time and
repetition adds fuel to the negativity bias.
As social identity theory reminds us, our stereotypes about outgroups
are biased toward negativity (Turner & Tajfel, 1986). Consistent with this
idea is Rothbart and Park’s (1986) discovery that the favorability of a trait
in a person or group is strongly correlated with the number of instances
required for its confirmation. Fewer examples of a negative the trait are
needed to confirm its existence in a person, and more counterexamples are
needed to disconfirm its existence. A robust finding in social cognition is
that negative behaviors carry more weight in our impressions of people as
compared to positive behaviors (Taylor, 1991). When we first meet people,
their negative actions have a greater impact on their perceived likeability as
compared to their positive actions. Moreover, people are more likely to
attribute events to external human agents when those events are negative
compared to when the events are neutral or positive, a phenomenon that
Morewedge (2009) has called the negative agency bias. This bias suggests a
stronger preference to see villainy as the cause of bad events than to see
heroism as the cause of good events.
Each person we meet for the first time is a mystery, and Yzerbyt and
Leyens (1991) conducted a clever study to illuminate how we devote
special consideration to negative information when resolving that mystery.
Their participants were asked to cast various actors in a play, determining
which actors should be awarded the part of a likeable or dislikeable
character. Participants were given a little information at a time about the
actors and were free to assign a part as soon as they felt confident in doing
so. Yzerbyt and Leyens found that negative trait information about an actor
led to much speedier decisions to assign an actor to a dislikeable role than
positive information did in assigning people to likeable roles. Just a little
evidence that an actor was dislikeable disqualified him from playing the
part of the good guy in the play, whereas a large amount of positive
information was needed for an actor to be awarded the part of the good guy.
Skowronski and Carlston (1989) have proposed that negative behaviors are
more diagnostic than positive ones because one must be good all the time to
be categorized as a good person, whereas the labeling of bad only requires a
few bad actions. Riskey and Birnbaum (1974) similarly concluded that “the
overall goodness of a person is determined mostly by his worst bad deed,
with good deeds having less influence” (p. 172).

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

William Shakespeare wrote, “There is nothing either good or bad, but

thinking makes it so.” In this chapter, we have reviewed the myriad ways
that people think their way through mystery, relying on perceptual,
cognitive, and motivational resources at their disposal to acquire an
understanding of a mysterious person, group, or circumstance. Our review
of perceptual forces at work in the mystery resolution process has included
principles of Gestalt organization that allows us to make sense of a world
filled with missing or misleading information. We also identified cognitive
processes that come into play such as people’s use of impressions, schemas,
prototypes, archetypes, and implicit theories of leadership, heroism, and
villainy that shape the encoding and interpretation of information.
Moreover, we described several key motivational forces that steer people
toward desired conclusions about mystery. These motivations include our
need for closure, our drive to spread rumors to justify our fear of
uncertainty, and our romantic ideas about how leaders should look, behave,
and shape group outcomes.
In addition, we explored the evolutionary basis of our heightened
alertness to the potential danger of a mysterious person or situation. As
Baumeister et al. (2001) point out, the idea that “bad is stronger than good”
operates as “a general principle across a broad range of psychological
phenomena” (p. 323). Yet we have shown that people can and do embrace
the good under the right conditions of mind and heart. People hope for
heroes but fear villains. When Dorothy sees the city of Oz for the first time,
her strong desire to return home inflames her imagination of Oz as a
magical place, and the Wizard as a heroic person, who can perform
miracles. Still, she is wary. We can indeed see people and possibilities
through rose-colored glasses, exaggerating the good that we crave in
individuals and in situations that can meet our most-coveted needs. It is no
coincidence that Dorothy’s mission to seek the Wizard begins with a rumor
about the legend of the “mighty and powerful” Oz who can help anyone
with any problem. If people are presented with just the aroma of a desired
meal, they will envision a banquet feast.
Aldous Huxley once observed that “There are things known and there
are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” This
chapter has described various doorways to our imperfect understanding of
uncertainty in the world. Our next chapter applies these principles to our
understanding of three men who had a profound impact on American
culture in the late twentieth century: Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King,
Jr, and Elvis Presley.

NOTES
1. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=999RqGZatPs
 CHAPTER 3

THE THREE KINGS: DISSENT AND

EVOLVING PERCEPTIONS OF HEROISM

In the twentieth century, the United States took significant strides toward
social change, especially toward racial justice. Several events near mid-
century represented giant steps in that direction. In 1947, Jackie Robinson
of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the color line in major league baseball. The
next year, President Harry S. Truman ordered the desegregation of
American armed forces. Most significant perhaps was the unanimous
Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. The justices
ruled that segregated schools were inherently unequal, and struck down the
“separate but equal” Supreme Court decision of 1896. The year 1954 also
saw several other breakthrough milestones: the launching of the first
nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus; a vaccine against polio; the
rock ‘n’ roll hit Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and his Comets; and
in sports, Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile barrier. It was a
time of significant change – socially, culturally, and scientifically.
Leadership was essential to many of these advances. Branch Rickey,
owner of the Dodgers baseball team, and Jackie Robinson himself exercised
wise and courageous leadership in integrating baseball. Jonas Salk and
other scientists leaned against convention in developing a polio vaccine.
And a persistent high school student, Barbara Johns of Prince Edward
County, Virginia, along with her legal team, led by Thurgood Marshall,
argued for a new understanding of “equality” before the Supreme Court,
and its tireless and far-sighted leader, Earl Warren. Their persistent pursuit
of change for the better eventually won support.
1954 was also a pivotal year in the lives of three young men who would
go on to be heroic leaders, even transforming ones, in American society,
greatly accelerating changes slowly evolving in the early Fifties. All three –
Southern men, born in January, two black and one white – would have
significant impact on American culture and politics, and in different ways
make America a more just, open society. All three were initially viewed as
villains by large segments of American society. To some, they were marked
men. Like many transforming leaders, their steadfast persistence in saying
and doing what they thought was right eventually transformed them from
villains to heroes in the eyes of many. The three were Martin Luther King,
Jr of Montgomery, Alabama, Elvis Presley of Memphis, Tennessee, and
Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr (later Muhammad Ali) of Louisville, Kentucky.
In 1954, King turned 25. He accepted his first position as a pastor at the
Dexter Avenue Baptist church in Montgomery. Already active in the civil
rights struggle, in less than two years King would be drawn into a
momentous nonviolent protest against Jim Crow segregation in Alabama –
the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1954, Elvis Presley turned 19. That
summer he made his first record. The Memphis disk jockey who played it
on the radio made sure to mention which high school Presley graduated
from, to identify him as white. He could easily have been heard as black. In
less than two years, like King, he would become a well-known, and
controversial, American figure. In 1954, Cassius Clay turned 12. In
October, his brand new Schwinn bicycle was stolen. He found a policeman
and told the officer that he would find the thief and beat him up. The officer
suggested he learn how to box first. In less than two years he had become a
well-known, and controversial, boxer in Louisville. After he won his first
match, he proclaimed that he would become “the greatest of all time”
(Remnick, 1998, p. 92).
The evolution of these three lives illustrates the complex dynamics of
heroic leadership. All three led, intentionally or not, dramatic social change
by overcoming the resistances that dominant forces placed in the path of the
messages and models they conveyed, through their words and example. In
so doing, they slowly become heroes. Though they were quite different,
their impact was transforming enough for us to recognize them as Three
Kings. One was named King, one has long been acknowledged as the “king
of rock ‘n’ roll” and the third called himself “king of the world,” and people
understood why.
We understand heroic leadership as leadership that is perceived by
followers as requiring exceptional effectiveness, morality, and, especially,
courage. Because it challenges prevailing norms, customs, and traditions, it
is often fiercely resisted. Following Howard Gardner’s (1995) framework,
heroic leadership relates stories, through word and example, that describe
novel identities for its followers. These new stories must compete with
counterstories, related by other leaders, that define very different, and
incompatible, identities. As we shall explore in more detail later, almost all
identity stories give followers positive, self-esteem enhancing definitions of
themselves and their group. Thus new stories that challenge existing stories
threaten the self-esteem of both current leaders and their followers. Heroic
leaders manage to persuade followers that there is a different way to lead a
satisfying and moral life. We will explore the way Martin Luther King,
Elvis Presley, and Muhammad Ali convinced a large segments of American
society that a new and more inclusive identity could work for them.
We proceed as follows. First, we outline some of the dynamics of
dissent and resistance to change. We also discuss how people can overcome
that resistance, and by doing so, become leaders, and then heroes, rather
than villains. Then we’ll illustrate these elements by highlighting how Elvis,
Martin Luther King, and Muhammad Ali became transforming leaders in
American society, and then, in the eyes of many, true heroes.

NONCONFORMITY AND DISSENT

Research in social psychology shows how quickly groups of people form

norms, and how reluctant people can be to depart from those norms (Asch,
1956; Sherif, 1936). Paradoxically, Solomon Asch had set out to show that
people would not blindly follow expert or majority opinion. Rather they
would reason and consider what other people’s views meant, and go along
or not. To his surprise, his own studies of line judgments revealed that
people would conform to clearly incorrect unanimous majority opinion.
Sometimes people thought that their own judgments must be wrong, though
it was clear that they were not. For the most part, they conformed because it
was easier, or less risky. They worried that they might be looked at
negatively by others, or perhaps ostracized, even though the people they
conformed to were strangers, and there was absolutely no threat.
Though Asch’s experiments studied conformity to trivial judgments
about the length of lines, other research makes clear that people conform in
their beliefs and in their behavior to much more consequential questions,
such as whether Martians are really invading New Jersey, or whether Bill
Clinton really bested George Bush in their final presidential debate (Cantril,
1940; Fein, Goethals, & Kugler, 2007). There are two main reasons for
going along, referred to as informational and normative social influence
(Kelley, 1952). In the case of informational social influence, people
conform because they depend on others for reality checks – for information
about what the truth is. If they are unsure, what other people think provides
a convenient guide. Normative social influence is different. It produces
conformity because people worry about how they will be regarded or
treated by their peers. Other research shows that these fears are not
unfounded. Group members exert considerable pressure on their members
to fall in line, and to go along with the opinions of the majority. When they
don’t conform, they are likely to be cut off and rejected (Schachter, 1951).
Why risk disapproval, whether spoken or unspoken, or some kind of
negative treatment, such as rejection, or worse? In many cases, these
influences operate so subtly and automatically that people are unaware of
their effect, or even their existence. In a study of debates, referenced earlier,
participants were largely unaware that the experimenter’s accomplices in
the room subtly muttered positive or negative remarks about either Clinton
or Bush. Even when they were aware of those comments, they were sure
that they had no impact. But the data showed clearly that they did.
In short there are strongly ingrained tendencies to go along with other
people, especially peers who form part of our reference groups. Similarly,
there are equally strong or stronger forces that lead us to go along with the
commands or decisions of authority figures (Milgram, 1965). They are not
only sources of information but they also have significant capacity to
reward or punish. So we can imagine how difficult it would have been for
the young Elvis Presley to wear his hair differently from his high school
peers, or to dress like African Americans dressed among his white friends,
or to call attention to himself as a singer. Or, how difficult it could have
been for Martin Luther King, Jr to take the leadership in organizing a
boycott of the segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, in the face
of opposition from disapproving and dangerous white authorities. Or how
much courage it took for the young Cassius Clay to defy crowds in
Louisville who resented his boastful predictions, often rendered in verse,
and egged on his opponents to “Button his lip!” (Remnick, p. 96).

UNWAVERING INDEPENDENCE AND LEADERSHIP

Given such strong tendencies not to deviate or stand out, why do some
individuals do it anyway? There may be situational factors, such as the
sense that they will have at least some support, and that they won’t be
totally alone. We know that in some contexts having just one ally breaks the
power of a majority (Asch, 1956). But clearly some individuals will not
conform when most others would simply go along. Certain personality traits
may come into play, such as extraversion – the tendency to be outgoing in
an assertive way – or openness – a tendency to be curious and open to novel
ideas, emotions, and esthetic experience. Narcissism may be involved, that
is, a sense of being superior and entitled. Some individuals have a sense of
being different, or being apart. Nonconformity may ultimately rest on a
sense of unique potential that must be realized. King, Presley, and Ali all
quickly discovered that they had unusual capacity in a self-defining domain.
Furthermore, their sense of “self-efficacy” or competence and effectiveness
in that domain enabled them to be bold enough to build a corresponding
identity for themselves that implicitly or explicitly invited others to think
and act as they did (Bandura, 1986).
For whatever reason, sometimes people find the courage to deviate, or
perhaps even seek to express their difference. In doing so, they become
potential leaders. What determines whether anyone follows? It may, in fact,
be easier to gain followers, once we don’t conform, than it is to resist group
pressure in the first place. This happens because there is a flip side to the
fact that it is difficult for people to deviate from the opinions or behaviors
of their peer groups, or to resist the suggestions or directives from authority.
That is, individuals who do assert their independence can take advantage of
people’s need for leadership, or what Sigmund Freud (1920) called their
“thirst for obedience.” Individuals who think or act independently can
compete with the prevailing ways of doing things and perhaps win over
followers. Indeed, several important theories of leadership emphasize that
potential leaders must compete with other leaders or potential leaders.
James MacGregor Burns’ highly influential exploration of leadership
argued that potential leaders mobilize potential followers “in competition or
conflict with others” (Burns, 1978, p. 18). Similarly, Howard Gardner
(1995) proposed that leaders influence potential followers by the stories that
they relate, by word or example, and that those stories compete with
counterstories. The most effective stories are those that relate an identity,
that explain where a group is coming from and where it is going, what
obstacles it will face, and how it can prevail.
What then determines whether an individual’s nonconforming stories,
ideas, or ways of behaving will prevail in competition with competing
prescriptions? Freud suggested several factors. One is “a strong and
imposing will.” A second is an unwavering, even fanatical, faith in an idea.
A third is that the person represents her or his group in a “clearly marked
and pure form.” That is, a potential leader must have some degree of
magnetism and must be able to articulate or somehow illustrate a point of
view or way of being. Furthermore, such a person must strike a group of
potential followers as representing them in a positive or even ideal way, that
is, she or he must be “prototypical” (Hogg, 2001). Gardner argues that it is
the unique burden of leaders to define who they are in ways that can help
others define as well who they are. A seemingly strong and prototypical
individual who projects a clear identity can fulfill that burden. Closely
related to these propositions is research on minority influence showing that
a potential leader, or minority group, can be influential if it is both
consistent and persistent over time in its novel viewpoints. It must be
unwavering (Brown, 1986; Moscovici, 1980).
But what kinds of novel and unwavering viewpoints can, in Gardner’s
terms, “transplant, suppress, complement, or in some measure outweigh
earlier stories” (p. 13). That is, what unfamiliar stories about followers’
identity are likely to prevail over more conventional counterstories? One
essential feature is that the new story must describe or create a positive
identity for potential followers. Influential identity stories are dramatic
accounts of the leader and followers as central actors or heroes in a drama
that unfolds over time (p. 14). The narrative must create a positive role for
individuals in the group in overcoming obstacles and achieving something
great. This is the essence of what charismatic leaders often do – make
people feel that they can be an important part of something great (Solomon,
Greenberg, & Tom Pyszczynski, 2016).
A second feature is that the story must “fit” in some manner that are “in
the air” or are familiar to people. They can be novel to a degree, but they
must have some plausibility in terms of the dominant beliefs of society. For
example, Gardner argues that a number of influential leaders in the
twentieth century, Ronald Reagan for example, told stories that were
innovative but not brand new. They picked up on ideas which had been
forgotten or latent, or that seemed passé, and reinvigorated them. In
Reagan’s case, it was a story of American exceptionalism, a narrative in
which the United States was a “city on a hill” that inspired others around
the world. After the four mostly failed presidencies of Lyndon Johnson,
Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, Reagan’s reassuring
message about a great nation had pitch-perfect resonance. It conveyed an
uplifting story that told his followers that they were important parts of
something great.
Still, the identity stories these new narratives sketch out often threaten
competing counterstories that also make people feel good about who they
are. Furthermore, they may further suggest that adherents to the existing
identities are somehow not good – perhaps not smart or open or moral. We
noted that our Three Kings were initially opposed and even reviled by much
of mainstream society when they first became well-known. There were
resilient counterstories to the narratives they embodied. We must address
two questions. First, why were those opposing stories so resilient? Why did
the established traditions maintain the allegiance of so many before they
gave way to wide-spread, though not universal, acceptance of the novel
innovative alternative? Second, how did new stories that potentially
threatened the self-definitions of those attached to the old ones eventually
take hold?
 SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF
SALIENCE

Several of the principles of social identity theory are helpful in

understanding both the resilience of old stories, and then how they give way
to new ones. The bedrock idea of social identity theory is that people have a
need for positive self-esteem. In addition, it holds that people derive their
self-esteem from both their individual sense of accomplishment and
morality, and also the value that they place on the groups to which they
belong, in comparison to the value they place on groups (Hogg, 2001; Tajfel
& Turner, 1986). Furthermore, our need for self-esteem leads us to evaluate
ourselves and our groups in highly biased ways. We think of ourselves as
better than average along many dimensions, and our groups as superior to
most of the other groups that we compare with (Allison, Messick, &
Goethals, 1989; Goethals & Darley, 1987). Leaders’ stories about a positive
identity are a central pillar of self-esteem. We are reluctant to change them.
However, another aspect of social identity theory explains why
competition between leaders’ stories is often so intense, and why a new
story can encounter strong resistance. We belong to many groups, and
thereby have multiple social identities, or as William James put it many
years ago, we have as many social selves as there are groups whose
opinions we care about (James, 1892). Different circumstances make some
social identities more salient, and others less so. Leaders can play a large
role in calling particular existing identities to mind, or suggesting new ways
of viewing ourselves and our groups in relation to other groups. Hitler’s evil
genius was to make many Germans’ “Aryan” non-Jewish identity salient,
and persuade non-Jewish Germans that Jews were inferior and evil and
should be removed from German society. In great contrast, Jesus had made
our common identity as human beings salient, so that the least of us merited
care and respect. Gardner highlights such contrasting identities by
distinguishing leader identity stories that are exclusive, like Hitler’s, which
identify an ingroup as superior to outgroups, from leaders’ stories that
present an inclusive identity. One example of an inclusive leader was Pope
John XXIII who offered Roman Catholics an identity which emphasized
and embraced the common humanity of Catholics and Protestants, and
Christian and non-Christians. For example, he referred to Protestants not as
inferior and heretic but simply “our departed brethren.”
When a potential leader offers a novel group identity, that new identity
may threaten the self-esteem of people whose sense of worth resides in the
older one. Leaders whose following depends on their representing and
defining that older identity may fight fiercely against any change in
people’s sense of who they are. Before the Civil War started, the new
president Abraham Lincoln appealed to the “mystic chords of memory” of
his “fellow countrymen,” reminding all of them that the sections of the
United States were bound together as a Union of friends rather than
opponents. However, Confederate leaders resisted this story and persuaded
people across the South that they had a distinctive and exclusive Southern
identity that was superior to the inclusive identity articulated by Lincoln.
Ultimately, transforming leaders call to mind and make salient facets of
potential followers’ identities that offer a more satisfying sense of self.
These new identities are generally inclusive. They entail taking other
people’s perspective, and demonstrating the courage and generosity that can
make people and feel morally elevated (Haidt, 2003). In considering
specifically the resistance to the novel stories of King, Presley, and Ali, it is
notable that they are all inclusive stories. King related a story about black
and white children, even “all of God’s children,” joining hands and
celebrating freedom. Presley related a story of black and white both
expressing their individuality and enjoying their commonality. Ali related a
story of black people respecting themselves and forming their own identity
and thereby living in true equality with white people. In contrast, the appeal
of nativistic and even racist visions of American society today reminds us
that many people may feel more comfortable in identifying with an ingroup,
that is, with their “tribe,” than in embracing an inclusive identity. Gardner
notes “visionary” leaders such as Buddha, Gandhi, or Jesus must be
exceptional to overcome more exclusionary stories that rehearse common
ingroup narratives.
In what follows we will see some of the ways that our Three Kings were
at least uncommon in making their stories compelling to much of American
society. King, Presley, and Ali related novel stories about what people in
mid-century USA could be. They faced strong competing counterstories,
but they persisted. They never wavered in their beliefs in themselves, and in
the inclusive identities they offered to others. In time, their visions of a
freer, fairer, more open society markedly touched the better angels of a
significant number of their fellow human beings. We consider them in the
chronological order in which they burst onto the American scene, with very
mixed results at the outset.

