What IS Courage? (Like Actually) | Professor Cynthia Pury - 908

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do hard work? Do these do that be five seconds of courage with no context. I'm like, well, five seconds of courage. It's all well and good, but what the fuck is that?

in the past, courageous. So in my theory, all of courage comes down to taking a worthwhile risk. So it's a situation where a person is aware of some kind of a risk. There's a thing a person wants to do, and there's some kind of a risk they have to take to do the thing. The question is is it worthwhile?

Is it worth doing? And you have to add the worthwhile part to it because otherwise you end up with situations where people doing some ridiculous TikTok challenge is courageous and it's like thank you, not really, not really, And the people are more likely to say something's courageous and more likely to do the courageous thing when the goal is very clearly worthwhile, is very clearly important to you, or good or valuable or societally lauded or something like that,

but the risk runs the opposite direction in the two different forms, the higher the perceived risk, the more likely you are to say the action is courageous up to a point where the risk overwhelms how good the goal is. But the more risky something is, the less likely you are to actually do it. So we call the two different kinds of courage accolade courage and process courage. So accolade courage is calling the thing courageous. Process courage is

do you do the thing. Accolade courage is increased when the action seems riskier or when you build up the risk, and process courage is decreased when you build up the risk. So it's already so yeah. So a really great example of that is I saw a thing online the other day that Monty Python in The Holy Grail is fifty years old, and if your listeners are familiar with that movie at all, there's a character in it named Sir Robin.

And not to give away too many spoilers or anything, it's a delightful old movie if you have a chance to see it. But this Sir Robin character is one of the knights who's seeking the Holy Grail, and he has a minstrel who follows after him talking about brave, brave, brave, Sir Robin. But Sir Rabin's minstrel just follows him around talking about how he's not afraid to be killed in nasty ways, and then proceeds to delineate all the nasty

ways in which Sir Robin might die. And of course Sir Robyn does not find this encouraging and chickens out. And it is a peak professional moment for me that I'm able to quote Monty Python in professional settings. So you know, life goal achieved, but there is it's funny because there's some truth to it. So if