ELVIS PRESLEY – KING OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

After his 1953 graduation from Humes High School in Memphis,

Tennessee, Elvis Presley took jobs as a truck driver and then in a machine
shop. He was a little different. He had sideburns, and sometimes wore loud
clothing. One afternoon he stopped by Memphis Recording Service on
Union Avenue and asked Marion Keisker, the blond woman behind a small
desk, how much it would cost to make a record. He explained that he
wanted to make a present for his mother’s birthday. Keisker, partner of Sam
Phillips, owner of the recording studio and Sun Records, told Elvis that he
would have to pay US$3.98 to make two cuts. He did his two songs, paid
the US$3.98, and asked if anyone was looking for a singer. It was clear he
was hoping somehow to find work as a performer. Keisker had nothing for
him at the time but noted that the young man was a good ballad singer. His
time would come.
Elvis had been born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1935. It was during the
Depression, and his parents were relatively poor. They soon moved to
nearby Memphis to find work, and took an apartment in Lauderdale Courts
– public-assisted housing in the middle of the city. They had no phone.
Elvis had done some singing in school, but nobody took much notice. After
he made his first record, he continued to come by the studio on occasion to
inquire about singing possibilities. But as 1953 gave way to 1954, he
appeared less and less often. He wasn’t having any luck making a
connection.
Things changed one evening in July of 1954. Two musicians, guitarist
Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black, were at the studio with Sam
Phillips planning to record some of their songs. They needed a vocalist.
Marion Keisker, overhearing their conversation, said, “What about the kid
with sideburns?” Someone got in touch with Elvis, who ran over to meet
Moore and Black. They tried a few songs, but nothing clicked. It was late,
and they took a break. While they were waiting, Elvis picked up his rhythm
guitar and started fooling around with Arthur Crudup’s blues number, That’s
All Right, Mama. Phillips immediately recognized it as a probable hit, and
had the trio record it. Later the same night, they also recorded an upbeat
version of Bill Munroe’s Country and Western classic Blue Moon of
Kentucky, as side B of a single. A few days later, That’s All Right was
played, repeatedly, on a local radio station. The response was ecstatic, and
almost overnight, Elvis became a hit in his hometown.
After a series of public performances, in Memphis and on the road,
mostly in the South, Elvis became a major attraction. His gyrations on the
stage nearly caused riots, especially among young women. At first he got
second billing, but increasingly people came to hear, and also to see, this
charismatic young performer. Working with Scotty Moore, Bill Black, and
drummer D. J. Fontana, Elvis attracted more and more attention, including
that of RCA records. At the end of 1955, less than a year and a half after the
July night that produced That’s All Right, RCA brought Elvis’ contract from
Sam Phillips and Sun Records for $35,000, an unprecedented amount of
money at the time.
During the next year, 1956, Elvis would burst into national
consciousness, at about the same time as Martin Luther King. He would
rise, fall, and rise again in the minds of the arbiters of mainstream American
culture, and in the views of much of the American public. In January, RCA
released Heartbreak Hotel, and Elvis was booked for six appearances on the
CBS program Stage Show with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. At first, neither
the song nor the TV appearances made much of a ripple. RCA wondered
whether they had made a big mistake. Another Sun Records star, Carl
Perkins, had scored a big hit with Blue Suede Shoes and seemed to eclipse
Elvis. But gradually Heartbreak Hotel took off and Elvis appeared in early
April on the more popular Milton Berle show. By that time his act had
matured and refined. The live audience was ecstatic, and much of the
broadcast audience was as well. Elvis had become, almost overnight it
seemed, a prominent national figure.
But the news was not all good. First, Elvis’ talents were derided by
music reviewers. Then his performances were attacked as immoral. He was
criticized in the New York Times for “a display of primitive physical
movement” and in the New York Journal-American for “‘grunt and groin’
antics.” The Roman Catholic weekly newsletter reported that a performance
in Wisconsin had been described there as “not only suggestive but
downright obscene” (Guralnick, 1994, p. 9. 284). When he appeared on the
Steve Allen Show in early July, he was persuaded to wear a tuxedo, do away
with the gyrations, stand still, and sing a somewhat ridiculous version of his
hit Hound Dog to a Basset Hound on a pedestal. Allen said the he was
presenting the new Elvis Presley. Elvis went along, but he hated it.
The “new Elvis” didn’t last long. His fans wanted the real thing. They
had watched the Allen show in great numbers, but insisted that Elvis be
allowed to be himself, and by example, relate his story. It was one that
many young people found compelling. Young people could cut loose a little
bit from conventional restrictions. You could dance like you wanted to,
dress like you wanted to, and wear your hair like you wanted to. Your
parents and society as a whole could make room for a little more
individuality, and even sensuality. Rock ‘n’ roll was there for everyone, to
take or leave. There was no threat in it.
Elvis did not invent Rock ‘n’ Roll. The year before Elvis became a
national figure, Bill Haley (Rock Around the Clock), Chuck Berry
(Maybelline), Fats Domino (Ain’t That a Shame), and Little Richard (Tuti
Fruitti) had brought the genre into the mainstream. But Elvis, with the
mentoring of Sam Phillips, brought something distinctive to it. They
bridged the gap between traditionally white popular music and traditionally
black popular music. That’s All Right was typical of African-American
Rhythm and Blues. Blue Moon of Kentucky had roots in Bluegrass and
Country and Western. Rock ‘n’ Roll would draw on both of these traditions.
As Sam Phillips had hoped, a compelling white artist singing both black
and white songs, in his own distinctive manner, opened white audiences to
black artists, and possibly black audiences to white artists, and black and
white artists to each other. Traditional boundaries between black and white
musical traditions were being crossed.
Partly because of the racial implications of his music, Elvis and his
rabid fans were criticized by many. Some threatened legal action if Elvis
“put obscenity and vulgarity in front of our children” (Guralnick, p. 322).
But in the short run, after the Allen show, his natural enthusiasm for his
music and his distinctive style would not be contained. He said plaintively
in a phone interview that he hadn’t been rebelling or trying to offend
anyone. “I don’t feel like I’m doing anything wrong” (Guralnick, p. 296).
Despite the negative reaction, the commercial possibilities of Elvis’s
wide popularity were irresistible. He signed a movie contract to star in the
movie Love Me Tender, released in November. More importantly, for the
transformation of Elvis from villain to hero, in the opinion of traditional
cultural opinion leaders, were his three appearances on the biggest of
television’s variety entertainment programs, the Ed Sullivan Show. After
Elvis’s controversial appearance on a second Milton Berle’s show, Sullivan
sniffed that “He is not my cup of tea,” and proclaimed that he would never
have him as one of his guests (Guralnick, p. 301). The mainstream was not
ready for this controversial figure. But then the ratings for the “New Elvis”
Steve Allen Show, even with Elvis in a tux, pulled Sullivan into a new
stream. The potential advertising dollars spoke loudly.
Accordingly, on Sunday, September 9, Elvis appeared on the opening
night of the new season of the Sullivan Show. Some of us old enough to
watch it on a school night remember being cautioned in church that
morning not to waste our time on this corrupting influence. That admonition
had the predictable effect of expanding the audience. During one number,
his own cover of Little Richards’s Ready Teddy, Elvis broke into his
exuberant hip-swinging dance. The uproar was only modest, but from then
on, Elvis’ appearances on the Sullivan Show would be shown only from the
waist up.
The breakthrough that Elvis had made with Middle America became
apparent at the end of Elvis’s third and final appearance with Ed Sullivan on
January 6, 1957. Biographer Peter Guralnick wrote that it “could best be
described as the triumph of inclusion over exclusion” (p. 378). By this time,
Sullivan had genuinely warmed to the accommodating, polite, and
essentially kind Elvis Presley. He persuaded Elvis to end with the spiritual
Peace in the Valley instead of another rock ‘n’ roll number. Although his
fans had never seen this side of Elvis, he was in fact deeply rooted in the
Southern Gospel tradition, and in later years would go on to make
numerous spiritual albums. Even singing this very different song, Elvis was
magnetic. Backed up by the Jordanaires, themselves grounded in white
Southern hymns, he brought to many of his fans yet another musical
tradition. After the song, Sullivan pronounced Elvis fit for national
consumption:
I want to say to Elvis Presley and the country that this is a real decent, fine boy, and wherever
you go, Elvis, all of you […] we want to say that we’ve never had a pleasanter experience on
our show with a big name than we’ve had with you. So now let’s have tremendous hand for a
very nice person. (p. 379)

In less than six months, there had been a sea change. Sullivan continued
to say warm things about this “nice” young man, and Elvis was no longer a
favorite target for denunciation and ridicule from the nation’s pulpits.
For a significant segment of American society, Elvis’ inclusionary story
overcame the exclusionary counterstories of his critics. Rock ‘n roll was
here to stay, for all to enjoy. In the short term, Elvis’s performances opened
the way for new artists such as Buddy Holly (That’ll Be the Day), the
Everly Brothers (Bye, Bye Love), and Buddy Knox (Party Doll). In a few
years, the “British Invasion,” lead by the Beatles and The Rolling Stones,
also followed in the footsteps of Elvis and other rock ‘n’ rollers.
Ironically, thanks to short-sighted management, Elvis retreated from the
path he himself had laid out. He put his energy into a series of mostly
forgettable movies, and sang mostly mediocre songs. He abandoned his
roots in Rhythm and Blues and Country and Western, and recorded pop
songs churned out by songwriters who knew how to produce reasonably
appealing but generally lifeless numbers aimed at teen audiences. His dress
and hairstyle became increasingly conventional. He was nearly forgotten as
a seemingly rebellious disrupter of polite society. He gained weight,
became addicted to drugs, and watched his career decline. Still, he recorded
a few really good songs, and made some memorable appearances as the
charismatic performer who became known as the ‘King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’.
In 1968, he recovered some of the old magic in a “Comeback Special” on
NBC. But his career became almost a parody of itself as he did shows in
Las Vegas wearing a white jump suit. Toward the end he began touring
again, often thrilling audiences who could connect the sweating overweight
performer with the electric Elvis of 1956. He was scheduled to give a
performance in Portland, Maine, on August 17, 1977. It was not to be. The
afternoon before, his father announced that Elvis had died, at age 42, in his
home, Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee.
 Although Elvis Presley succumbed to the pressures to “tone it down”
and conform, he remained true to himself for long enough to win over and
open up a wary traditional audience. Always a hero to the young people
who bought his records and delighted in his television appearances, he
became a mainstream icon whose story transformed the 1950s American
society. It was OK to “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” to do things differently, to
step out. The morals of the nation need not feel threatened by exuberant,
frankly sensual performers who sang great songs. Elvis helped make Chuck
Berry’s famous lyric come true: “Long live rock ‘n roll […] the feelin’ is
there, body and soul.”

MARTIN LUTHER KING – THE BATTLE FOR EQUAL

RIGHTS

Michael King, Jr was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in January, 1929. He was the
son and grandson of prominent Baptist ministers. He enjoyed a comfortable
middle-class black upbringing. After an inspiring trip to the Middle East
and Europe, his father changed his own name to Martin Luther King, after
the famous theologian and priest who in the 1500s had challenged the
teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and the authority of the Pope.
Michael King, Jr then became Martin Luther King, Jr at the age of five.
Martin was a gifted student. Excelling in segregated schools, he gained
admission to the historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta when he
was only fifteen. At 22, he earned a divinity degree at Crozier Theological
Seminary, near Philadelphia. While still working on his PhD in Theology
from Boston University, King became pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church in Montgomery, Alabama. As noted earlier, the year was 1954. King
was twenty-five. By that point he was immersed in the traditions of the
Southern black Baptist church, various modern religious and intellectual
traditions, and also the undergirding texts of the American founding, most
importantly the Declaration of Independence. Like others around the world,
he was inspired by, and held closely to its assertion of the “self-evident”
truth that “all men are created equal.”
 By the end of the next year, King had completed his doctoral degree and
settled into the routines of the ministry. He may or may not have seen
coming an event in his new home city which transformed American society.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress refused
to give up her seat on a bus to a white rider. She was very tired – tired from
work, and tired from the ubiquitous repressions of the Jim Crow South.
Parks was immediately arrested for violating local segregation statutes. In
response, black community organizers quickly formed the Montgomery
Improvement Society, elected the well-educated and highly respected King
as president, and began a bus boycott.
To help launch the protest movement, King spoke to several thousand
people gathered at one of the city’s African-American churches just four
days after Parks’ arrest, on December 5. While he had little time to prepare
an address for a clearly momentous occasion, he was able to draw on the
various strands of his life in the South and his education in both the North
and the South. Like Parks, he emphasized in eloquent terms that he was
tired. He told “my friends” that “there comes a time when people get tired
of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” and “get tired of
being plunged across the abyss of humiliation,” and “tired of being pushed
out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the
piercing chill of an alpine November.” He used the word “tired” five times
in all (King, 1955).
But King also touched on other themes that would be heard in his later
speeches and writings. His words would relate an inclusive identity story of
both the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship. First, he
emphasized that the crowd gathered to hear him were American citizens
who shared with all other Americans a love for democracy. He stated that
Rosa Parks was not to be regarded as a fine Negro citizen of Montgomery
but simply as one of the city’s “finest citizens.” He also held high the value
of justice, stating that “we’re going to work with grim and bold
determination to gain justice,” and that “we are determined […] to work
and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty
stream.” However, King also cautioned again and again that the struggle
would be nonviolent. Having had been strongly influenced by the work of
Gandhi and its roots in the life of Jesus, King affirmed that “We believe in
the teachings of Jesus. The only weapon that we have in our hands this
evening is the weapon of protest.”
Inspired by King’s eloquence, the boycott of the Montgomery city buses
sustained itself for more than a year. During that time, King was arrested
and his house was bombed, but he remained undeterred. He had concluded
his December speech acknowledging that “I will face intimidation” but that
he would not rest. Even though some may die in the struggle, “We don’t
mind so long as justice comes out of it.” In the end, King and the bus
boycott prevailed. The case was finally resolved when the US Supreme
Court upheld a lower court ruling that segregation on the city bus system
was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of equal
protection under the laws.
King’s leadership in Montgomery garnered him national attention. He
appeared on the cover of Time magazine in early 1957, shortly after the
Supreme Court ruling. Over the next three years he became an increasingly
prominent leader for African Americans. His confrontational approach,
though nonviolent, was more radical than the leadership of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) or the Urban
League. He applied pressure for reform on the presidential administration of
Dwight D. Eisenhower, particularly on Attorney General Herbert Brownell.
By the time of the 1960 presidential election between Democrat John F.
Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon, King was the foremost leader of
the civil rights movement.
King became even more visible to the nation as a whole shortly before
the election. He had been jailed in a maximum security prison in Georgia
for driving with an out-of-state license. Candidate Kennedy telephoned
King’s wife Coretta and offered to help. Shortly afterward, Kennedy’s
brother, the future attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, called the presiding
judge to orchestrate King’s release after more than a week in prison
(Branch, 1988, p. 367). The publicity from that intervention had two effects.
The attention from the Kennedys gave King even greater status as the
foremost African-American leader. The black Pittsburg Courier cited the
prevailing view that “These white folks have now made Dr. Martin King, Jr.
(sic) the biggest Negro in the United States” (Branch, p. 368). In addition,
the publicity won John Kennedy considerable support from black voters
against Richard Nixon. King’s father, Martin Luther King, Sr, also known
as Daddy King, was especially vocal in his support for Kennedy. He
announced that he even though he had always been a Republican he would
now vote for Kennedy in thanks for the family’s aid.
After John Kennedy became president, and Robert Kennedy attorney
general, King entered a period of tense negotiations with the two, at a
distance. The Kennedys seemed fundamentally sympathetic to civil rights
but feared losing white political support in the South. But King and others
kept up the pressure. Freedom Rides in 1961 and continuing protests made
civil rights a foremost issue. King had succeeded in drawing national
attention to the plight of African Americans, and also to his leadership on
their behalf. A direct result of the continuing pressure was President
Kennedy giving a speech in June of 1963 proposing strong civil rights
legislation, including support for voting rights. He went considerably
further than he ever had before in proclaiming that, “We are confronted
primarily with a moral issue. It is as old the Scriptures and is as clear as the
American Constitution.”
Martin Luther King had now reached the height of his prominence and
influence. Then two statements in 1963, one a written document and the
other a speech, solidified his status as a transforming heroic leader for the
nation as a whole. In April, King was arrested once again; this time in
Birmingham, Alabama. While imprisoned he wrote a long response to white
religious leaders who had implored him to stop protests and pursue change
in a less-disruptive manner. King’s eloquent response became known as
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” He distinguished between just and unjust
laws and explained the moral duty to lovingly and openly protest rather
than obey unjust laws. He stated that freedom would not be given
“voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Most
movingly, he asked people to empathize with his own plight:
when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to
explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the amusement park that has just
been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that
Funtown is closed to colored children. (King, 1963a)

Four months later, on August 28, King spoke at the civil rights march in
Washington, DC. His famous “I Have a Dream” speech borrowed the
phrase “Let freedom ring” from the spiritual American anthem My Country
'Tis of Thee. King concluded his ringing declaration with the words:
when we let [freedom] ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every
city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white
men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the
words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free
at last!” (King, 1963b)

Recognizing the ascension of King’s moral leadership, Time magazine

named him Man of the Year in 1963.
King’s leadership became even more crucial during the next two years.
Lyndon B. Johnson became president after John Kennedy was assassinated
in November of 1963. King had a wary relationship with Johnson as he had
had with Kennedy, but the two worked quietly together to ensure the
passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The next year, after Johnson had
been elected with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, King
organized voting rights marches from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol
in Montgomery. In horrific scenes broadcast on national television, the
marchers were beaten by Alabama state police and driven back. A
clergyman from the North was killed by a mob that evening. Finally, a
peaceful march, led by King, was negotiated, and the protestors completed
the long walk into Montgomery. President Johnson used the occasion to
deliver his most memorable speech, pushing the Congress to enact
immediately voting rights legislation. He received overwhelming applause,
and ultimately support, when he quoted from We Shall Overcome, the
anthem of the civil rights movement. He proclaimed “but really it is all of
us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And
we shall overcome.” Then, with King’s support and pressure, the Voting
Rights Act was passed in the summer of 1965.
Over the next several years, King’s efforts met with mixed success.
Following urban riots during the next several summers, the public became
less willing to take further steps to ensure justice for African Americans.
The nation’s focus shifted to increasing opposition to the war in Vietnam.
King spoke out against the war, but his voice was one of many. He became
more radical in his condemnation of American militarism and then of
American capitalism. He remained an important black spokesman, but
found himself left behind by other more radical voices – voices which did
not always endorse nonviolence.
Martin Luther King’s struggles for justice for exploited workers – many,
but not all, of whom were African Americans – ended in Memphis,
Tennessee, in the Spring of 1968. On the night of April 3, in the Mason
Temple, King addressed a large crowd of supporters, giving an
impassioned, empowering speech, knowing full well, as he had for some
time, that he would always be the potential target of an assassin. He
acknowledged that there would be difficult days ahead, but then in the
biblical cadences of the Southern black preacher, he reassured his audience
that no matter what happens, they would prevail:
I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked
over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know
tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

His quest, and theirs, would ultimately be successful, not because of

him, but because of them. Finally, he concluded with a characteristic
blending of religious imagery and historical American texts – in this case,
trumpeting the opening words of Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the
Republic, the Union Army’s Civil War anthem, and Abraham Lincoln’s
favorite song, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord.
Those were the last words of his last speech. The next day he was killed.

MUHAMMAD ALI – KING OF THE WORLD

The future Heavyweight Champion of the World was born Cassius

Marcellus Clay, Jr in 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky. His home state was one
of the Border States that remained in the Union during the Civil War, even
though it held slaves. Located just across the Ohio River from the free state
of Indiana, like the rest of the South, it was nevertheless highly segregated.
Clay grew up in a middle-class black neighborhood. It was far from
prosperous but the young Cassius never had to worry about where his next
meal was coming from or where he would lay his head down at night. His
father was a sign painter and aspiring artist. His mother did most of the care
for Cassius and his younger brother Rudy. She also occasionally did
domestic work for well-to-do white families (Remnick, 1998).
Clay was a good-looking, fit, and voluble child and young man. He was
known as a talker. What we might call his “gift of gab” was not always so
appreciated during his amateur and professional boxing career when his
detractors called him “The Louisville Lip” or “Gaseous Cassius.” But
growing up, his talking, about almost anything, drew others to him, and
made him a potential leader. He moved beyond just talking to both talking
and boxing as a result of a petty crime. His bicycle was stolen.
Clay was twelve when he and a friend went to a convention of black
merchants and looked around. When they started for home, Cassius
discovered his bicycle was gone. He located a policeman and told him that
he would beat up whoever took it. The officer, Joe Martin, saw resolute
focus in the boys’ demeanor, but suggested he might learn to box before he
started a ruckus. Clay took Martin’s advice and improved rapidly, catching
the attention of the Louisville fight crowd. He appeared on television and
became something of a sensation. As he developed, he perfected an unusual
style of keeping his hands low and ducking away, just barely, from his
opponents’ jabs and hooks. His talking took on the added dimensions of
taunting his opponents, often in poetry, or at least, doggerel. He would use
his wit to predict the round he would defeat his opponent: “This guy must
be done. I’ll stop him in one” (Remnick, p. 96). He was a magnetic figure
even to those who were put off by his braggadocio.
Clay moved up in the amateur ranks and won a spot on the US Olympic
team going to Rome in 1960. His outgoing charm and constant conversation
made him a favorite with much of the press, and most of the athletes. He
easily won the light-heavyweight gold medal. It was then that he came to
national attention. One sultry evening in August, he was one of the several
American medal winners interviewed on television. The program was
dreary until Clay’s exuberance transformed the broadcast. Viewers still
remember him crowing about how happy he was, how he slept with his
medal under his pillow, and couldn’t wait to show it to his mother.
Back in the USA, Clay began his professional career, as a heavyweight.
Although he had some close fights, he generally predicted when he would
stop his opponents, and he always won. By 1963, the undefeated former
Olympic champ, he was ready to fight for the title. The reigning champ was
the fearsome Sonny Liston. Liston had knocked out the previous title holder
Floyd Patterson in the first round in 1962 to win the championship, and
then replicated his one-round knockout in a rematch a year later. The fight
with Clay was arranged for February of 1964. Most boxing writers thought
that Clay would be beaten badly, perhaps even killed. Liston seemed
invincible. But Clay bragged, “I’m young, I’m handsome, I’m strong, I’m
pretty, can’t possibly be beaten.” Time would tell. When they met, many
who watched or listened to the fight on the radio were surprised that unlike
Patterson, Clay survived the first round. Not only that, he won it clearly. He
was ahead on the judges’ cards when Liston threw in the towel after the
sixth round. The exuberant Clay pronounced himself “King of the World.”
The celebration didn’t last long. Many were put off by the fast-talking
even “uppity” black man who pronounced himself “The Greatest.” They
were amused by his pronouncement that he would “float like a butterfly,
sting like a bee,” but they didn’t much like him. Looming large were
rumors that Clay was going to become a “Black Muslim.” Large segments
of white America didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound good. In
fact, Clay had been highly conscious of racial dynamics for many years. It
was hard not to be in segregated Louisville. He was drawn to the teachings
of the Nation of Islam, and its current leader, Elijah Muhammad. The
Nation’s philosophy had roots reaching far back into the African-American
experience. Notions of black self-sufficiency, discipline, and personal
responsibility appealed to Clay. Elijah Muhammad and his followers
rejected the Civil Rights goal of integration and its means of nonviolence.
Clay would adopt its principles selectively. It soon became clear that he had
joined the Nation of Islam and had accepted the name Muhammad Ali from
Elijah Muhammad. The controversy continued as a November rematch with
Liston was scheduled in Boston. A few days before the fight, Ali had
emergency hernia surgery and the fight was postponed. By the time he was
ready to box again, promoters in the city of Boston decided that Ali and his
connections to the Nation of Islam were too divisive. It would not be
rescheduled in the Bay State capital. It would have to go somewhere else.
Not many other places were willing to take on the furor surrounding Ali.
But a second fight finally took place in the small city of Lewiston, Maine,
in May of 1965. Ali knocked out Liston in the first round, though many
spectators said they never saw the wining right-hand punch. As controversy
grew, it strangely but perhaps inevitably became entangled with growing
protests over the escalating war in Vietnam. Ali expressed reservations
about joining the fight and being drafted. In early 1966, he told a reporter
that “I don’t have no personal quarrels with those Viet Congs” (Montville,
2017, p. 23). Attention then focused on whether he would be compelled to
fight them, despite his wishes. Ali had twice failed the Army mental test,
though many suspected that he had deliberately faked a poor performance.
Often questioned about his IQ, he would quip that he never said he was the
smartest, just the greatest (Ali, 1975).
Government authorities were relentless in trying to bring down this
controversial figure. It became nearly impossible for him to get a license to
fight in the United States. He defended his title four times outside American
borders – in Canada, Germany, and England. The conflict came to head in
the Spring of 1967 when Ali refused to step forward and be drafted at an
induction ritual in Houston. He claimed deferment on the grounds that he
was a Muslim minister. He was charged with draft evasion, and denied both
boxing licenses in US cities and banned from traveling outside the country.
He was stripped of his title and not allowed to fight for three and a half
years – the prime of his career. He was a pariah to much of mainstream
America.
Then things changed. During the years Ali was out of the ring (1967–
1970), he grew, the nation changed, and people took another look. First, Ali
began to speak regularly at college campuses and other welcoming venues.
Even those who didn’t much like his religion, his refusal to fight for his
country, or his outsized personality realized that he was sincere in his
beliefs, and most important, ready to sacrifice his entire career and even his
freedom. Chances were excellent that he would go to jail for a long time.
That would depend on the American legal system, maybe even federal
courts. Second, the country’s attitude toward the war in Vietnam shifted
dramatically. Opposition caused President Lyndon Johnson to announce that
he would not run for re-election in 1968. His successor, Richard Nixon,
realized he had to end the war and steadily withdraw American troops from
Southeast Asia. With that change in the political climate, it almost seemed
that Ali was a prophet. The war made no sense, and he had said as much. So
when Ali was allowed to box again at the end of 1970, people followed his
campaign to regain his title from the new champ, Joe Frazier, with new
eyes, and considerable sympathy. Mainstream America was largely won
over. By then, the sporting press had stopped calling him Cassius Clay. He
was Muhammad Ali around the world. He came back to fighting much
more accepted than when he went out. He had taken a transforming journey,
and in part because of who he was, the country had been transformed.
In the next decade, Ali became a legendary figure. He lost his first fight
to Joe Frazier in 1971 but beat him in 1974 in a brutal rematch. He regained
the title in an epic bout with George Foreman in 1974. After that he endured
numerous defenses of his title, lost and won it back in 1978, and finally
retired. During that time, he kept speaking out for, and to, African
Americans. His message was always the same. Take care of yourselves. Be
responsible. Respect your own people. Know your own history. Establish
your own identity. Living peacefully in a mixed race country was to be
established on the basis of equality firmly rooted in positive self-regard.
But Ali soon slowed, lost his facial expressiveness, and his quick
talking. His wit was intact, but he couldn’t easily express it. “The Louisville
Lip” was a distant memory. In 1984, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s
syndrome and began a long decline. He gradually became a respected,
kindly, and tragic figure. Photos of him in his prime – for example, one of
him standing over Sonny Liston after knocking him out in their rematch –
were seen often in magazines or on television. He was both remembered for
his often unappreciated greatness as an athlete, and valued as a mellowed
model of standing firm for one’s commitments, no matter the personal cost.
The highpoint of Muhamad Ali’s transformation from villain to hero
came during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. There was actually
little question that the American Olympian who would best represent the
United States at the opening ceremonies was Muhammad Ali. He appeared
dramatically to light the flame that opened the games. His left hand shook,
but he firmly held the torch in his right hand, and managed to record one
more victory.
Mainstream America further demonstrated its respect and even
reverence for Ali in 1998. That year, the signal was Ali appearing on a
Wheaties box. A drawing of him as a boxer in his prime was on the front
with the “Breakfast of Champions” logo. On the back was a picture of Ali at
the 1996 Olympics. The text noted both his boxing career and his later
humanitarian efforts. It noted that he was as well-known outside the ring as
in it, and that he always stood up for what he believed. He had made what
he believed was a message that his society could embrace. When he died in
2016, his funeral in Louisville included celebrities from around the world,
notably former US President Bill Clinton.
What explains how so significant a part of the general public changed
the dominant narrative of Ali as villain to Ali as hero? Freud’s comments
about a strong and imposing will, and an unshakeable faith in an idea are
certainly part of it. And he was certainly prototypical of one kind of young
African-American male. He acquired the potential to be a leader because of
all three elements. That potential was realized by his incredible charisma.
His looks, his physical grace, his humor, and his quick thinking all
contributed to his outsized charm. We know that people who speak up
quickly, even in saying simple things, are seen as charismatic by their peers
(Von Hippel, Ronay, Baker, Kjelsaas, & Murphy, 2016). The more people
realized that this irrepressible person was for real, and that he was deeply
committed to a vision of a more just America where African Americans
were respected because of their self-respect and were welcome to contribute
on their own terms, the more Ali became a transforming hero to many.
 CHAPTER 4

HEROIC TRANSFORMING LEADERSHIP:

TOUCHING THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR
NATURE

Late in the summer of 1864, President Abraham Lincoln was sorely

tempted to make a deal with Confederate President Jefferson Davis that
might have prolonged American slavery for decades. The agreement could
have completely betrayed the promises of Lincoln’s own Emancipation
Proclamation. During one of the Union’s bleakest periods in the long Civil
War, there was intense pressure from the Democratic Party and some
Republicans. Many wanted Lincoln to make peace by backing off his
insistence that the war could only be ended by the complete capitulation of
the South, and the emancipation of all slaves. They decried the bloodshed of
battles in June and July, and insisted that the South would return to the
Union if only Lincoln would relax his demand that slaves be “forever free.”
The mounting toll of dead and wounded, with no ending in sight, weighed
heavily on the President. At one point he drafted a letter saying he would let
Jefferson Davis “try me” (McPherson, 2008, p. 239). He would insist only
on reunion, with other issues, including emancipation, considered later.
In the end, Lincoln backed away from the great temptation to restore
peace at the expense of millions of African Americans. Instead, he
reaffirmed his stated position that the promise made must be kept.
Eventually his insistence on reunification plus emancipation prevailed. This
series of events constitutes one of the many aspects of Lincoln’s leadership
that makes him both transforming and heroic. Going forward, we will refer
to it and other examples of what the sixteenth President decided, did, and
said to illustrate the concept of heroic transforming leadership. We begin
with James MacGregor Burns’ (1978) definitions of leadership and
transforming leadership, and our own definitions of heroism and heroic
leadership. Following Burns, we will also consider the role of charisma in
heroic transforming leadership. We will see that such leadership sometimes
involves charisma, but we will also see that charisma is often non-heroic,
even at times villainous, and can be far from transforming. We end with a
discussion of the leadership of America’s current president, Donald Trump.
Trump is also a Republican, though that party today is very different form
the “party of Lincoln.” We will see that Trump’s leadership offers
illuminating contrasts to the transforming leadership of Abraham Lincoln
and many other American presidents.

WHAT IS LEADERSHIP?

James MacGregor Burns’ exploration of leadership has had a vast influence

on the evolving discipline of Leadership Studies. Cumbersome though it is,
his definition of leadership highlights elements that we believe are central
to its understanding. Burns wrote that:
leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes
mobilize, in competition or conflict with others, institutional, political, psychological, and
other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers […] in order to
realize goals mutually held by both leaders and followers […]. (Burns, 1978, p. 18, emphasis
in original)

There are several important elements of this formulation. One is the

idea that potential leaders compete with other potential leaders to influence
followers. It may not be the case that all leaders have had to compete with
other potential leaders, but the idea of competition or conflict is important
and seen widely in instances of transforming heroic leadership. Certainly
Abraham Lincoln was in conflict with so-called Peace Democrats, and
others, who wanted to stop fighting in the illusory hope that an armistice
would lead to reunion. Burns’ emphasis on competition and conflict has
echoes in Howard Gardner’s more recent emphasis on narrative and
storytelling as essentials of leadership (Gardner, 1995). Gardner argues that
a leader’s stories often compete with “counterstories” that offer a different
vision of a group’s identity. One of his most interesting examples is Pope
John XXIII who told an inclusive story about Catholics and the Roman
Catholic Church. John favored an open, welcoming church that respected
the humanity of all, regardless of their faith. The Church establishment
related an exclusionary story that portrayed Catholics as better than non-
Catholics.
A second important element of Burns’ approach is that potential leaders
use (mobilize) various kinds of power (resources) at their disposal in their
effort to engage followers. In listing “institutional, political, psychological
and other resources,” Burns echoes the work of French and Raven (1959;
Raven, 1965) who emphasize the broad spectrum of powers (or potential
influence) that people can apply in interactions with others. Importantly,
they note that what they call “reward” and “coercive” (punishment) power
could take the form of tangible actions, such as giving money (reward) or
inflicting pain (coercive), or personal behaviors, such approval or
disapproval. This distinction, in addition to their discussions of expert,
legitimate, and referent power, underlines the fact that influence and
leadership involve relationships, and that followers care very much about
who their leaders are and how those leaders regard them. A leader’s
personal and impersonal treatment of followers matters a great deal. Very
importantly, it can signal that the leader and also other followers value an
individual follower highly. Positive regard from a leader, meaning that the
leader believes one has value, and will show that he or she does, satisfies
strong human motives, and can therefore be powerful.
This point brings into focus Burns’ emphasis on human motivations.
Leaders use their various kinds of power to “arouse […] and satisfy” the
needs of followers. Satisfying follower needs is clearly an essential element
of leadership. But simply stating that leaders satisfy follower motivations
may give the impression that they accept and work with followers’
preexisting needs and goals. But in saying that leaders, or potential leaders,
“arouse” motives, Burns underlines the fact that leaders often work to alter
the motives of followers. Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs approach,
Burns argues that by satisfying some motives, leaders can make other
motives salient. These other motives might be preexisting motives that
simply aren’t salient at the moment, or are seldom salient, or they may be
new motives that the leader arouses by somehow persuading followers that
they are important and require satisfaction. For example, a leader may
stimulate or arouse underlying fears and make the need for safety salient.
Or she or he might make followers feel personally safe, but cause doubt
about whether they are welcomed into the leader’s group of followers. In
his 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis speech, President John F. Kennedy aroused
safety needs, pointing out that the course the nation was embarking on was
perilous, but then making esteem needs even more salient by arguing that
that option best exemplified American values and principles:
The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are; but it is the one
most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the
world. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.

In short, human beings have a range of motives, conscious and

unconscious, salient and not salient. Leaders can change the needs
followers experience by satisfying and arousing various motives by what
they do and what they say, or according to Howard Gardner, “by word
and/or personal example.” One need that is particularly relevant for
understanding transforming leadership, and also central to understanding
Donald Trump’s leadership, is the need for a positive social identity.
According to social identity theory, people have a need for high self-esteem,
and base their self-evaluation on some combination of individual identity
and social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Our individual identity is our
sense of our personal worth based on individual accomplishments relative
to those with whom we compare. Social identity is our sense of how the
groups we belong to compare in ability and morality to other groups
(Goethals & Darley, 1987; Hogg, 2001). Leaders can affect our sense of
individual worth by the way they treat us within the groups we belong to.
For example, if they make decisions affecting us using fair procedures, they
signal that we deserve respect, and that we are valued within our group
(Tyler & Lind, 1992a, 1992b). Leaders can also shape our social identity by
signaling that the group we belong to, and that he or she leads or aspires to
lead, is one of value, that should be a source of pride. Sometimes leaders
convey this through inclusive identity stories that imply that both our group
and other groups have value. Pope John XXIII did this by addressing his
encyclicals to “all men of good will” and by referring to Protestants as
“separated brethren” rather than members of denominations less worthy
than Catholics. At other times, leaders offer a positive social identity for
their followers by deriding other groups. During World War II, US General
George Patton tried to raise the self-esteem, and morale, of American
soldiers by referring to the German enemy as “those Hun bastards.” Most
famously of course, Adolf Hitler tried to build a positive “Aryan” identity
for Germans by blaming the nation’s problems on Jews, and making them
scapegoats.
The role of leaders in shaping motivation by both arousing and
satisfying different needs calls attention to the final element in Burns
definition of leadership – the idea that leaders engage motives in order to
“realize goals mutually held by both leaders and followers.” The idea that
leadership is about leaders mobilizing followers to achieve mutual or
collective goals has become almost a cliché. It paints a picture of leaders
and followers working harmoniously to advance aims that they simply
happen, by chance, to share. This image overlooks the fact that in engaging
(arousing and satisfying) motives, leaders change follower goals. This idea
is, in fact, central to Burns’ theory. The goals of leaders and followers may
end up being mutual, but they may seldom begin that way. This alternative
view of mutual goals is nicely captured in Hogan, Curphy, and Hogan’s
(1994) definition of leadership. It characterizes leadership as “persuading
other people to set aside for a period of time their individual concerns and
to pursue a common goal that is important […] for the group” (p. 493). Like
Burns’ approach, this one highlights the idea that individuals have a range
of motives, and that leaders use their influence capabilities to create goals
that are shared at least for a time between leaders and followers. In 1955
and 1956, Martin Luther King successfully engaged many of the African-
American citizens of Alabama to participate in the Montgomery Bus
Boycott by emphasizing the need to jointly pursue justice:
I want to say that in all of our actions we must stick together. Unity is the great need of the
hour, and if we are united we can get many of the things that we not only desire but which we
justly deserve. (King, December 5, 1955)
 Closely related theories of leadership also emphasize how some leaders
engage follower motivations to contribute to a group goal, and derive self-
esteem by being “part of the solution” (House & Shamir, 1993).
With these considerations in mind, a streamlined definition of
leadership, based on Burns’ writing, might be: leadership is an activity by
which potential leaders compete with other potential leaders to shape
followers’ goals by using some of their various powers to arouse and satisfy
follower motives. The heart of this admittedly not-very-streamlined account
is that leaders attempt to increase their followers’ motivation to pursue
specific goals. For example, during the darkest days of the Battle of Britain
during World War II, Winston Churchill succeeded in convincing his
countrymen that their needs for safety, freedom, and self-respect would be
best served by fighting Nazi Germany rather than entering into negotiations.
Many others thought that resistance to the German Wehrmacht was useless
and that England should negotiate the best peace that it could, as soon as
possible.

WHAT IS TRANSFORMING LEADERSHIP?

James MacGregor Burns not only launched Leadership Studies as a

discipline just over 40 years ago, he introduced one of the most enduring
and influential concepts in the field – that of “transforming leadership”
(Burns, 1978, 2003). What exactly is transforming leadership? First, it is
not transformational leadership, though many scholars and writers attribute
that concept to Burns. Transformational leadership, as developed and
measured by Bass and his colleagues, is a combination of charisma,
inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized
consideration, with charisma ordinarily being the glue that binds the other
qualities together. In general, it produces energized effort toward goals
defined by the leader. Transforming leadership is distinguished by its
emphasis on morality. Burns defined it as happening when leaders and
followers engage each other in ways that raise both to higher levels of
motivation and morality (Burns, 1978, p. 20). It isn’t exactly clear what
Burns meant by higher levels of motivation. Is it simply increased effort,
which seems to be the consequence of transformational leadership, or
different and more moral motivation? It seems the latter. Leaders attempt to
engage followers to pursue more moral purposes, and thus both are elevated
toward higher levels of morality. People’s motives can be transformed in
the moral direction by leaders who help people satisfy their lower basic
needs, perhaps for economic security and safety, and at the same time
arouse the needs to experience moral uplift. For example, in his famous
message to Congress in December 1862, Abraham Lincoln argued that
history would judge whether the Union acted morally when it had the
opportunity to free slaves, and that Congress should act to do so. He wrote
that the required means were both clear and moral: “The way is plain,
peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever
applaud, and God must forever bless.”
In general, transforming leadership moves people to attempt to
accomplish moral purposes. Moral leaders can work toward helping
followers satisfy existing needs and open them to the possibilities of self-
actualization and what Kohlberg (1976) called post-conventional morality.
At the heart of that highly developed level of moral reasoning is developing
an independent conception of justice informed by taking the perspective of
others. At this level, people come to appreciate others’ needs and the
situations within which they have to make choices. Once followers
appreciate what others face, or what they are contending with, they can see
their common humanity. Moral leaders who engage their followers in ways
that help them empathize with others guide them toward acting in ways that
exemplify basic Christian virtues of humility and care (Allison, Kocher, &
Goethals, 2016). Their leadership is almost always inclusive, based on
perceptions of common humanity.
Howard Gardner characterized Secretary of State George Marshall’s
leadership after World War II as essentially visionary in its inclusiveness. In
his famous address at the Harvard University commencement in 1947,
Marshall unveiled what has come to be called the Marshall Plan – a
signature achievement of the administration of President Harry S. Truman.
He laid out the rationale for the United States helping the Western world as
a whole by providing the economic support to rebuild war-torn European
countries, both allies England and France, and former enemy, Germany.
Because the United States itself was economically and militarily strong
enough to provide for the needs of most of its citizens, Marshall was able to
persuade them to look beyond themselves and help others. He made clear
that Americans were better off if others were as well.

WHAT IS HEROIC TRANSFORMING LEADERSHIP?

Our work on heroes and heroism has consistently emphasized three ideas
that distinguish it from the scholarship of other students of heroism. One is
that heroism is in the eye of the beholder. It is an attributed quality, almost
always based on perceptions of unusual competence or unusual morality, or
both. The moral behavior that is regarded as heroic typically requires
struggle, risk, and self-sacrifice. Second, we have argued that all heroes are
leaders, though not all leaders are heroes. Heroes are not always direct
leaders, like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, who interact directly
with their followers to show the way forward with their words or example.
They may be indirect leaders, whose accomplishments inspire us and shape
our aspirations and behavior. For example, one might regard the painter
Pablo Picasso as a hero, both because of the artistic quality of his work and
for its implications, such as his depiction of the cruelty of the Spanish Civil
War in his masterpiece Guernica. Another may regard Clint Eastwood as a
hero on the basis of his skill in directing great films, despite not liking his
politics or his lifestyle. A third distinctive feature of our approach, tied to
the fact that we believe that heroism is in the eye of the beholder, is that
many people’s heroes are fictional. In fact, in one of our earlies studies we
asked participants to list their heroes. Roughly one-third of the names they
listed were fictional. Sherlock Holmes was one such fictional hero. Some
people admire his crime-solving intelligence and wit, and also think that he
generally acts morally, if not entirely legally. Though fictional, he is a
leader in that he provides a model for wise and often witty ways to help
others.
While holding that heroism is in the eye of the beholder, we are
persuaded that Joseph Campbell’s description of the transforming hero’s
journey captures something very real. Some individuals such as Gandhi and
Nelson Mandela appear to have been transformed by the trials and
vicissitudes of the archetypical hero’s journey, and they are widely seen as
heroes. But there are clearly heroes such as US Airways pilot Chesley
(“Sully”) Sullenberger, who in 2009 successfully saved all passengers and
crew by ditching his stricken airliner in the Hudson River on a cold January
day, who have not necessarily been transformed by a hero’s journey. In
contrast, there are individuals who have been transformed, and behave
morally and effectively, but are not appreciated as heroes. Ulysses S. Grant
was transformed by his leadership of Union armies during the Civil War,
and his struggles for African Americans during his presidency. But he is not
typically regarded as a hero. Even if some believe that he should be.
Given these considerations, we will define heroic transforming
leadership as leadership that is regarded as heroic by followers who emulate
and follow the leader to accomplish moral purposes. The baseball player
Jackie Robinson is an example. He is widely regarded as a hero for his role
in transforming American society by integrating the major leagues. Other
black players coming along soon after Jackie always referred to him as Mr
Robinson – honoring his courage and persistence. As suggested earlier,
Gandhi and Mandela clearly qualify as heroic transforming leaders. Heroic
transforming leaders must first be regarded as heroes and then they must
achieve some kind of morally transforming change. Abraham Lincoln is the
American politician who best illustrates these elements of heroic
transforming leadership.
Who are the individuals most likely to become heroic transforming
leaders? Many will be individuals who have been transformed themselves
by enduring the heroes journey (Campbell, 1949). That is, they would have
left places of comfort, journeyed into dangerous domains where they were
opposed by powerful enemies, and in prevailing, acquired a new sense of
moral purpose that they bring to potential followers. Nelson Mandela and
Martin Luther King are two who took such a journey. Another was George
Washington. Washington gave up his comfortable position as owner and
overseer of huge tracks of land around his beloved Mount Vernon in
Northern Virginia to become commander of the Continental Army during
the American Revolution. While the position was one of great honor, that fit
his ambition, it also became, to use Lincoln’s words, a “fiery trial.”
Washington got home only once during eight long years of war. But thanks
to his persistence and wisdom, the forces he led eventually won.
 Washington also prevailed over his ambition, and turned aside the
opportunity to become king. Through the rigors of war, he developed a
vision of a strong, united, and democratic nation. During his subsequent
years as president and distinguished private citizen, Washington faced his
most vexing moral challenge. He appreciated that slavery, along with the
treatment of native people, was America’s original sin. Owner of several
hundred slaves himself, he struggled with the politics, economics, and
logistics of freeing his slaves. Until his final days, he never was able to find
the moral courage to take the ultimate necessary step. But then, in writing
his will, five months before his death, he eloquently led the way for other
slave-holding American founders by stipulating that his slaves be freed on
the death of his cherished wife Martha, that those who were unable to take
care of themselves be provided for during their remaining days, and that the
slaves thus freed be taught to read and write so as to be able to support
themselves. It was an audacious act of moral leadership by a transformed
hero. He wrote in the strongest words he could find, that all of these
provisions regarding slaves be “religiously fulfilled […] without evasion,
neglect or delay” (Washington, 1799).
In addition to personal transformation being fundamental to
transforming leadership, several authors have emphasized the role of
charisma (House & Shamir, 1993). The idea of charisma as an important
element in leadership goes back nearly one hundred years to Max Weber’s
discussion of charismatic authority (Weber, 1947 (from Burns, 2003, p.
246)). The term charisma derives from the Greek idea of “divine gift” or
“gift of grace.” Weber states that it is a quality attributed to individuals
whose magnetism appears to be almost other worldly and who are seen as
“endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically
exceptional powers or qualities.” It inspires “complete personal devotion.”
As the term is used today, it refers to aspects of how a person looks, moves,
acts, sounds, and speaks that other people find compelling and emotionally
arousing. Martin Luther King’s charisma came from the meaning of his
words and the rhythms and cadences in which he delivered them. Elvis
Presley’s derived from his looks, the way he moved on stage, his facial
expressions, and his voice. Muhammad Ali captivated audiences by his
athletic grace, his rapid-fire wit, and his message of black self-respect.
While we may call examples of charismatic men to mind more readily than
charismatic women, Oprah Winfrey and the late Princess Diana of Great
Britain were compellingly charismatic. Their looks, their manner of
speaking, and the story of their lives elicited an emotional connection and
some of the personal devotion noted by Weber.
Burns has been critical in his appraisal of the role of charisma in
transforming leadership. First, following Weber, he notes that it is
emotional rather than rational. These views align with Sigmund Freud’s
analysis of the emotional connections between leaders and followers which
emphasize the hypnotic qualities of strong leaders who influence through
repetition and exaggeration rather than logic. They hold their followers in
“fascination” through their strength and their fanatic commitment. Second,
Burns argues that charismatic leadership does not empower followers, as
does transforming leadership. It does not elevate them but rather turns them,
essentially, into children.
While charismatic leadership can mesmerize, and therefore short-circuit
thinking, and make followers feel small in comparison to the beloved
leader, other scholars have linked rationality and empowerment to charisma.
Bass and Avolio (1993) pair charisma and intellectual stimulation as
correlated elements of transformational leadership. The magnetic leadership
of Martin Luther King and Gandhi stimulated followers to think divergently
– to view the world differently. In fact, Burns argues that “creative
leadership,” which is often charismatic, creates entirely new meanings that
can be transforming. House and Shamir (1993) suggest that a hallmark of
charismatic leadership is empowerment. Charismatic leaders set high
expectations for their followers, and convey their confidence that the
followers can meet those high expectations. In his last speech in Memphis,
the night before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King urged his
followers to believe that they would achieve their goals, with or without
him, and that “we as a people will get to the Promised Land.” Barack
Obama’s inspiring campaign slogan in his 2008 presidential campaign was
“Yes We Can.” His words, and manner of expressing them, made his
followers feel empowered. John F. Kennedy inspired and empowered
followers by charging them to “Ask not what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country.”
Our conclusion is that the motivating elements of charisma energize
followers and help create transformation. There need not be a contradiction
between thinking that the leader is exceptionally capable and powerful, and
feeling empowered by her or him at the same time. That is actually what
leaders and followers engaging each other to reach higher levels of
motivation is all about. At the same time, we must acknowledge the
irrational side of charismatic leadership. Most importantly, we must
recognize that the power of charisma and charismatic leadership may not
always be directed toward moral ends. The example of Adolf Hitler reminds
us that the most charismatic leaders can be the most evil.

TRANSFORMING PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP VS

DONALD TRUMP

As noted earlier, we hold that transforming leadership fosters an inclusive

morality, where wider and wider circles of humanity are valued. It is the
opposite of exclusive leadership, which builds social identity by arousing
intergroup antagonism and derogation of those who are different and lie
outside the inner circle, or ingroup. Exclusive leaders define the ingroup
narrowly and provoke aggressive feelings and motives of resentment and
revenge toward the outgroup. Exclusive presidents have been rare in
American history. In contrast, our three greatest presidents – George
Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt – have been
eloquent in expressing the values of unity and inclusion, and the dangers of
intergroup hostility. Perhaps the most foresighted expression of the need for
unity and common purpose is found in our first president’s farewell address.
Washington articulated specifically the need for common purpose and for
suppressing the spirit of factions and parties. He warned:
in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party […] The alternate
domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party
dissention […] is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and
permanent despotism. The disorders & miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of
men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the
chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this
disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty. (Washington,
1796)
 In other words, factionalism leads to intergroup conflict and ultimately
domination by a single compelling leader. Washington believed in a
unifying American identity more than any sectional identity. Although some
of his immediate successors embraced this value as well, none had fought
for it, in war and in peace, as consistently as had Washington.
Of all presidents, it was Abraham Lincoln, of course, who faced the
gravest threat to American unity. As he left his home in Springfield, Illinois,
in February of 1861 to assume the presidency he expressed his fear that “I
now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task
before me greater than that which rested upon Washington” (Lincoln,
1861). He did not return, but he did succeed in holding the Union together
through the “fiery trial” of war. From before the war started to near its
ending, he consistently talked of unity. In his first inaugural address, he
spoke to the South of being “not enemies but friends […] Though passion
may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” He appealed
to the “better angles of our nature” to maintain unity. In his second
inaugural address, as the war was coming to a close, he spoke of “charity
for all” and asked the nation “to do all with may achieve and cherish a just,
and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations” (Lincoln, 1865).
In a somewhat different vein, Franklin Roosevelt expressed a different
facet of inclusion – international unity within the Western Hemisphere. In
his own first inaugural address, he proclaimed, “I would dedicate this
Nation to the policy of the good neighbor – the neighbor who resolutely
respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others […]”
(Roosevelt, 1993). Roosevelt’s words are of particular interest in seeing the
importance of positive social identity in enabling an inclusive view of
others. Inclusive identity stories are more likely to appeal to people who are
secure in their own identity. When people’s self-esteem is threatened, they
are more receptive to the leaders who offer positive social identity through
the derogation of outgroups.
The last president before Donald Trump, Barack Obama, was also
inclusive in his vision of the American identity. In his address to the 2004
Democratic Convention, Obama burst onto the national scene by declaring:
there is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of
America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian
America – there’s the United States of America.
 Later, referring to his own mixed-race identity, he recalled “the hope of
a skinny kid with a funny name who believes America has a place for him,
too” (Obama, 2004). Partly to open whites to his own political aspirations,
he presented an inclusive vision of the United States.
For the moment, inclusive identity stories which can morally transform
America, and make it in George H. W. Bush’s words, “kinder and gentler,”
have been overtaken by the divisive rhetoric and leadership of the country’s
45th president, Donald J. Trump. Not only is Trump’s story of America
different from that of his inclusive predecessors, it must be understood on
its own terms. It is best captured in his campaign rallies, and his many
rallies during his time as president-elect. The same dynamics are seen in his
tweets and public appearances as President.
Videos of Trump campaign rallies provide textbook examples of mob
psychology (cf. “Unfiltered Voices from Donald Trump’s Crowds,” The
New York Times, August 3, 2016; YouTube). They are as illustrative as
accounts of lynch mobs during the early twentieth century. They reveal an
ugly brew of resentment, anger, and aggression. They tap into all the
elements of “The Crowd” described by Gustave LeBon in 1895, and
elaborated by Sigmund Freud in his 1920 essay on “group psychology.”
Both LeBon and Freud outlined the way that the cultured veneer of human
society can be stripped away in a crowd or mob, unleashing generally
repressed instincts and urges, especially aggression. LeBon wrote:
Isolated [a man] may be a cultured individual; in a crowd he is a barbarian – that is, a
creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity […] of
primitive beings. (Freud, p. 77)

These characterizations fit the crowds at Trump rallies in ways that are
uncanny.
Freud makes several additional points about the typical mob that can be
seen in the relationship between Trump and his audiences. First, mobs have
a “thirst for obedience.” A large crowd looks for direction and when a
leader steps forward, he or she has the potential to take it almost anywhere.
The leader can unleash behavior that people would be very unlikely to enact
outside of a mob setting. In Trump’s rallies, bigoted shouts, physical
aggression toward protestors, and the mocking of political opponents in
obscene, sexist, and racist terms are startling. Chants such as “lock her up,”
referring to Hillary Clinton, are the tip of the iceberg. The temperature
under such a concoction is raised or lowered by the leader. We have seen
some political leaders – such John McCain in 2008, tempering anti-Muslim
attacks on Barack Obama – get the crowd to back off. Trump stirs them up.
Second, the excitement and emotional arousal in a crowd greatly
diminish intellectual functioning. People become impulsive and react
reflexively to any strong stimulus. There is little thought. Freud describes
the dynamic as follows:
Inclined as it itself is to all extremes, a group can only be excited by an excessive stimulus.
Anyone who wishes to produce an effect upon it needs no logical adjustment in his
arguments; he must paint in the most forcible colours, he must exaggerate, and he must
repeat the same thing again and again. (1920, p. 78)

A leader like Trump who exaggerates, lies, and says the same thing over
and over again (“and Mexico is going to pay for it”) excites the crowd and
can bend it to his will. As Freud says somewhat later in his essay, quoting
LeBon:
A group, further, is subject to the truly magical power of words; they can evoke the most
formidable tempests in the group mind, and are also capable of stilling them. “Reason and
arguments are incapable of combating certain words and formulas. They are uttered with
solemnity in the presence of groups, and as soon as they have been pronounced an expression
of respect is visible on every countenance, and all heads are bowed.” (Freud, 1920, p. 80)

The idea that “all heads are bowed” when leaders repeat simplistic
slogans ties into the underlying assumption that followers have intense
emotional connections with their leaders. Freud discusses the overvaluation
of the loved one, and how such adulation blinds the ones who love to the
ones who are loved. Of course, such intensity gives the target of affection
tremendous power. Burns notes that “The person possessed by love […] is a
slave to the loved one, as the plight of Philip in Somerset Maugham’s
marvelously titled Of Human Bondage illustrates” (p. 74). Donald Trump
clearly appreciates this dynamic, bragging that “I could stand in the middle
of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters”
(Trump, 2016). Here is in other instances, Trump is probably exaggerating,
but not by much. As he points out, the firmness of his support surpasses that
of almost any other political figure in America today. His base loves him.
 What creates this strong attachment to Trump, and its seemingly
blinding binding adoration? Other political leaders move their followers
with slogans, exaggerations, and repetitions. Barack Obama is one. But
there is something almost unnatural in the degree to which Trump’s
supporters are welded to him, and to each other. Is it his personal charisma,
or the nature of his message? Trump supporters do experience him as
charismatic. But we think that they attribute that quality to him because of
the message he conveys, both explicitly and implicitly.
Trump’s leads with an identity story, much like other politicians. That
story paints a picture of a large swath of the American public that is both
deprived and disrespected by an establishment of powerful elites. The
narrative is unrelievedly exclusive, one of ingroups and outgroups, good
guys and bad guys. It calls to mind some of rhetoric of Jefferson Davis
when he took the oath of office as presidency of the slavery-based
Confederacy in February of 1861:
Doubly justified by the absence of wrong on our part, and by wanton aggression on the part
of others, there can be no cause to doubt that the courage and patriotism of the people of the
Confederate States will be found equal to any measures of defense which honor and security
may require.

The message is clear: our side is courageous, honorable, and without

fault. The outgroup threatens and disrespects us.
In Gardner’s framework, this constellation of images appeals to the
“unschooled mind.” The advantage of exclusive “good guy – bad guy”
narratives is that they allow the expression of feelings of aggression and
resentment that feel entirely justified by the attitudes and behavior of the
outgroup. In Trump’s world, the outgroups are the media, Hollywood,
academics, Democrats, black NFL players, Mexicans, Muslims, and urban
coastal elites, to name a few. The construction that these groups look down
on his followers, and therefore treat them unfairly, was actually crystalized
by Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton. In
remarks she clearly regrets, she offered the view that:
you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
The racist, sexist, homophoic, xenophobic, Islamaphomic – you name it […]. And he has
lifted them up. He has given voice to them. (Clinton, 2017)
 True, and they greatly appreciated it. Some of Trump’s supporters
delight in calling themselves “deplorables,” reminding themselves and
others of the disdain and contempt in which half of the Democratic party
holds for them.
Trump underlines what other destructive leader have shown during the
last century. Open, inclusive, and welcoming identity stories have difficulty
competing against the emotionally satisfying narratives that affirm and give
voice to people’s fears, resentments, and feelings of being judged and
treated unfairly. They boost people’s social identity through derogation of
the outgroup much more than by celebrating the ingroup. We see this in
Trump’s frequent use of the idea that a powerful elite establishment treats
his supporters unfairly. In May of 2017, Trump spoke to the New York City
police and told them how unfairly they had been treated by Black Lives
Matter activists and other liberal groups. In April 2018, he pardoned
Scooter Libby, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, saying
that while he didn’t know Libby, “for years I have heard that he has been
treated unfairly.” The next month, Trump pardoned the conservative activist
Dinesh D’Souza, and considered extending clemency to former Illinois
Governor Rod Blagojevich and lifestyle author and commentator, Martha
Stewart. Trump said that D’Souza “was very unfairly treated,” that
Blagojevich’s conviction was “really unfair,” and that Martha Stewart was
“harshly and unfairly treated” (Baker, 2018). Furthermore, Trump and his
supporters repeatedly assert that Trump himself is treated unfairly by the
non-Fox News media.
Trump’s rhetoric and political strategy – holding his base and
derogating nearly everyone else – is so unusual in American politics that it
raises the question of why he has embraced this approach. Is it just because
he stumbled over the political gold nuggets that he had been panned by
some of his Republican predecessors, as when George H. W. Bush
divisively mocked liberals who used “one of those marvelous Boston
adjectives” and responded to the blowback by saying “the people of
Massachusetts might not like it, but the rest of the country will understand
[…]” (Bush, 1988)? Or is there more than just political opportunism? Does
Trump’s hostile denigrating politics give expression to who he really is, to
his underlying personality?
 Psychologists have identified a personality constellation that appears to
fit Trump rather well. It is called the dark triad. Its components are
narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy (Paulhus & Williams,
2002). Narcissism includes feelings of pride, grandiosity, and entitlement.
Machiavellianism includes lack of conventional morality, deception, and
manipulation toward maximizing self-interest. Psychopathy includes lack of
empathy and antisocial behavior. Many political leaders are narcissistic and
manipulative. Psychopathy is the darkest of the dark triad and not as widely
shared. Psychiatrists have adopted the “Goldwater rule,” which cautions
against making psychiatric diagnoses or even psychological trait
attributions from a distance. That’s a valuable guideline. Nevertheless, it’s
hard not to be struck by the extent to which much of Trump’s behavior
matches the profile.
Trump’s appeal also calls to mind another dark triad, which we refer to
as nativism, racism, and sexism. We do not wish to place the “basket of
deplorables” label on Trump supporters, but there is no doubt that much of
what he says lets slip its political strains. Republican Speaker of the House
of Representatives, Paul Ryan, frankly called Trump’s claim that a judge
with Mexican heritage could not be trusted to handle fairly the law suit
against Trump University “the textbook example of a racist comment.”
There are numerous other examples of Trump saying and doing things that
call forth these three exclusive and fundamentally hostile narratives of
American identity.
While Trump has brought forth an ugly exclusive divisiveness, we do
well to remember the essence of transforming leadership that has been
characteristic of a number of US presidents. Abraham Lincoln best captured
its moral inclusiveness. In 1861, he expressed his confidence that the idea
and the ideal of unity would be “touched […] by the better angels of our
nature.” When people thought calmly, those spirits would help them see that
there was more than united them than divided them. Their higher values
could steer them toward a path that was “plain, peaceful, generous, just.”
More than anything else, that path would lead them to embrace their
common humanity. Our own better angels can do the same.
 DONALD TRUMP AS THE PUER AETERNUS

The puer aeternus is a Latin term meaning “eternal boy.” The image
appears frequently in mythology and is used in modern times by clinical
psychologists to describe older men who never fully mature into
psychological adulthood. We raise the possibility that Donald Trump falls
into the category of the puer aeternus based on behaviors that most
reasonable people would consider to be childish and immature. These
behaviors include his repeated insults directed toward women and political
opponents; his mocking of a disabled man; his derision of a war hero, John
McCain; his tendency to encourage followers at his rallies to physically
assault protesters; his disdain for Muslims; his “birther” stance against
Barrack Obama even in the face of definitive contrary evidence; his
repeated lying at a rate far beyond that of other politicians; his
defensiveness at the size of his hands; his limited vocabulary; his sexual
promiscuity; his history of bragging about groping women; his impulsivity;
and his overall narcissism (Drezner, 2018).
Clinical psychology has identified a number of characteristics of the
puer aeternus, and an examination of Trump’s life leads us to check most of
the boxes. First, most puers have fathers who are emotionally distant
(Johnston, 2017). Trump meets this criterion as his relationship with his
father tended to be strictly a business relationship. Hillman (2017), in fact,
argues that the puer’s relentless path toward hedonism and self-destruction
reflects a longing for the father and fathering. Second, an atmosphere of
male bravado and machismo tend to characterize the socialization of the
puer aeternus. As Milhado (2009) notes in his analysis of puers:
a sense of masculinity has to be won by struggle; it is not a birthright. This is done by taking
a stand, overcoming inertia, deciding and acting more, reading and knowing more, by gaining
muscle and gaining competence in the world of men.

There is evidence of such hypermasculinity in the Trump household

during Donald’s childhood (Johnston, 2017). Third, a typical puer aeternus
is drawn to women who will accept and feed his narcissistic self-image.
After the puer falls in love, he soon discovers that the woman is not a
goddess “but quite mortal and human,” causing “the fascination with her to
vanish” (Milhado, 2009). Trump’s multiple divorces from women with
supermodel looks are consistent with this attribute of puers.
Fourth, puers initially come across to women as charming and well-
adjusted, but beneath that exterior lurks a sadistic streak. Trump has been
called “sadistic” by many of his former associates and ex-wives (Schneider,
2017). Fifth, a typical puer aeternus is impulsive and impatient and has a
low tolerance for frustrating events. A puer’s impulsivity translates into
avoidance of tasks requiring long preparation and training. Consistent with
this description, Trump eschews preparations for summit meeting with
world leaders, claiming that his natural instincts will carry the day. He
scorns a scientific understanding of global warming, claiming that his
“natural instinct for science” tells him that climate science is wrong (Chait,
2018). The ultimate fate of the puer aeternus is not a happy one. He
typically self-destructs as a result of “pathological materialism, political
extremism or religious fanaticism” (Milhado, 2009). At the time that we
write this book, in October of 2018, Trump has yet to implode. In fact, his
approval rating of 47% is at an all-time high.
The puer aeternus is, by definition, an immature individual. How does
such an individual attract followers? Rohr (2011a, 2011b) has argued that
immature leaders attract immature followers, an observation that is
consistent with the central tenets of the heroic leadership dynamic
framework (HLD) that we proposed several years ago (Allison & Goethals,
2014). According to the HLD, our preferences for heroes are constantly in
flux, with our needs changing in response to two major forces: our current
environmental conditions and our current developmental state. We have
called this tendency for our heroes to change need-based heroism. More
informally, we’ve called it the Johnny Carson effect. In 1983, during his
Tonight Show opening monologue, Carson couldn’t resist making light of
his difficult divorce. “I remember being a kid, age 7 or 8,” he said. “Babe
Ruth was my hero. Then when I first got into show business, Jack Benny
was my hero. Now my hero is Henry VIII” (Carson, 2003). Carson’s quip
illustrates how our psychological needs dictate our choice of heroes. As
these needs inevitably shift over time, so do our preferences for heroes and
heroic leaders.
We have noted that Burns (1978) championed the idea that leaders
activate the needs, motives, and purposes of followers. When a puer
aeternus seeks leadership, he is incapable of appealing to the highest levels
of followers’ needs. To use Lincoln’s phrasing, he cannot activate “the
better angels of our nature” but rather the lower, less-evolved elements of
our nature. Trump’s narrative is that of the small child operating in
Kohlberg’s (1969) preconventional or conventional levels of morality. His
followers may be capable of higher levels of moral reasoning, but there is a
“perfect storm” of factors operating to suppress these better angels of
followers. First, as we have noted, the need for a positive social identity, in
this case white racial identity, has been ignited by economic conditions that
left many Americans in the heartland unemployed or underemployed. Non-
white workers in America, or abroad in China or Mexico, are identified by
Trump as a threat to American power and exceptionalism. This
identification with white social identity has been heightened by the
perceived ineffectiveness in the nation’s first African-American president,
Barack Obama, in addressing economic threats from different racial groups
within and beyond America. Moreover, Trump’s supreme self-confidence
and charisma has magnified his effectiveness in communicating his fear-
based and racial identity-based message. As we have noted, Burns argued
that charismatic leadership does not elevate followers but rather turns them,
essentially, into children. A puer aeternus president has transformed
millions of Americans into puer aeternus followers.
Figure 4.1 illustrates the point we are making about how people make
judgments about who are the heroes and villains occupying positions of
leadership. This figure is an oversimplification of reality but it does depict
our essential argument. We first note that judgments of heroism and villainy
depend on both the transformed state of the perceiver as well as the target of
perception. Consider cell 1 in Figure 4.1. If perceivers have not yet
personally transformed to higher levels of motivation and morality, they
will be drawn toward leaders who are similarly untransformed, and they
will deem these untransformed leaders to be heroic. Immature followers
love immature leaders. An example of cell 1 might be a white supremacist
making a judgment about Donald Trump’s heroic or villainous status. Next
consider cell 2. Here the untransformed perceiver encounters a transformed
leader. An example might be a white supremacist of the nineteenth century
making a judgment of Abraham Lincoln. Clearly such an individual would
deem Lincoln to be a villain. Next is cell 3, featuring a transformed
individual encountering an untransformed leader. This individual would
judge such a leader to be a villain. Finally, in cell 4, a transformed person is
making a judgment about a transformed leader. Here the verdict would be a
heroic one. The general rule of thumb is that when there is a mismatch
between the transformed state of the perceiver and the perceived, the target
will be seen as villainous. And when there is a match between perceivers
and the perceived, the target will be judged as a hero.

Figure 4.1. Assignments of Hero or Villain Label as a Function

of the Transformed States of the Perceiver and the Target of
Perception.

In our review of the characteristics of the heroically transformed

individual, we highlighted three patterns that prevail among the majority of
individuals who grow into heroes (Allison & Goethals, 2017). The first
heroic “arc” is the movement from the pre-transformed state of
egocentricity to the post-transformed state of sociocentricity. The puer
aeternus is highly selfish, narcissistic, and egocentric. Sadly, without
considerable psychotherapy, the puer appears incapable of adopting the
more socially conscious mindset of a mature adult. The second heroic arc is
that of stagnation to growth. As we have emphasized, the puer aeternus is
stuck at a lower stage of social and moral development. There are indeed
therapeutic exercises available that can promote a growth mindset, but the
puer is likely to resist these measures. The third heroic arc is the movement
from dependence to autonomy. Here Trump presents an interesting case, as
he appears on the surface to be autonomous. He has in fact been called an
outlier and a maverick. A closer examination of Trump’s seeming autonomy
reveals its fragility. According to Jungian analyst Daryl Sharp (1987), “a
puer typically leads a provisional life, due to the fear of being caught in a
situation from which it might not be possible to escape” (p. 66). His life is
spent locked in a psychological prison. Sharp explains that the bars of the
jail cell “are unconscious ties to the unfettered world of early life” (p. 92).
In this chapter, we have defined transforming heroic leadership as
leadership that is regarded as heroic by followers who join with the leader
to accomplish moral purposes. Inasmuch as heroism is in the eye of the
beholder, we must conclude that some eyes behold Donald Trump as a
heroic transforming leader whereas others eye him as the opposite, namely,
a villainous transforming leader. There is no doubt that Trump has appealed
to millions of followers with his morality of tribalism, nativism, sexism,
and racism. Trump falls short of meeting Burns’ (1978) criteria of
transforming leadership, which centers on raising followers to the highest
levels of morality. Those high levels would never involve derogation of
racial, gender, or sexual identity groups. Yet there is an underdeveloped
morality, resembling the moral code of the puer aeternus, that encapsulates
the Trump movement. We have shown how Trump has capitalized on
unique set of economic conditions as well as on his charisma to win the
minds and hearts of people who are not interested in scaling moral heights.
Trump’s followers felt betrayed by an African-American president who did
not act in their best white interests. A rich, powerful, and charismatic white
man now promises to restore pride in their race, their country, and their
patriarchal worldview. America is now embroiled in a “soft” civil war and
looks for the next Abraham Lincoln to awaken the better angels of our
nature within us.
 CHAPTER 5

HOW HEROES TRANSFORM THEMSELVES

AND THE WORLD

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.

– Albert Einstein

There is a very telling scene early in the classic film, Casablanca, during
which the story’s hero Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, declares
his undying loyalty only to himself. “I stick my neck out for nobody,” he
reveals to French officer Louis Renault. The scene is telling because we
know, or at least strongly suspect, that it can’t possibly be true. Casablanca
would not be regarded as one of the best movies of the twentieth century if
Rick remained throughout the film the kind of guy who refuses to take risks
to help others. He must change. Sure enough, our hero’s heart is wrenched
by the appearance of Ilsa Lund, the love of his life who jilted him a few
years earlier. Rick’s love for her is awakened, and with that awakening
comes a greater realization that there are forces at work in the world around
him that transcend his need to be with Ilsa. At the end, when Rick sticks his
neck out for the world, viewers of the movie are eminently satisfied.
Nothing gives us greater fulfillment that witnessing the complete
transformation of a hero.
This chapter is about how people undergo dramatic, positive change. In
short, it’s about heroic transformation – what it is, how it comes about, and
why it’s important. The only way most of us undergo transformation is to
travel the hero’s journey, which may be the most daunting task facing any
human being. There is one piece of good news and two pieces of bad news
about the hero’s journey. The good news is, of course, that anyone who
completes the path emerges a brand-new person, a much-improved version
of one’s previous self. Transformation, after all, means “to change form,”
which metaphorically describes what happens to Rick in Casablanca. He
starts out bitter, unaligned with any cause, nursing his emotional wounds,
and preoccupied with only himself. We might say that Ilsa’s love opens
Rick’s heart and, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, enables him to be
touched by the better angels of his nature. This all sounds well and good
except that the hero’s journey inevitably involves setback, suffering, and a
death of some type. What dies is usually the former self – the
untransformed version of oneself that sees the world “through a glass
darkly” (Bergman, 1961). Letting go of the old self is always costly. As a
result of his transformation, Rick loses his café, his safety, his reputation,
and his former life. Transformation marks the death of a narrow, immature
way of seeing the world and the birth of a broader, more enlightened way of
viewing life. It’s always worth the price.
The second piece of bad news is that one cannot engineer the journey
for oneself. Doing so only makes the journey ego-driven, and as we will
see, one of the primary purposes of the hero’s journey is to tame or
eliminate the ego. The hero’s journey “happens” to us, usually against our
will. A tornado hurls Dorothy into the land of Oz. Stephen Hawking is
diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Malala Yousafzai is
shot and nearly killed by the Taliban. The last person Rick wants to see
walking through the door of his café is Ilsa, and without her unwelcome
appearance, Rick may have never let go of his bitterness. Heroes do not go
on the transformative journey on their own volition any more than
caterpillars make a decision to transform into a butterfly. All of us are
thrown into the hero’s journey, often kicking and screaming in protest. It is
the only way most of us will ever change.

OVERVIEW OF HEROIC TRANSFORMATION

Heroic transformation appears to be a prized and universal phenomenon
that is cherished and encouraged in all human societies (Allison &
Goethals, 2017; Efthimiou, Allison, & Franco, 2018a; Efthimiou, Allison, &
Franco, 2018b; Efthimiou & Franco, 2017). Surprisingly, until the past
decade, there has been almost no scholarship on the topic of heroic
transformation. Two early seminal works in psychology offered hints about
the processes involved in dramatic change and growth in human beings. In
1902, William James addressed the topic of spiritual conversion in his
classic volume, The Varieties of Religious Experience. These conversion
experiences bear a striking similarity to descriptions of the hero’s
transformation as reported by famed mythologist Joseph Campbell (1949).
These experiences included feelings of peace, clarity, union with all of
humanity, newness, happiness, generosity, and being part of something
bigger than oneself. James emphasized the pragmatic side of religious
conversion, noting that the mere belief and trust in a deity could bring about
significant positive change independent of whether the deity actually exists.
This pragmatic side of spirituality is emphasized today by Thich Nhat
Hanh, who observes that transformation as a result of following Buddhist
practices can occur in the absence of a belief in a supreme being. Millions
of Buddhists have enjoyed the transformative benefits of religion described
by James simply by practicing the four noble truths and the noble eightfold
path (Hanh, 1999, p. 170).
The second early psychological treatment of human transformation was
published in 1905 by Sigmund Freud. His Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality described life-altering transformative stages in childhood
involving oral, anal, phallic, and latent developmental patterns. None of
these changes were particularly “heroic” but they did underscore Freud’s
belief in the inevitability of immense psychological change. Although Freud
suggested that people tend to resist change in adulthood, several subsequent
schools of psychological thought have since proposed mechanisms for
transformative change throughout the human lifespan. Humanistic theories,
in particular, have embraced the idea that humans are capable of a long-
term transformation into self-actualized individuals (e.g., Maslow, 1943).
Developmental psychologists have also proposed models of transformative
growth throughout human life (e.g., Erikson, 1994). Recent theories of self-
processes portray humans as open to change and growth under some
conditions (Sedikides & Hepper, 2009) but resistant under others (Swann,
2012). In the present day, positive psychologists are uncovering key
mechanisms underlying healthy transformative growth in humans (Lopez &
Snyder, 2011; Seligman, 2011).
An important source of transformation resides in tales of heroism told
throughout the ages. These mythologies reflect humanity’s longing for
transformative growth, and they are packed with wisdom and inspiration
(Allison & Goethals, 2014). Just reading, hearing, or observing stories of
heroism can stir us and transform us. According to Campbell (2004, p. xvi),
these hero tales “provide a field in which you can locate yourself” and they
“carry the individual through the stages of life” (p. 9). The resultant
transformations seen in heroic stories “are infinite in their revelation”
(Campbell, 1988, p. 183). Otto Rank (1909) observed that:
everyone is a hero in birth, where he undergoes a tremendous psychological as well as
physical transformation, from the condition of a little water creature living in a realm of
amniotic fluid into an air-breathing mammal. (p. 153)

This transformation at birth foreshadows a lifetime of transformative

journeys for human beings.
According to Allison and Goethals (2013, 2017), hero stories reveal
three different targets of heroic transformation: A transformation of setting,
a transformation of self, and a transformation of society. These three
transformations parallel Campbell’s (1949) three major stages of the hero’s
journey: departure (or separation), initiation, and return. The departure from
the hero’s familiar world represents a transformation of one’s normal, safe
environment; the initiation stage is awash with challenge, suffering,
mentoring, and transformative growth; and the final stage of return
represents the hero’s opportunity to use her or his newfound gifts to
transform the world. The sequence of these stages is critical, with each
transformation essential for producing the next one. Without a change in
setting, the hero cannot change herself or himself, and without a change in
herself or himself, the hero cannot change the world. Our focus here is on
the hero’s transformation of the self, but this link in the chain necessarily
requires some consideration of the links preceding and following it. The
mythic hero must be cast out of her or his familiar world and into a different
world, otherwise there can be no departure from her or his status quo. Once
transformed, the hero must use her or his newly enriched state to better the
world, otherwise the hero’s transformation lacks social significance.
The hero’s transformation is essential for the hero to achieve her or his
goal on the journey. During the quest, “ineffable realizations are
experienced” and “things that before had been mysterious are now fully
understood” (Campbell, 1972, p. 219). The ineffability of these new
insights stems from their unconscious origins. Jungian principles of the
collective unconscious form the basis of Campbell’s theorizing about hero
mythology. As Le Grice (2013) notes, “myths are expressions of the
imagination, shaped by the archetypal dynamics of the psyche” (p. 153). As
such, the many recurring elements of the mythic hero’s journey have their
“inner, psychological correlates” (Campbell, 1972, p. 153). The hero’s
journey is packed with social symbols and motifs that connect the hero to
her or his deeper self, and these unconscious images must be encountered,
and conflicts with them must be resolved, to bring about transformation
(Campbell, 2004). Ultimately, the hero’s outer journey reflects an inner,
psychological journey that involves “leaving one condition and finding the
source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition”
(Campbell, 1988, p. 152).
Allison and Smith (2015) identified five types of heroic transformation:
physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, and moral. A sixth type, motivational
transformation, was later proposed by Allison and Goethals (2017). These
six transformation types span two broad categories: physical
transformation, which we call transmutation, and psychological
transformation, which we call enlightenment. Physical transmutations are
endemic to ancient mythologies that featured gods transforming humans
into stars, statues, and animals. Today, transmutation pervades superhero
tales of ordinary people succumbing to industrial accidents and spider bites
that physically convert them into superheroes and supervillains. These
ancient and modern tales of transmutation offer symbolism of the hidden
powers residing within each of us – powers that emerge only after dramatic
situations coax them out of hibernation. Efthimiou and her colleagues have
written at length about the power and potential of biological transmutation
to change the world (Efthimiou, 2015, 2017; Efthimiou & Allison, 2017;
Franco, Efthimiou, & Zimbardo, 2016). The phenomenon of neurogenesis
refers to the development of new brain cells in the hippocampus through
exercise, diet, meditation, and learning. This transmutative healing and
growing can occur even after catastrophic brain trauma. Efthimiou (2017)
describes many examples of transmutation occurring as a result of
regeneration or restoration processes that refer to an organism’s ability to
grow, heal, and recreate itself. Epigenetic changes in DNA and the science
of human limb regeneration are two examples of modern-day heroic
transmutations (Efthimiou, 2015).
The other five types of transformation – moral, motivations, mental,
emotional, and spiritual – comprise the second broad category of
transformation that we call enlightenment. Emotional transformations refer
to “changes of the heart” (Allison & Smith, 2015, p. 23) involving growth
in empathic concern for others; we call this transformation compassion.
Spiritual transformations refer to changes in belief systems about the
spiritual world and about the workings of life, the world, and the universe;
we call this change transcendence. Mental transformations refer to leaps in
intellectual growth and significant increases in illuminating insights about
oneself and others; we label this wisdom. Moral transformations occur when
heroes undergo a dramatic shift from immorality to morality; we call this
redemption. Finally, a motivational transformation refers to a complete shift
in one’s purpose or perceived direction in life; we label this change a
calling (see also Dik, Shimizu, & O’Connor, 2017).

PURPOSE OF THE HERO’S TRANSFORMATION

The purpose of the hero’s journey is to provide a context or blueprint for

human metamorphosis. Why do we need such life-changing growth?
Allison and Setterberg (2016) argue that people are born “incomplete”
psychologically and will remain incomplete until they encounter challenges
that produce suffering and require sacrifice to resolve. Transcending life’s
challenges enables the hero to “undergo a truly heroic transformation of
consciousness,” requiring them “to think a different way” (Campbell, 1988,
p. 155). This shift provides a new “map or picture of the universe and
allows us to see ourselves in relationship to nature” (Campbell, 1991, p.
56). Buddhist traditions and 12-step programs of recovery refer to
transformation as an awakening. Using similar language, Campbell (2004)
described the journey’s purpose as a much-needed voyage designed to
“wake you up” (p. 12). The long-term survival of the human race may
depend on such an awakening, as it becomes increasingly clear that the
unawakened, pre-transformed state is unsustainable at the collective level.
As individuals, transformation is necessary for our psychological,
emotional, social, and spiritual well-being. Collectively, the survival of our
planet may depend on broader, enlightened thinking from leaders who must
be transformed themselves if they are to make wise decisions about human
rights, climate change, peace and war, healthcare, education, and myriad
other pressing issues. Nearly 50 years ago, Jewish scholar Abraham
Heschel (1973) opined that “the predicament of contemporary man is grave.
We seem to be destined either for a new mutation or for destruction” (p.
176, italics added).
Allison and Goethals (2017) propose five reasons why transformation is
such a key element in the hero’s journey, and why it is essential for
promoting our own and others’ welfare. First, transformations foster
developmental growth. Early human societies recognized the value of
initiation rituals in promoting the transition from childhood to adulthood
(van Gennep, 1909). A number of scholars, including Campbell, have
lamented the failure of our postmodern society to recognize the
psychological importance of rites and rituals (Campbell, 1988; Le Grice,
2013; Rohr, 2011a). Coming-of-age stories are common in mythic hero
tales about children “awakening to the new world that opens at
adolescence” (Campbell, 1988, p. 167). The hero’s journey “helps us pass
through and deal with the various stages of life from birth to death”
(Campbell, 1991, p. 56).
The second function of heroic transformation is that it promotes healing.
Allison and Goethals (2016) argue that the simple act of sharing stories
about hero transformations can deliver many of the same benefits as group
therapy (Yalom & Leszcz, 2005). These benefits include the instillation of
hope; the relief of knowing that others share one’s emotional experiences;
the fostering of self-awareness; the relief of stress; and the development of
a sense of meaning about life. A growing number of clinical psychologists
invoke hero transformations in their practice to help their clients develop
the heroic traits of strength, resilience, and courage (Grace, 2016). Recent
research on post-traumatic growth demonstrates that people can overcome
severe trauma and even use it to transform themselves into stronger,
healthier persons than they were before the trauma (Ramos & Leal, 2013).
The third function of transformations focuses on its ability to cultivate
social unity. Campbell (1972) argued that hero transformations “drop or lift
[heroes] out of themselves, so that their conduct is not their own but of the
species, the society” (p. 57). The transformed hero is “selfless, boundless,
without ego.” The most meaningful transformations are a journey from
egocentricity to sociocentricity, from elitism to egalitarianism (Campbell,
1949; Rohr, 2011a; Wilber, 2007a, 2007b). No longer isolated from the
world, transformed individuals enjoy a feeling of union with others.
Describing the hero’s journey, Campbell (1949) wrote, “where we had
thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world” (p. 25). Friedman
(2017) has introduced the construct of self-expansiveness in which:
boundaries between self and other, and even self and the world (including the cosmos as a
whole), can be seen as permeable. Viewing others as an alternate manifestation of oneself can
promote heroism, as one’s individual life is not viewed as separate. (p. 15)

Fourth, transformations also advance society in meaningful ways. The

culmination of the hero’s journey is the hero’s boon, or gift, to society. This
gift is what separates the hero’s journey from simply being a test of
personal survival. For the voyage to be heroic, the protagonist in myth must
use her or his newly acquired insights and gifts to better the world
(Campbell, 1949; Rohr, 2011a). The heroic boon to society follows the
successful completion of the individual quest, and so we can say that the
social boon is entirely dependent upon the hero’s personal transformation
that made the individual quest a success. Hero mythology, according to
Campbell (1972), is designed to teach us that society is not a “perfectly
static organization” but represents a “movement of the species forward” (p.
48).
Finally, transformations deepen our spiritual and cosmic understanding.
Campbell (1988) observed that the hero’s transformation involves learning
“to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life” (p. 152).
Myths, he said, “bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual” (p.
19). In every hero tale, the hero must “die spiritually” and then be “reborn
to a larger way of living” (p. 141), a process that is the enactment of a
universal spiritual theme of death being the necessary experience for
producing new life (Campbell, 1991, p. 102). Hero transformations supply
cosmological wisdom. Ethnographer Arnold van Gennep (1909) observed
that transformative rituals in early human tribes have:
been linked to the celestial passages, the revolutions of the planets, and the phases of the
moon. It is indeed a cosmic conception that relates the stages of human existence to those of
plant and animal life and, by a sort of pre-scientific divination, joins them to the great
rhythms of the universe. (p. 194)

INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL SOURCES OF

TRANSFORMATION

Allison and Goethals (2017) distinguished between sources of

transformative change that come from within the individual and sources
that originate from outside the individual. There are several types of
internal sources of transformation. For example, transformation can arise as
a result of natural human development. An initial transformative event, a
sperm cell fertilizing an egg, leads to a zygote transforming into an embryo,
which then becomes a fetus, a baby, a toddler, a child, an adolescent, a
young adult, a mid-life adult, and an elderly adult. Another internal source
of change resides in people’s needs and goals. According to Maslow’s
(1943) pyramid of needs, an individual is motivated to fulfill the needs at a
particular level once lower-level needs are satisfied. Once the needs at the
four lower levels are satisfied, one is no longer concerned with them or
driven by them. In effect, one transitions to higher levels and eventually
achieves self-actualization, during which one might enjoy peak experiences
of having discovered meaning, beauty, truth, and a sense of oneness with
the world – a transformative state reminiscent of James’ (1902) description
of the religiously converted individual.
A third internal source of transformative change is human transgression
and failure. People often undergo significant change after being humbled by
their “fallings and failings” (Rohr, 2011a, p. xv). Joseph Campbell (2004)
acknowledged that not all heroic quests end with glorious, heroic success.
“There is always the possibility for a fiasco,” he said (p. 133). Such fiascos
can serve as the grist for a larger transformative mill, producing a kind of
suffering needed to fuel a greater hero journey. It is a general truth that for
substance abusers to be sufficiently motivated to seek recovery from their
addictions, they must reach a profound level of pain and suffering,
commonly referred to as “hitting rock bottom.” Suffering, according to
Rohr (2011a), “doesn’t accomplish anything tangible but creates space for
learning and love” (p. 68). This space has been called liminal space (van
Gennep, 1909; Turner, 1966), defined as the transitional time and space
between one state of being and an entirely different state of being. In
liminal space, one has been stripped of one’s previous life, humbled, and
silenced. Transgressions, and the liminal space that follows them, are the
fertile soil from which heroic transformations bloom.
Another internal source of transformation is what Allison and Goethals
(2017) call an enlightened dawning of responsibility. This dawning is
captured in a simple phrase, composed of 10 two-letter words, “If it is to be,
it is up to me” (Phipps, 2011). There is a long history of social
psychological work devoted to studying the forces at work that promote the
dawning of responsibility in emergency settings (Latane & Darley, 1969).
Research has shown that in a crisis, a small but courageous minority of
people do step up to do the right thing even when there are strong pressures
to avoid assuming responsibility. These fearless social aberrants, most of
whom are ordinary citizens, are able to transcend their circumstances and
transform from ordinary to extraordinary. For example, about one-third of
the participants in Milgram’s (1963) obedience study defied the authority’s
command to continue applying painful electric shocks to another
participant. Whistleblowers are another notable example; they have the
mettle to step up and do the right thing at great potential cost to themselves
(Brown, 2017). Bystander training is now available to cultivate this
dawning of responsibility in situations where transformative leadership is
needed (Heroic Imagination Project, 2018).
External situational forces can also evoke transformative change.
Situations, for example, can trigger emotional responses that transform us.
William James (1902) noted that in the context of religious conversion,
“emotional occasions […] are extremely potent in precipitating mental
rearrangements” (p. 77). Emotions need not be negative to induce change.
Feelings of elevation can transform people psychologically and
behaviorally (Haidt, 2003). People become elevated after witnessing a
morally beautiful act, and this elevated feeling has been shown to produce
altruistic acts (Thomson & Siegel, 2013). A second external source of
transformation is the series of trials that all heroes must undergo during
their journey. Suffering can be an internal cause of transformation when it
results from self-destructive actions, but suffering caused by outside forces
can serve as an external source of transformation. Campbell (1988) believed
that “trials are designed to see to it that the intending hero should be really a
hero. Is he really a match for this task?” (p. 154). The point of greatest
danger for the hero is when she or he enters the belly of the whale
(Campbell, 1949). The belly can be entered literally as in stories of Jonah
and Pinocchio, but usually the belly is a metaphorical place along the
journey in which the hero’s darkest inner demons must be “disempowered,
overcome, and controlled” (p. 180). For Campbell, the hero’s journey truly
is an inner task of conquering one’s fears and slaying one’s dragons.
Positive psychologists today refer to this transformative process as post-
traumatic growth, during which people convert the worst thing that ever
happened to them into the best (Rendon, 2015).
A third external source of transformation is the vast hero literature and
mythology to which we are exposed throughout our lives. Allison and
Goethals (2014, 2016, 2017) have long argued that narratives about heroes,
pervasive in all of storytelling from Gilgamesh to the present day, serve as a
nourishing catalyst for transformative change. The central premise of the
heroic leadership dynamic (HLD) is that our consumption of heroic tales
takes place within an interactive system or process that is energizing,
always in motion, and drawing us toward rising heroes and repelling us
from falling ones. The HLD framework proposes two transformative
functions of hero stories: an epistemic function and an energizing function.
Hero narratives supply epistemic growth by offering scripts for prosocial
action, by revealing fundamental truths about human existence, by
unpacking life paradoxes, and by cultivating emotional intelligence. The
epistemic value of hero tales is revealed in Campbell’s (1988) observation
that hero mythology offers insights into “what can be known but not told”
(p. 206) and that “mythology is the womb of mankind’s initiation to life and
death” (Campbell, 2002, p. 34). Hero tales also offer energizing benefits,
providing people with agency and efficacy. Narratives of heroism promote
moral elevation, heal psychic wounds, and inspire psychological growth
(Allison & Goethals, 2016; Kinsella, Ritchie, & Igou, 2015a; Kinsella,
Ritchie et al., 2017).
The fourth external source of transformation is the social environment
of the hero. In hero narratives and classic mythology, the hero’s journey is
populated by numerous friends, companions, lovers, parent figures, and
mentors who assist the hero on her or his quest (Campbell, 1949). The hero
is always helped along the journey by the actual, imagined, or implied
presence of others. Campbell also discussed the importance of encounters
with parental figures; male heroes seek atonement with father figures, and
female heroes seek it with mother figures. Campbell also described the
hero’s brush with lovers and temptresses, who can either assist, distract, or
do harm to the hero. The majority of people who are asked to name their
heroes mention a mentor or coach who had a transformative effect on them
(Allison & Goethals, 2011; Goethals & Allison, 2012).
The temporal sequencing of mentorship is an important element of the
hero’s journey. Mentors help heroes become transformed, and later, having
succeeded on their journeys, these transformed heroes then assume the role
of mentor for others who are at earlier stages of their quests. In short,
“transformed people transform people” (Rohr, 2014, p. 263). Mentors can
have a transformative effect with their words of advice, with their actions,
or both. Words can fall on deaf ears but one’s actions, attitudes, and lifestyle
can leave a lasting imprint. St Francis of Assisi expressed it this way: “You
must preach the Gospel at all times, and when necessary use words” (Rohr,
2014, p. 263). A mentor can be viewed as a type of hero who enhances the
lives of others (Kinsella et al. 2015a).
The hero’s journey prepares people for leadership roles by offering a
transformative experience that can be shared later with others. Burns (1978)
argued that transforming leaders make an effort to satisfy followers’ lower
needs (e.g., survival and safety), thereby elevating them for the important
work that they – leaders and followers -- must do together to produce
significant higher-level changes. Burns described transforming leadership
as individuals engaging each other “in such a way that leaders and
followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality” (p.
20). Both leaders and followers will be “elevated” such that the leaders
create a “new cadre of leaders” (p. 20). This conception is consistent with
Campbell’s ideas about the role of mentorship during the hero’s journey,
with the mentor elevating the hero and preparing her or him for future
mentoring duties. Burns’ framework also makes explicit a notion that is
largely implicit in Maslow’s (1943) model, namely, that the self-actualized
person has become an elder, a mentor figure, and a moral actor who wields
transformative influence over others. Erik Erikson’s (1994) theory of
lifelong development makes the similar claim that older generative
individuals, having been given so much early in life, are now in a position
to give back to younger people.
Other theories also point to the transformative effect of mentoring and
leadership. Hollander (1995) proposed a two-way influence relationship
between a leader and followers aimed primarily at attaining mutual goals.
Hollander defined leadership as “a shared experience, a voyage through
time” with the leader in partnership with followers to pursue common
interests. For Hollander, “a major component of the leader–follower
relationship is the leader’s perception of his or herself relative to followers,
and how they in turn perceive the leader” (p. 55). Tyler and Lind (1992a,
1992b) have shown that these perceptions are crucially important in
cementing good follower loyalty. Followers will perceive a leader as a
“legitimate” authority when she or he adheres to basic principles of
procedural justice. Leaders who show fairness, respect, and concern for the
needs of followers are able to build followers’ self-esteem, a central step in
Maslow’s (1943) pyramid, thereby fostering followers’ transformative
movement toward meeting higher-level needs.

THREE TRANSFORMATIVE ARCS OF HEROISM

Allison and Goethals (2017) identified three deficits of the hero at the
outset of her or his journey. The untransformed hero is missing (1) a
sociocentric view of life, (2) an autonomy from societal norms that
discourage transformation, and (3) a mindset of growth and change. Below
we explain how the arc of heroic metamorphosis bends toward
sociocentricity, autonomy, and growth.
 Egocentricity to Sociocentricity

Campbell (2004) believed that one of the central functions of hero

mythology is to “get a sense of everything – yourself, your society, the
universe, and the mystery beyond – as one great unit” (p. 55). He claimed
that “when we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-
preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness”
(Campbell, 1988, p. 155). In most hero narratives, the hero begins the
journey disconnected from the world. She or he is a self-centered, prideful
individual whose sole preoccupation is establishing her or his identity,
career, and material world. The entire point of her or his hero journey is to
awaken oneself to the larger, deeper task of thinking beyond herself or
himself, to developing communion with everyone and with everything
(Friedman, 2017). To the extent that we spend the first stages of our lives
selfishly building our personal identities and careers, we may be designed
to awaken in later stages to our original predisposition toward
sociocentricity (Rohr, 2011a). Campbell (2001) urged us all to cultivate this
greater purpose of forming compassionate unification with all of humanity.
He believed this awakening is the central function of hero mythology.

Dependency to Autonomy

A person’s willingness to deviate from the dominant cultural pattern is

essential for heroic transformation. Heroes do the right thing, and do what
they must do, regardless of authority, tradition, and consequence. Maslow
(1943) called this characteristic autonomy. “There are the ‘strong’ people,”
wrote Maslow, “who can easily weather disagreement or opposition, who
can swim against the stream of public opinion and who can stand up for the
truth at great personal cost” (p. 379). Fulfillment of the lower needs in the
pyramid is essential for autonomy to develop in individuals. “People who
have been made secure and strong in the earliest years tend to remain secure
and strong thereafter in the face of whatever threatens” (p. 380). Zimbardo
(2008) has championed the idea that heroes are people with the ability to
resist social pressures that promote evil, and that such resistance requires
the moral courage to be guided by one’s heart rather than by social cues.
Zimbardo and other hero activists drive home the point that “the opposite of
a hero isn’t a villain; it’s a bystander” (Chakrabortty, 2010; Langdon, 2018).
While the transformed hero enjoys “union with the world,” she remains an
autonomous individual who can establish her own path in the world that is
unfettered by pressures to conform to social pressures.

Stagnation to Growth

One can be autonomous but not necessarily growing and stretching toward
realizing one’s full potential. The pre-transformed hero naturally resists
change, and thus severe setbacks may be her or his only impetus to budge.
Without a prod, she or he will remain comfortable in one’s stagnation,
oblivious to the idea that anything needs changing. The hero’s journey
marks the death of pretense and inauthenticity, and the birth of the person
one is meant to be. Campbell (1988) described the process as “killing the
infantile ego and bringing forth an adult” (p. 168). Sperry (2011) has argued
that people are so attached to their false selves that they fear the death of the
false self even more than they fear the death of their physical self. Our
growth can also be inhibited by a phenomenon called the crab bucket
syndrome (Simmons, 2012). This syndrome describes the consequences of
our entrenchment with our families, our friends, and our communities, and
they with us. Any attempt we make to crawl up and out of the bucket is met
with failure as the crabs below us pull us back down. For most of us, the
hero’s journey represents the best way, and perhaps the only way, to escape
the bucket and discover our true selves. Campbell (1991) argued that a
healthy, transformed individual accepts and embraces her or his growth and
contradictions. “The psychological transformation,” wrote Campbell,
“would be that whatever was formerly endured is now known, loved, and
served” (p. 207).

ACTIVITIES PROMOTING TRANSFORMATION

Can anything be done to promote heroic transformation? We noted earlier
that one cannot be in charge of one’s own heroic transformation. According
to Rohr (2011b), engineering our own transformation by our own rules and
by our own power “is by definition not transformation. If we try to change
our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego” (p.
5). There are things we can do, however, to make transformation more
likely. From our review of theory and research on heroism, developmental
processes, leadership, and spiritual growth, we can identify three broad
categories of activities that encourage transformation. These activities
include participation in training and developmental programs, spiritual
practices, and (of course) the hero’s journey. On the surface, these activities
appear dissimilar, yet engaging in these practices produces similar
transformative results.

Training and Development Practices

In examining the characteristics of people who risked their lives to save

others, Kohen, Langdon, and Riches (2017) discovered several important
commonalities. They found that these heroes:
imagined situations where help was needed and considered how they would act; they had an
expansive sense of empathy, not simply with those who might be considered ‘like them’ but
also those who might be thought of as ‘other’ in some decisive respect; they regularly took
action to help people, often in small ways; and they had some experience or skill that made
them confident about undertaking the heroic action in question. (p. 1)

With this observation, Kohen et al. raise four points about preparation
for heroism. First, they note the importance of imagining oneself as ready
and capable of heroic action when it is needed. This imagination component
involves the development of mental scripts for helping, an idea central to
Zimbardo’s Heroic Imagination Project (2018) hero training programs.
Established a decade ago, the Heroic Imagination Project aims to encourage
people to envision themselves as heroes and to “prepare heroes in training
for everyday heroic action.” The group achieves this goal by training
ordinary people to “master social and situational forces as well as their
automatic human tendencies in order to act in ways that are kind, prosocial,
and even heroic.” Participants are trained to improve their situational
awareness, leadership skills, moral courage, and sense of efficacy in
situations that require action to save or improve lives.
Second, Kohen et al. (2017) emphasize the importance of empathy,
observing that heroes show empathic concern for both similar and
dissimilar others. A growing body of research supports the idea that
empathy can be enhanced through training, an idea corroborated by the
proliferation of empathy training programs around the world (Tenney,
2017). Svoboda (2013) even argues that empathy and compassion are
muscles that can be strengthened with repeated use. Third, Kohen et al. note
that heroes regularly take action to help people, often in small ways. Doing
so may promote the self-perception that one has heroic attributes, thereby
increasing one’s chances of intervening when a true emergency arises.
Finally, Kohen et al. observe that heroes often have either formal or
informal training in saving lives. These skills and experiences may be
acquired from training for the military, law enforcement, or firefighting, or
they may derive from emergency medical training, lifeguard training, and
cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) classes (Svoboda, 2013).
In a similar vein, Kramer (2017) has devised a methodology for helping
people develop the courage to pursue their most heroic dreams and
aspirations in life. He identifies such courage as existential courage,
consisting of people’s identity aspirations and strivings for their lives to feel
meaningful and consequential. Kramer’s technique involves fostering
people’s willingness to take psychological and social risks in the pursuit of
desired but challenging future identities. His “identity lab” is a setting
where students work individually and collaboratively to (1) identify and
research their desired future identities, (2) develop an inventory or
assessment of identity-relevant attributes that support the realization of
those desired future identities, (3) design behavioral experiments to explore
and further develop those self-selected identity attributes, and, finally, (4)
consolidate their learnings from their experiments through reflection and
assessment. Kramer’s results show that his participants feel significantly
more “powerful,” “transformative,” “impactful,” and “effective” in
pursuing their identity aspirations. They also report increased self-efficacy
and resilience.
Another example of training practices can be found in initial rituals and
rites of passages found in many cultures throughout the world. Although
modern Western cultures have eliminated the majority of these practices,
most cultures throughout history did deem it necessary to require
adolescents, particularly boys, to undergo rituals that signaled their
transformation into maturity and adulthood (Turner, 1966; van Gennep,
1909). In many African and Australian tribes, initiation requires initiates to
experience pain, often involving circumcision or genital mutilation, and it is
also not uncommon for rituals to include a challenging survival test in
nature. These initiation tests are considered necessary for individuals to
become full members of the tribe, allowing them participate in ceremonies
or social rituals such as marriage. Initiations are often culminated with large
elaborate ceremonies for adolescents to be recognized publicly as full-
fledged adult members of their society.
Child-rearing can serve as another type of transformative training
practice. A striking example can be seen in Fagin-Jones’s (2017) research
on how parents raised the rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. Fagin-
Jones found that the parenting practices of rescuers differed significantly
from the parenting of passive bystanders. Rescuers reported having loving,
supportive relationships with parents, whereas bystanders reported
relationships with parents as cold, negative, and avoidant. More rescuers
than bystanders recalled their parents as affectionate and engaged in
praising, hugging, kissing, joking, and smiling. These early cohesive family
bonds encouraged other-oriented relationships based on tolerance,
inclusion, and openness. Rescuers reported that their family unit
engendered traits of independence, potency, risk-taking, decisiveness, and
tolerance. Bystanders, in contrast, recalled a lack of familial closeness that
engendered impotence, indecisiveness, and passivity. Rescuers’ parents
were less likely than bystanders’ parents to express negative Jewish
stereotypes such as “dishonest,” “untrustworthy,” and “too powerful.”
Overall, rescuers were raised to practice involvement in community,
commitment to others’ welfare, and responsibility for the greater good. In
contrast, bystanders’ parents assigned demonic qualities to Jews and
promoted the idea that Jews deserved their fate.

Spiritual Practices
For several millennia, spiritual gurus have extolled the benefits of engaging
in a variety of spiritual practices aimed at improving one’s mental and
emotional states. Recent research findings in cognitive neuroscience and
positive psychology are now beginning to corroborate these benefits.
Mindfulness in particular has attracted widespread popularity as well as
considerable research about its implications for mental health. The key
component of mindfulness as a mental state is its emphasis on focusing
one’s awareness solely on the present moment. People who practice mindful
meditation show significant decreases in stress, better coping skills, less
depression, improved emotional regulation, and higher levels of resilience
(Hofmann, Sawyer, Witt, & Oh, 2010). Mindful meditation quiets the mind
and thus “wakes us up to what is happening,” allowing “contact with life”
(Hanh, 1999, p. 81). Tolle (2005) argues that living in the present moment is
a transformative experience avoided by most people because they habitually
choose to clutter their minds with regrets about the past or fears about the
future. He claims that “our entire life only happens in this moment. The
present moment is life itself” (p. 99). Basking in the present moment is the
basis of the psychological phenomenon of “flow” described by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi (2008). When experiencing flow, people are “in the
zone,” fully present, and completely “immersed in a feeling of energized
focus” (p. 45).
The spiritual attribute of humility can also be transformative. When
asked to name four cardinal virtues, St Bernard is reported to have
answered: “Humility, humility, humility, and humility” (Kurtz & Ketcham,
1992). Humility has been shown to be linked to increased altruism,
forgiveness, generosity, and self-control (Worthington, Davis, & Hook,
2017). One can argue that humility cannot be practiced, as the idea of
getting better at humility runs contrary to being humble. However, we
suspect that one can practice humility by adopting the habit of admitting
mistakes, acknowledging personal faults, avoiding bragging, and being
generous in assigning credit to others.
Gratitude is another transformative spiritual practice validated by recent
research. Algoe (2012) found that gratitude improves sleep, patience,
depression, energy, optimism, and relationship quality. Practitioners have
developed gratitude therapy as a way of helping clients become happier,
more agreeable, more open, and less neurotic. Moreover, neuroscientists
have found that gratitude is associated with activity in areas of the brain
associated with morality, reward, and value judgment (Emmons & Stern,
2013). Closely related to gratitude are experiences with wonder and awe,
which have been shown to increase generosity and a greater sense of
connection with the world (Piff, Dietze, Feinberg, Stancato, & Keltner,
2015). Enjoying regular doses of wonder is a telltaletrait of the self-
actualized individual (Maslow, 1943).
Another transformative spiritual practice is forgiveness. Research shows
that people who are able to forgive others have healthier relationships,
improved mental health, less anxiety, stress and hostility, lower blood
pressure, fewer symptoms of depression, and a stronger immune system
(Worthington, 2013). “Letting go” is another spiritual practice that can
produce transformation. It has also been called release, acceptance, or
surrender. Buddhist teacher Thich Naht Hanh (1999) claims that “letting go
give us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness” (p. 78).
William James (1902) also described the beneficial practice of letting go
among religiously converted individuals:
Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher
powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that
you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely
thought you were renouncing. (p. 110)

Finally, we turn to the complex emotion of love as a transformative

agent. In addition to starring in Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart played the
lead role in Sabrina, another film demonstrating the transformative power
of love. In Sabrina, Bogart played the role of Linus, a workaholic CEO who
has no time for love. His underachieving brother David begins a romance
with a young woman named Sabrina, and it becomes clear that this budding
relationship jeopardizes a multi-million-dollar deal that the company is
about to consummate. To undermine the relationship, Linus pretends to
show romantic interest in Sabrina, and he succeeds in winning her heart.
Despite the pretense, Linus falls in love for the first time in his life, resigns
as CEO, and runs away with Sabrina to Paris. Love has completely
transformed him from a cold, greedy businessman into a warm, enlightened
individual. Similar transformations in film and literature are seen in
Ebenezer Scrooge (in A Christmas Carol), the Grinch (in How the Grinch
Stole Christmas), Phil Connors (in Groundhog Day), and George Banks (in
Mary Poppins).
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl (1946) wrote, “The
salvation of man is through love and in love” (p. 37). Thich Naht Hanh
(1999), moreover, weighs in that “love, compassion, joy, and equanimity
are the very nature of an enlightened person” (p. 170). Loving kindness also
transforms us biologically (Keltner, 2009). People who make kindness a
habit have significantly lower levels of stress hormones such as cortisol.
Making an effort to help others can lead to decreased levels of anxiety in
individuals who normally avoid social situations. Being kind and even
witnessing kindness have also been found to increase levels of oxytocin, a
hormone associated with lower blood pressure, more sound sleep, and
reduced cravings for drugs such as alcohol and cocaine. Loving others
lights up the motivation and reward circuits of the limbic system in the
brain (Esch & Stefano, 2011). Research also reveals that people who
routinely show acts of love live longer compared to people who perform
fewer loving actions (Vaillant, 2012).

The Hero’s Journey

We opened this chapter by noting that the only way most of us undergo
transformation is to embark on the hero’s journey. While we have complete
control over whether we receive training that can facilitate a heroic
metamorphosis, and over whether we engage in spiritual practices, we have
far less control over our participation in the classic hero’s journey. We can
only remain open and receptive to the ride that awaits us. As we have noted,
our departure on the journey can be jarring – we often experience an
accident, illness, transgression, death, divorce, or disaster. The best we can
do is fasten our seatbelts and trust that the darkness of our lot will
eventually transform into lightness. But we cannot remain passive. During
the journey, we must be diligent in doing our part to secure allies and
mentors, and to take actions that cultivate strengths such as resilience,
courage, and resourcefulness (Williams, 2018). After being transformed
ourselves, we feel the obligation to transform others in the role of mentor.
Having traversed the heroic path, we may use our heroism to craft a
newfound purpose for our existence, a purpose that drives us to spend our
remaining years making a positive difference in people’s lives. Bronk and
Riches (2017) call this process heroism-guided purpose.

ADDITIONAL ISSUES WORTH PONDERING

Several unexplored issues involving heroic transformation deserve more

thorough treatment than we can devote to them here. These issues focus on
education, religion, gender, inclusive transcendence, partial transformation,
and barriers to transformation. We give brief attention to these topics below.

Education and Transformation

On July 16, 2003, legendary President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela,

delivered a speech in support of the Mindset Network, a non-profit
organization designed to improve educational opportunities for children of
all ages. “Education,” he said, “is the most powerful weapon which you can
use to change the world.” This statement attracted widespread media
attention and remains a highly recurring internet meme today. A Google
search of “education can change the world” yields thousands of hits echoing
Mandela’s claim and extending the idea to include education being the key
“to success,” “to happiness,” “to freedom,” “to the world,” and “to the
future.” Summing up our supreme collective confidence in education,
United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock declared that
“Education is the key to everything” (Theirworld, 2017).
Are these claims true? We believe it is a mistake and perhaps even
dangerous to equate education with transformation. Consider, for example,
the link between education and crime. Some studies suggest that education
mitigates crime (Buonanno & Leonida, 2006; Machin, Olivier, & Sunčica,
2011) while other studies find that education either plays little or no role in
preventing violence. Bergen and Pandey (2005) report that the vast majority
of terrorists who perform violent acts are college educated. For example, all
12 men involved in the 1993 World Trade Center attack had a college
education. All the pilots in the September 11th terrorist attacks, as well as
the secondary planners identified by the 9/11 commission, attended
universities. The lead pilot, Mohamed Atta, had a degree from a German
university, and the operational planner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, studied
engineering in North Carolina. The chilling masked figure on many ISIS
beheading videos was Mohammed Emwazi, who had a college degree in
computer programming. In the same vein, Ramsland (2015) has found that
some of the most notorious serial killers of our time were highly educated,
including Ted Bundy and the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski.
We do not wish to undersell education’s positive consequences for
individuals and societies. Improving educational opportunities for citizens
no doubt helps people satisfy needs in Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy,
especially those at the lower levels of the pyramid. Nelson Mandela was no
doubt correct about education improving the quality of life for communities
operating near subsistence levels. Our claim is that education is insufficient
for meeting higher-level needs of esteem and for cultivating social
belongingness, self-transcendence, union with the world, and self-
actualization. In short, education is a beginning step toward transformation
but falls short in fully producing a truly awakened individual.

Religion and Transformation

As noted earlier, William James (1902) described the psychological

consequences of religious conversion as including feelings of peace, the
ability to see clearly, the sense of union with all of humanity, a feeling of
newness, the experience of happiness, the desire for generosity, and the
sense of being part of something bigger than oneself. While these results of
conversion are all signs of healthy religion, many of us are very well aware
of “religious” individuals who preach war instead of peace, who exclude
rather than include, who display anger in lieu of joy, and who show greed
instead of generosity. In short, being “religious” and even engaging in
religious practices such as attending church does not guarantee the kind of
religious conversion experiences described by James. In fact, going through
the motions of religion can heighten one’s sense of righteousness and
arrogance, setting in motion a dark transformation toward principles that are
antithetical to James’ observation of mature religion. Many people who are
“holier than thou” end up holier than no one. Rohr (2010) argues that the
litmus test for healthy spiritual transformation is whether one shows “a
movement toward the edge, the outside, the lower, the suffering, and the
simple. It’s never about climbing.”

Women as Transformers

In his studies of initiation rituals worldwide, Rohr (2005) observed that

non-Western cultures throughout history have been more likely to require
males to participate in these rites of passage as compared to females.
Underlying this gender difference is the widespread belief that young males
require initiation rituals to transform them into men, whereas young females
tend to be naturally capable of transforming into womanhood without
formal rituals. Differences in biology and culturally assigned gender roles
have been posited to explain this difference (Formica, 2009; Rohr, 2005).
For women, transformation is corporeal. Women personally undergo
biological transformations in processes such as menstruation, pregnancy,
labor, and breastfeeding. Throughout most of human history, women have
also been assigned culturally mandated activities involving transformation.
For example, child-rearing traditionally involved women transforming
children into adults. Moreover, most human cultures have historically
assigned women the task of preparing food for the family, during which
women transformed wheat into bread and cream into butter.
If, as we have argued, transformation involves promoting unity and
adopting a sociocentric mindset, then women may be agents of
transformation. Throughout history, men have built things, fixed things, and
defended us from things (Rohr, 2005) – all in the service of satisfying
lower-level needs. True transformation, however, occurs at higher levels
where women may have the advantage. Rohr has even boldly claimed that
“transformation is deeply embedded in feminine consciousness” (see also
Ross, 2017). In her review of research on gender differences in leadership
effectiveness, Hoyt (2014) found convincing evidence that women may be
more transformative as political leaders. Compared to men, women leaders
are more likely to improve standards of living, education, and healthcare.
They enjoy more success in peace negotiations and are more likely to reach
across party lines. Women more so than men are likely to adopt democratic
and participatory styles of leadership. Moreover, women are more likely to
follow ethical guidelines, engage in philanthropy, and promote the welfare
of women, children, and families. With all their accomplishments as
leaders, women may also show more humility than men (Fumham, Osoe, &
Tang, 2001; Perry, 2017). Over 2,500 years ago, the Tao Te Ching offered
this wise description of women as humble, transformative leaders:
Can you play the role of woman?

Understanding and being open to all things […]

Giving birth and nourishing,

Bearing but not possessing,

Working yet not taking credit,

Leading yet not dominating,

This is the Primal Virtue.

Transcend and Include

Central to the phenomenon of transformation is the principle of transcend

and include (Wilber, 2007a). Higher stages of transformation do not discard
the values of the lower stages; they include them. When we are young, we
hold strong opinions that later seem naïve to us, yet we are not necessarily
“wrong” at the time; we are merely incomplete. An illustration of this idea
can be found in our musings about our childhood baseball heroes, Willie
Mays (for George Goethals) and Willie Stargell (for Scott Allison). We both
freely admit that our taste in heroes has evolved and matured since the
1950s and 1960s; yet if you ask us if that means that Mays and Stargell are
no longer our heroes, we will quickly tell you that they remain our heroes to
this very day. Maintaining this preference exemplifies the principle of
transcend and include. Transformation to a higher level of consciousness
always transcends but also includes the lower levels (Rohr, 2011a). This
does not mean that we equate Mays and Stargell with Gandhi and Mandela.
It means that we appreciate their heroic influence on us during a crucial
time in our development.
Joseph Campbell’s (1949) understanding of the transform and include
principle is seen in his description of the transformed hero as the “master of
both worlds.” At the end of their transformative journey, heroes are as
comfortable navigating in their original world as in the new world that they
now inhabit. There are implications of this principle for gender roles. Male-
oriented activities of building, fixing, and protecting must be transcended
by female-oriented activities of inclusion, participation, and harmony. But
with transcendence must come inclusion, as we cannot expect to survive as
a society without always leaving room for those so-called male activities.

Partial Transformation

Does anyone ever become fully transformed? Maslow (1970) believed that
less than two percent of humanity is able to reach the pinnacle state of self-
actualization. We suspect a similar percentage, or less, enjoys the full
transformative experience as we have described it in this chapter. If few
people can complete the journey, then what hope is there?
Achieving partial transformation may be the deepest level that most of
us can reach. While partial transformation would seem to be better than
none at all, we suspect that acquiring a hint of transformation can be
precarious, offering benefit to some but engendering a dangerous self-
righteousness in others. First, let’s examine the benefits. People may go
through some of the steps of the journey and thereby become more open,
generative, and ethical. One example is Ulysses S. Grant. As a young man,
he was clearly untransformed. He developed an alcohol problem and
suffered early dismissal from the army in 1854. After losing money in bad
business ventures in California, he moved to New York City, where he
continued to struggle financially. Yet over time Grant’s moral courage grew.
First, he showed considerable bravery fighting for a morally just cause
while serving with distinction in the army. Moreover, during his presidency,
he fought hard for the rights of African Americans, lobbying fiercely for the
passage of the 15th Amendment, which gave blacks the right to vote. Grant
is also credited for crushing the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina in 1872.
He showed moral courage by working for racial equality at a time when
doing so was both uncommon and unpopular. While Grant’s lifelong
struggle with some issues suggests that he may not have completely
transformed, he showed enough enlightenment to make a difference in his
own life as well as the lives of millions of Americans.
But partial transformation may bring with it some problems that don’t
arise in the complete absence of transformation. For many people, the
experience of a bit of transformation enables them to see that others lag
them – and then attack those others for that lag. In other words, people have
enough transformation to see their progress compared to others but not
enough to understand the concept of “transcend and include.” A prominent
example can be seen in the current political divide in America. People who
hold compassionate views on immigration issues, for example, may reserve
that compassion for immigrants but not for others who oppose immigration.
A truly transformed, compassionate individual will not direct vitriolic
rhetoric toward those who show less compassion. Our point is that partial
transformation often leads to enlightened thinking but not enlightened
communication toward those at earlier stages of development. The
consequences of partial transformation can be just as bad as no
transformation at all.

Barriers to Transformation

We now turn to factors that can stand in the way of people undergoing a
positive transformative experience in life. The largest barrier, of course, is a
person’s unwillingness to heed the call to go on the hero’s journey. We all
know people, including prominent world leaders, who are “stuck” in early
stages of development. It would behoove the world to understand why so
many people are stuck and what can be done to nudge more of us along the
transformative journey. Earlier, we reviewed activities that promote
transformation, and one might argue that any barriers to change are merely
the inverse of these promotional activities. While there may be some truth
in this idea, it is also true that some barriers are less intuitive or obvious
than one might suspect. The great Islamic poet Rumi once offered this
advice to those seeking enlightenment: the task is sometimes not to pursue a
transformative loving experience “but merely to seek and find all the
barriers within yourself that you have built against it” (Barks, 2005, p. 18).
A major source of arrested development is the problem of self-
ignorance. A recurring theme in psychological research is that people are
unaware of much of their own psychological functioning (Alicke, 2017;
Bargh & Morsella, 2008; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Wegner, 2002). This lack
of self-awareness may explain people’s resistance to transformative growth.
Early psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Adler, and Horney were the first to
point to the destructive effects of behaving unconsciously. Carl Jung (1956)
described the shadow as the dark, unknown aspects of our personalities that
prevent us from transforming into our full potential. Building on Jung’s
work, Campbell observed that all “the images of [hero] mythology are
referring to something in you,” and that our shadow impedes our ability to
make the best use of these images (p. 68).
A second barrier is found in impoverished environments that deny
people opportunities for transformation. Maslow’s (1943) model of
hierarchical needs suggests that people can get stuck at lower stages of the
hierarchy that focus on satisfying basic biological and security needs.
Heroic potential may be suppressed when individuals are afflicted by
poverty or safety concerns that hinder their ability to progress upward in the
hierarchy toward higher-level goals. Resolving this problem is easy in
theory but extremely difficult in practice, as most world societies either lack
the will or the means to eliminate poverty. Related to this idea is another
barrier – exposure to traumatic events that can impede people’s ability to
undergo transformative growth. Trauma disrupts people’s sense of safety
and their ability to cope with the overwhelming threat and danger,
damaging their physical, emotional, and cognitive functioning processes
(Keck, Compton, Schoeneberg, & Compton, 2017). Safety and security
needs become paramount to the traumatized individual, rendering higher-
level needs unimportant. The good news is that most people can show great
progress in recovering from the deleterious effects of trauma. This healing
is the basis of the hopeful phenomenon of post-traumatic growth (Rendon,
2015).
A fourth barrier to transformation is people’s strong tendency to self-
identify as victims. Individuals who have been harmed and who derive their
entire personal identity from being wronged by someone else, or by society,
may find it difficult to grow and transcend their victimhood. We are not
making the claim that there are no legitimate victims; there most certainly
are people who have been harmed and have real grievances. Our argument
is that adopting a strong and permanent victim identity is a sure way of
avoiding growth and moving beyond the pain of having been harmed. A
highly unfortunate consequence of harboring a victim mindset is the need to
scapegoat. People tend to reason that if someone has harmed them, then that
perpetrator must be punished. There is no doubt that scapegoating others
has been the primary cause of most violence and warfare throughout human
history. Until people learn to take individual responsibility for their lives
and for their anger, the deadly duo of victimhood and scapegoating will
continue to work in concert to thwart heroic transformation.
Another barrier to transformation lies in the absence of good
mentorship. Social sources of wisdom, inspiration, and change are critical
elements of the hero monomyth as described by Campbell (1949). These
social sources appear in the form of friends, mentors, peers, and allies, all of
whom represent rich and essential sources of transformation. There are
times, moreover, when people encounter the wrong mentor whose advice
does more harm than good. Allison and Smith (2015) used the term dark
mentors to describe these damaging guides who not only undermine
people’s ability to walk the heroic path but also encourage down the wrong
path.
Severe mental and physical illness can also impede people’s ability to
undergo heroic transformation. Most individuals facing severe mental or
physical disability are unable to reap the benefits of the hero’s journey
because they are preoccupied with managing their condition. Related to this
problem is the prevalence of narcissism. Psychologists believe that roughly
six percent of US adults are afflicted with narcissistic personality disorder
(Bressert, 2018), which means that at least 15 million Americans may be
narcissists. The characteristics of narcissism are a grandiose sense of
importance, a preoccupation with unlimited success, a belief that one is
special and unique, exploitation of others, lack of empathy, and arrogance.
Narcissists are unlikely to undergo heroic transformation because they don’t
believe they need one and thus avoid it entirely (Worthington & Allison,
2018). The narcissist assigns blame for her or his problems to others,
leading her or him to believe that other people need to change rather than
the narcissist themselves.
Finally, people may avoid heroic transformation because they lack
psychological flexibility, defined as an individual’s ability to adapt to
fluctuating situational demands. Those classified as low in psychological
flexibility have been shown to experience less growth and development
(Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010). To help people overcome inflexibility,
Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson (2011) developed a therapeutic approach called
acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The goal of ACT is to increase
the ability to contact the present moment more fully as a conscious human
being, and to change behavior when doing so serves valued goals.
Psychological flexibility is established through six core ACT processes,
several of which sound like mindful pathways to Buddhist enlightenment.
The six elements of ACT are acceptance, cognitive defusion, being present,
self as context, values, and committed action. All of these processes reflect
positive psychological and spiritual skills that enable people to grow and
evolve into healthy adaptive human beings. They also resemble Franco et
al.’s (2016) skillset of heroic eudaimonia, which includes mindfulness,
autonomy, and efficacy (see also Jones, 2017).

CONCLUSION

This chapter has reviewed the functions, processes, and consequences of the
hero’s transformation. William James once observed:
Whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from an
individual’s life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and even wonder at it, as a
transformation. (James, 2013 [1902], p. 70, emphasis added)

James’ use of the word “wonder” implies that people are moved by the
transformations they see in people, and also that these transformations are a
rare occurrence. As did James, we suspect that many people spend their
entire lives resisting change, denying the need for it, and suffering as a
result of avoiding it. As Jung (1945) observed:
 There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how
absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by
imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. (p. 335)

The transformed hero represents the zenith of human maturity – the

state of well-being that allows people to flourish (Seligman, 2011), achieve
“bliss” (Campbell, 1988), and experience eudaimonia (Franco et al., 2016).
As a result of their journey, heroes acquire wisdom about themselves and
the world; they develop the courage to face their inner dragons; they are in
union with all of humanity; they pursue justice even at a cost to themselves;
they are humbled and tempered; and they embark on a journey that “opens
the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech,
beyond words, in short, to what we call transcendence” (Campbell, 2014, p.
40; see also Friedman, 2017). The wisdom of writers and philosophers,
from Homer in 800 bce to Phil Zimbardo today, informs us that we are all
called to lead a heroic life. Yet most people are unaware of this fact, or they
face impediments that impede the realization of their heroic potential. If the
ultimate goal of the hero’s journey is for the hero to bestow the world with
transformative gifts, then one would think that the world would be doing
everything possible to promote the hero’s journey for everyone. Yet the
hero’s transformation remains a secret, avoided by many or most people,
perhaps because it clashes with our Western notion of linear, unabated
“progress” from cradle to grave (Rohr, 2011a).
We began this chapter with an appreciation for Rick Blaine’s
transformation from egocentricity to sociocentricity in the classic film,
Casablanca. We are drawn to Rick’s character because he undergoes the
kind of transformation that we hope for in ourselves and in everyone around
us. But there is something else going on – something that the first chapter of
this book identifies as crucially important in our appreciation of heroes.
Yes, Rick undergoes transformation, but his story also appeals to us because
of the aura of mystery surrounding the kind of person he is. The nature and
direction of his transformation remains a secret until the closing scene of
the movie. We are given hints that he will ultimately do the right thing, such
as his history of running guns to Ethiopia and fighting for the good guys in
Spain. But these are only hints, leaving open the possibility that Ilsa
damaged Rick to such a degree that he will forever remain the kind of man
who sticks his “neck out for nobody.”
 As we discussed in Chapter 2, people are drawn to mystery; we long for
its happy resolution yet fear its potential for danger. When Rick finally
shows us his true heroic colors in the film’s final scene, we are as thrilled
with how the mystery resolved itself as we are with the resolution itself. Our
satisfaction may also be tinged with relief. For 90 minutes of film time, we
are immersed in Rick’s mystery, and our longing for it to be resolved to our
liking only heightens our delight at how everything ultimately unfolds. One
other point is no doubt true: Rick’s heroic transformation, and the mystery
surrounding it, does more than provide us with immense gratification. In a
small but not insignificant way, Rick transforms us all as well.
 CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION: RESOLVING AMBIGUITY TO

DISCERN AND CREATE TRUE HEROES

In this book, we have reviewed the psychology of how people unravel

mystery and uncertainty as a means for creating heroes and villains. We’ve
shown how people rely on perceptual, cognitive, and motivational resources
at their disposal to acquire an understanding of mysterious individuals,
groups, and circumstances. Also at work in the mystery resolution process
are principles of Gestalt organization that help us to make sense of a world
missing that is often lacking information or filled with misleading
information. People also use cognitive tools, such as impressions,
prototypes, archetypes, and implicit theories of leadership, heroism, and
villainy, to resolve mystery. There are also key motivational forces that
steer people toward desired conclusions about ambiguity. These motivations
include one’s need for closure, one’s drive to spread rumors to justify one’s
fear of uncertainty, and one’s romantic ideas about how leaders should look,
behave, and shape group outcomes.
Chapter 2 offered a review of many psychological theories and
principles bearing on the manner in which people resolve mystery. In
Chapter 3, we applied several of these principles to our understanding of the
heroism of a trio of heroes whom we call “The Three Kings”: Muhammad
Ali, Elvis Presley, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This chapter emphasized that
heroic transforming leaders display an unwavering autonomy and consistent
nonconformance to existing societal norms. Over time, our Three Kings
managed to make their stories about shaking the status quo to raise human
potential compelling to much of American society. This trio faced strong
competing counterstories, but they persisted and eventually won the hearts
and minds of most of America, and the world. It took some years, but the
Three Kings transformed from villains to heroes in the eyes of most
Americans.
Figure 4.1 may be used to see exactly how this change occurred. Most
Americans in the 1950s and early 1960s were in a pre-transformed state
regarding race relations, sexuality, and gender roles. As such, they judged
the Three Kings to be villains at that time (cell 2 in Figure 4.1). By the end
of the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, America had
transformed enough to recognize the Three Kings as heroes (cell 4 in Figure
4.1).
The Three Kings were ahead of their time. History has shown that
almost all people ahead of their time are vilified, and often even
assassinated. They are prophets whose radical ideas are first rejected but
over time become accepted and part of the mainstream culture. It can take
years, even generations, for the general public to catch up to the level of
development of a prophet. We call this phenomenon heroic lag. In a perfect
world, there would be no heroic lag. A good and new way of doing things
would be proposed and people would accept it. But a sad truism in
psychology is that people resist change, especially any change that threatens
one’s ego or one’s tribe. Heroic lag appears inevitable in any system in
which there is some uncertainty about truth and objective reality. Festinger
(1951, 1954) was the first to argue that in the absence of objective reality,
social reality becomes paramount. Social reality, however, is vulnerable to
distortions, biases, emotions, and motivations, making it slow to evolve.
But we can take heart in a great truth articulated by one of our kings, Martin
Luther King, Jr, who once observed that “the arc of the moral universe is
long, but it bends toward justice” (King, 1964). We can be reassured that
despite heroic lag, the truth of a heroic principle eventually becomes
acknowledged and revered.
But there is a great cost to heroic lag. Good people die and society
suffers great losses before a heroic ideal gains popular acceptance. It isn’t
hard to see how heroic lag is operating in current American culture, on
issues from gun control to universal healthcare. The uncertainty about how
best to proceed on these issues is heightened immeasurably by both
psychological and structural barriers to progress. The American two-party
system creates an ingroup versus outgroup mentality in which one’s party
affiliation determines one’s position on the issues. Tribal delineations are
rarely a good route to resolve ambiguity. Such delineations only increase
heroic lag and prolong cultural suffering. When mere group membership is
used as a heuristic cue for clarifying doubts, then there is little autonomy of
thought that the Three Kings showed us to be so important in bringing
about needed change. Minimizing party-membership-based heroic lag
would seem to require a paradigm shift in American politics, and currently,
there are few calls to bring about such a shift. Because of this party-based
dysfunctional means of resolving uncertainty in America, there seems to be
less clarity and more ambiguity about how to move forward on key issues
than there has been for generations.
In Chapter 4, we described in some detail the most powerful social
mechanism for resolving ambiguity: heroic transforming leadership. This
enlightened leadership involves a leader’s ability to mobilize
organizational, political, psychological, and other resources to first elevate,
and then satisfy, the motives of followers. Heroic transforming leaders
never focus on sharpening the boundaries between groups; they transcend
tribal consciousness. We argue that heroic transforming leadership is the
most effective mechanism for converting people’s fears and doubts into
elevated emotions, motives, and behaviors. This chapter also raised the
specter of false heroic leaders who, through their charisma and their appeal
to lower motives, may bamboozle followers into believing that the leader is
heroic. We used Donald Trump as an exemplar of the puer aeternus, a
grown man stuck at lower stages of social, emotional, and moral
development. Trump’s genius lies in his ability to use extreme self-
confidence and charisma to heighten tribal fears and social identities. As a
puer aeternus, Trump activates motivations at the most primitive end of
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and his rhetoric reveals a regressive morality
that divides people rather than unites them.
Finally, our fifth chapter examined the various methods by which
people are able to resolve uncertainty in their own lives to personally
transform into heroic leaders. We reviewed the functions, processes, and
consequences of the hero’s transformation, with special focus on three
pathways to heroic transformation: the hero’s journey, hero training and
development, and an array of spiritual practices. This chapter can be seen as
a blueprint for how we can all become heroic transforming leaders of our
own lives. We propose that all human beings are called to undergo a
personal heroic transformation. Again, the journey toward heroic
metamorphosis involves the same high-level goals of heroic transforming
leadership, namely, elevated morality and motivation and the dissolution of
a tribal mentality. Heroically transformed individuals are in unity with the
entire world and sense that they are part of something greater than
themselves. The choice whether to heed the call to become transformed or
remain a puer aeternus is up to each of us.
A crucial issue remains: in a complex and uncertain world, how are we
to distinguish the good leaders from the bad ones? What sets apart the
heroes in our world from the villains? Answering this question is not as
easy as it seems, for while we prefer to see heroes and villains as polar
opposites, the reality is that only a fine line separates heroes from villains
(Allison, 2015; Allison & Goethals, 2011). Consider the great eight traits of
heroes. It can be argued that five of these heroic traits also describe villains:
smart, strong, resilient, charismatic, and inspiring. When we examine
Kinsella, Ritchie, and Igou’s (2015b) twelve central traits of heroism, seven
of these qualities can also arguably be considered traits of villains: brave,
conviction, courageous, self-sacrifice, protecting, determined, and
inspiring. We are left with the unsettling conclusion that heroes and villains
may have more similarities than differences.
The traits unique to heroism appear to fall on the moral dimension of
heroism more so than on the competence dimension. The great eight traits
unique to heroism are selfless, reliable, and caring, and the Kinsella et al.
(2015b) traits unique to heroism are moral integrity, selfless, saves others,
and helpful. It would seem that the morality of heroism focuses on concern
for others, on a self-less-ness that underscores a heroic transcendence of
boundaries between the self and others. This dimension of heroism was
emphasized by Joseph Campbell (1949) in his description of the hero
monomyth. Describing the hero’s journey, Campbell (1949) wrote, “where
we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world” (p. 25). Heroes
want to unify the world. Villains want to divide us. Almost without
exception, this sentiment is expressed by every cultural hero, including one
of our kings, Martin Luther King, Jr, who said:
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you
are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

Consider also a thoughtful quote from Albert Einstein (1950):

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and
space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest
— a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us,
restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our
task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to
embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. (emphasis added)

We add emphasis to Einstein’s analogy of the pre-transformed state as a

prison, for that imprisonment image is exactly how psychologist Daryl
Sharp (1987) describes the puer aeternus. The puer is trapped in the
“delusion” of tribal identity and of separateness from the world. Heroes
escape the prison by engaging in the process of self-expansiveness
(Friedman, 2017), during which the boundaries between oneself and others
are seen as permeable. Many spiritual geniuses, including Thich Nhat Hanh,
Eckhart Tolle, and Richard Rohr, place unitive consciousness at the
forefront of their definition of spiritual maturity. Referring to the people
around us, Hanh (1999) writes: “We believe these things exist outside us as
separate entities, but these objects of our perception are us […]. When we
hate someone, we also hate ourselves” (p. 81). In a similar vein, Rohr
(2016) quotes the Christian mystic, Lady Julian of Norwich, who coined the
Old English term oneing to refer to the unification of all people: “No person
can separate themselves from another person. In the sight of God, all
humans are oned, and one person is all people and all people are one
person” (p. 39).
One of our observations in Chapter 2 deserves special emphasis:
mystery may be ignored or suppressed, but often it generates arousal,
positive or negative, fear or hope, and the search for answers. This book
has explored how people come up with those answers. We have seen how
people resolve mystery in a way that reflects their deepest longing for
heroes, a longing that we have called a romance. Our fanciful desire to
designate people as heroes may be subject to distortion and to motivated
perception under conditions of uncertainty. Heroic transforming leadership
is the most powerful mechanism for avoiding these distortions and biased
motivations. Such transforming leadership has the capability of unlocking
the mystery and ambiguity that can pervade our social environment. We
argue that heroic transforming leadership is the lynchpin for guiding
followers toward higher levels of motivation and morality (Chapters 3 and
4), and it is the key to prevailing on self’s heroic journeys (Chapter 5).
One of the most important take-home messages of this book is that a
leader’s answer to ambiguity can only be as highly evolved as the leader is
herself/himself. As Burns (1978) and Campbell (1949) noted many decades
ago, true heroes move us to higher levels of morality, to higher stages of
development, and toward union with the world rather than toward social
dissolution. We know from the many of the worst genocidal tragedies of
history that if people resolve their uncertainty by attending only to
peripheral cues of leadership, such as a leader’s charisma and self-
confidence, then surely we are headed for disaster. This romance with
heroism is a Romeo and Juliet tragedy that only leads to “fiasco,” as
Campbell (2004) puts it. But if people attend to central cues of leadership,
cues that focus on the morality and social inclusivity of the message, then
the romance with heroism may blossom beyond our sweetest imaginations.
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 INDEX

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), 140

Activities to promote transformation
hero’s journey, 129–130
spiritual practices, 126–129
training and development practices, 122–125
ACT. See Acceptance and commitment therapy
Alexander the Great, 22
Ali, Muhammad, 4, 39, 42–44, 46, 66–72, 146
Allison, S. T., 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 119, 134, 139
Altruism, 115
Archetypes, 25, 26
Asch, Solomon, 13, 44, 45
Attribution theories, 15
Automatic meaning-making, 10–17
Autonomy, 120–121
Avolio, B. J., 86

Bad versus good, 33–39

Banks, George, 128
Bannister, Roger, 16
Barriers to transformation, 137–140
Basic law of rumor, 18
Bass, B. M., 86
Battle Hymn of the Republic, 66
Baumeister, R. F., 33–35, 38
Bebbington, K., 36
Bergen, P., 131
Berle, Milton, 55, 56
Berry, Chuck, 55, 59
Big Iron, 8–9, 10, 18, 22, 33
Big John, 22
Black, Bill, 54
Black Lives Matter, 94
Blagojevich, Rod, 94, 95
Blink (Malcolm Gladwell), 11
Bogart, Humphrey, 2, 103–104, 128
Bratslavsky, E., 33
Brownell, Herbert, 62
Brown, Roger, 18
Brown vs Board of Education, 41
Bruner, Jerome, 31
Burns, James MacGregor, 47, 74–76, 78–80, 86, 92, 99, 118, 151
criteria of transforming leadership, 102
Bush, George H. W., 45
transforming leadership, 90, 95

Calling (motivational transformation), 111

Camelot (musical), 31
Campbell, Joseph, 83, 105, 107, 110, 111, 114, 116, 119–122, 135, 138, 149–152
Cantril, Hadley
Invasion from Mars, The, 19
Carlston, D. E., 37
Carter, Jimmy, 48
Casablanca, 2, 103, 128, 142
Charisma, 13, 74, 85, 99, 152
Charismatic leadership, 86, 87
Chicago Cubs MVP, 11
Child-rearing, 125, 133
Christmas Carol, A, 128
Churchill, Winston, 79–80
Civil Rights Act of 1964, 64
Civil rights movement, 62, 146
Clay, Cassius Marcellus, Jr. See Ali, Muhammad
Clemente, Roberto, 3
Clinical psychology, 97
Clinton, Bill, 28, 29, 45, 72
Clinton, Hillary, 29, 91, 94
Closure, 9, 10
need for, 20–21
Coercion, 76
Cognitive dissonance theory, 19
Collective behavior, 18
Compassion, 109, 123
Competence, 82
Competition, 75
Connors, Phil, 128
Correspondence bias, 16
Cosmic understanding of heroic transformation, 113
Courage, 43, 46, 47, 51, 83, 84, 93, 111, 121, 123, 124, 129, 136, 141
Creative leadership, 86
Crudup, Arthur, 54
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 126
Curphy, G. J., 79

Dark mentors, 139

Dark triad, 95, 96
Davis, Jefferson, 73, 93
Declaration of Independence, 60
Dependency, 120–121
Developmental growth, 111
Developmental psychologists, 106
Diana, Princess, 85
Dissent, 44–46
Domino, Fats, 55
Dorsey, Jimmy, 54
Dorsey, Tommy, 54
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 2, 25, 32
Hound of the Baskervilles, The, 7, 10
Dread rumors versus wish rumors, 18
D’Souza, Dinesh, 94

Eastwood, Clint, 22
Ed Sullivan Show, 56, 57
Education, and heroic transformation, 130–131
Egocentricity, 101, 112, 119–120, 142
Einstein, Albert, 103, 150
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 62
Ellison, M. T., 36
Emancipation Proclamation, 73
Emotional arousal, 91–92
Emotional transformations, 109
Empathy, 123
Enlightenment, 108, 109
Erikson, E., 118
Esteves, F., 35
Eudaimonia, 140, 141
Everly Brothers, 58
Exposure to traumatic events, 138
Extraversion, 46
Eyewitness to Power (David Gergen), 23

Factionalism, 88
Fay, N., 36
Festinger, Leon, 19, 147
Field of Dreams, 32
Finkenauer, C., 33
Fiske, S. T., 35
Flexner, James Thomas, 23
Fontana, D. J., 54
Ford, Gerald, 48
Forgiveness, 126, 127
Fourteenth Amendment, 62
Franco, Z. E., 140
Frankl, Viktor
Man’s Search for Meaning, 128
Frazier, Joe, 70, 71
Freedom Rides, 63
Freud, Sigmund, 13, 23, 27, 30, 47, 86, 90
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 106
on transforming leadership, 91–92
Frontiers in Psychology, 1
Fundamental attribution error, 16

Gandhi, Mahatma, 52, 83, 86, 135

Gardner, Howard, 43, 47, 48, 51, 75, 77, 81, 93
Generosity, 51, 105, 126, 127, 132
Gennep, Arnold van, 113
Gergen, David, 23–24, 27, 30
Eyewitness to Power, 23
Gilbert, D. T., 24
Gilovich, T., 35
Gipp, George, 27
Gladwell, Malcolm
Blink, 11
Goethals, G. R., 107, 108, 111, 113, 115, 116, 119, 134
Goffman, E., 30
Good mentorship, absence of, 139
Good versus bad, 33–39
Grant, Ulysses S., 83, 136
Gratitude, 127
Grice, Le, 108
Groundhog Day, 128
Guernica, 82

Haley, Bill, 41, 55

Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership, 1
Hanh, Thich Nhat, 106, 127, 128, 150, 151
Harding, Warren C., 12, 25
Hawking, Stephen, 105
Hayes, S. C., 140
Healing, 111–112
Heider, Fritz, 15
Heroic images, construction of, 30–33
Heroic Imagination Project, 123
Heroic lag, 146–147
Heroic leadership dynamic (HLD) framework, 98, 116
Heroic traits, 149
Heroic transformation, 103–143
education and, 130–131
internal and external sources of, 113–119
overview of, 105–110
purpose of, 110–113
religion and, 132
types of, 108–110
Heroic transforming leadership, 5, 73–102, 151
definition of, 82–87
Heroism-guided purpose, 130
Heroism Science literature, 1, 4
Heroism Science (journal), 1
Hero’s journey, 129–130
Heschel, Abraham, 111
Hierarchy of needs approach, 76, 114, 131, 138, 148
Hillman, J., 97
Hitler, Adolf, 50–51, 78, 87
HLD. See Heroic leadership dynamic framework
Hogan, J., 79
Hogan, R., 79
Hogg, Michael, 29
Hollander, E. P., 118–119
Holly, Buddy, 58
Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Arthur Conan Doyle), 7, 10, 18
House, R. J., 86
Howe, Julia Ward, 66
How the Grinch Stole Christmas, 128
Human transgression, 114–115
Humility, 81, 126–127, 134
Huxley, Aldous, 39

Implicit leadership theories, 16

Impression formation, primacy effects in, 13–14
Informal social communication, 8
Informational social influence, 45
Intergroup conflict, 88
Invasion from Mars, The (Hadley Cantril), 19

Jackie, 31
Jackson, Andrew, 13
Jackson, Joe, 32
James, Bill, 10–11
James, William, 50, 106, 115, 127–128, 132, 141
Varieties of Religious Experience, The, 105
Jesus, 52
Jim Crow segregation, 42
Johnny Carson effect, 99
Johns, Barbara, 42
Johnson, Lyndon B., 48, 64, 65, 70
John XXIII, Pope, 51, 75, 78
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1
Jung, Carl, 25, 137–138, 141

Kahneman, D., 35
Keegan, John, 22–23
Keisker, 53
Kennedy, Jacqueline, 31
Kennedy, John F. (JFK), 28–32, 62, 63, 87
Cuban Missile Crisis speech, 77
Kennedy, Robert, 63
King, Coretta, 62
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 4, 39, 42, 44, 46, 52, 54, 59–66, 79, 84–86, 146, 147, 150
“I Have a Dream” speech, 64
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,”, 63
King, Martin Luther, Sr. (Daddy King), 62–63
Knox, Buddy, 58
Knute Rockne, All American, 27
Kodachrome, 24
Koffka, Kurt, 9
Kohen, A., 122–124
Kohlberg, L., 99
Ku Klux Klan, 136

Langdon, M., 122–123

Leader archetypes, 25, 26
Leader–follower relationship, 119
Leader schemas, 11–13
Leadership
charismatic, 86, 87
creative, 86
definition of, 74–80
 effectiveness, 133
motivation and, 78, 151
mystery and mystification in, 22
qualities of, 13
romance of, 16
schemas, 16
unwavering independence and, 46–50
Leader’s perception
mystery and mystification in, 22–25
sweet imagination of, 25–30
LeBon, Gustave, 90, 92
Letting go, 127
Lewin, Kurt, 21
Leyens, J. P., 37
Libby, Scooter, 94
Lincoln, Abraham, 3, 66, 73–74, 75, 81, 84, 87, 104
assassination of, 32
transforming leadership, 88–89, 96, 99, 101, 102
Lind, E. A., 119
Love (transformative power of), 128
Lover’s perception
sweet imagination of, 25–30
Loving kindness, 128–129
Lowcock, Mark, 130
Lundqvist, D., 35

Machiavellianism, 96
MacLeod, C., 36
Malala Yousafzai, 105
Mandela, Nelson, 33, 83, 84, 130, 135
Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl), 128
Marshall, George, 81–82
Marshall Plan, 81
Marshall, Thurgood, 42
Martin, Joe, 67
Mary Poppins, 128
Maslow, Abraham, 118–120
hierarchy of needs approach, 76, 114, 131, 138, 148
Maugham, Somerset
Of Human Bondage, 92
Mays, Willie, 134, 135
McCain, John, 91, 97
Meaning-making, 4
automatic, 10–17
basics of, 9–10
 from partial information, 14–15
ubiquity of, 15
Mental transformations, 109–110
Mentorship, temporal sequencing of, 117–118
Milgram, S., 115
Milhado, P., 97–98
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord, 66
Montgomery Bus Boycott, 42, 61–62, 79
Montgomery Improvement Society, 60
Moore, Scotty, 53, 54
Morality, 3, 5, 43, 50, 52, 77, 80, 82, 87, 95, 99, 100, 102, 110, 118, 127, 148, 149, 151, 152
post-conventional, 81
Moral transformations, 110
Morewedge, C. K., 37
Morison, Samuel Eliot
Oxford History of the American People, 31–32
Motivational transformation, 110
Motivation, and leadership, 78, 151
Muhammad, Elijah, 69
Munroe, Bill, 54
Mystery, 7–10, 13, 14, 33, 34, 37, 38, 119, 142–143, 145, 146, 151
in perception of leaders, 22–25
resolving information, search for, 17–20
Mystification, in perception of leaders, 22–25
Mythology, 117

NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
Narcissism, 46, 95
Narcissistic personality disorder, 139–140
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 62
Need-based heroism, 99
Negative agency bias, 37
Nixon, Richard, 28–29, 48, 62, 70
Nonconformity, 44–47
Normative social influence, 45

Obama, Barack, 33, 91, 92

transforming leadership, 89–90, 99
“Yes We Can” campaign, 86–87
Obedience, 91
Oehman, A., 35
Opportunities for transformation, 138

Pandey, S., 131

Park, B., 36
Parks, Rosa, 60, 61
Partial information
image construction or drawing conclusion from, 15–16
meaning-making from, 14–15
and rumor transmission, 18
Partial transformation, 135–137
Patton, George, 78
Peace Democrats, 75
Perceptual readiness, 30–33
Perkins, Carl, 54
Personality traits, 46
Phillips, Sam, 53, 56
Physical transformation, 108–109
Picasso, Pablo, 82
Portman, Natalie, 31
Post-conventional morality, 81
Presley, Elvis, 4, 39, 42–43, 44, 46, 52–59, 85, 146
Primacy effects
in impression formation, 13–14
meaning-making from partial information, 14–15
Procedural justice, 119
Prototypical group member, 12–13
Psychological flexibility, 140
Psychological transformation, 108, 109, 122
Psychopathy, 96

Rank, Otto, 107

Reagan, Ronald, 23, 26–28, 48, 82
Redemption, 110
Religion, and heroic transformation, 132
Resilience, 50, 111, 124, 126, 129
Resourcefulness, 129
Reward, 76
Richard, Little, 55, 57
Riches, B. R., 122–123
Rick Blaine (character), 2, 142–143
Rickey, Branch, 42
Rituals, 124–125
Robinson, Jackie, 41, 42, 83
Rock ‘n’ Roll, 55, 56, 58, 59
Rohr, R., 114, 132, 133, 150, 151
Rolling Stones, The, 58
Romance, definition of, 3
Romance of leadership, 16, 152
bias, 17
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR), 29, 82, 87
transforming leadership, 89
Rothbart, M., 36
Rumors
basic law of, 18
dread versus wish, 18
transmission of, 18, 19
of violence, 18
Ryan, Paul, 96

Sabrina, 128
Salience, 50–52
Salk, Jonas, 42
Schemas
leader, 11–13
leadership, 16
role in social perception, 10–11
Scrooge, Ebenezer, 128
SDI. See Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
Self-actualization, 135
Self-control, 126
Self-efficacy, 47, 124
Self-esteem, 43, 44, 50, 51, 77–79, 89, 119
Self-expansiveness, 112
Self-ignorance, 137
Sense of accomplishment, 50
Setterberg, G. C., 110
Shakespeare, William, 38
Shamir, B., 86
Sharp, Daryl, 101, 150
Sherlock Holmes (character), 2, 7, 32, 83
Simon, Paul, 24, 30
Simonton, D. K., 25
Skowronski, J. J., 37
Smith, G., 108, 139
Social class stereotypes, 15, 16
Social cognition, 38
Social environment of the hero, 117
Social identity theory, 12, 36, 50–52
Sociocentricity, 119–120, 142
“Spaghetti Westerns”, 22
Sperry, L., 121
Spiritual practices, 126–129
Spiritual transformations, 109
Spiritual understanding of heroic transformation, 113
Spontaneous trait inferences, 15
Stagnation to growth, 121–122
Stanton, Edwin, 32–33
Stargell, Willie, 134, 135
Steve Allen Show, 55, 56
Stewart, Jimmy, 27
Stewart, Martha, 94, 95
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 23
Strosahl, K. D., 140
Sullenberger, Chesley (“Sully”), 83
Superheroes, 2
Svoboda, E., 123

Tao Te Ching, 134

Theory of lifelong development, 118
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Sigmund Freud), 106
Tolle, Eckhart, 150
Transcendence, 109
Transforming leadership
definition of, 78–82
heroic, 5, 73–102
Transmutation, 108–109
Truman, Harry S., 41, 81
Trump, Donald J., 5, 74, 77
as puer aeternus, 96–102, 148
vs transforming presidential leadership, 87–96
Tversky, A., 35
Tyler, J., 119

Uncertainty, 4, 5, 8, 18–20, 22, 24, 33, 35, 38, 39, 145, 147, 148, 151, 152
pleasures of, 25
Urban League, 62
US Civil War, 11–12

Varieties of Religious Experience, The (William James), 105

Victimhood, 138–139
Vohs, K. D., 33
Voting Rights Act of 1965, 65

War of the Worlds (Orson Wells), 20, 21

Warren, Earl, 42
Warren Harding Error, 11, 25
Washington, George, 13, 23, 84–85, 87, 88
Washington, Martha, 85
Wayne, John, 27
Weber, M, 29, 85, 86
Weiner, B., 35
Wells, Orson
War of the Worlds, 20, 21
We Shall Overcome, 65
Whistleblowers, 115
Whitechurch, E. R., 24
Wilson, K. G., 140
Wilson, T. D., 24
Winfrey, Oprah, 85
Wisdom, 84, 106, 110, 113, 139, 141
Women, as transformers, 132–134
World Trade Center attack (1993), 131

Xenophobic racial profiling, 32–33

“Yes We Can” campaign, 86–87

Yzerbyt, V. Y., 37

Zeigarnik, Bluma, 21
Zeigarnik effect, 21
Zimbardo, P., 120–121, 123, 142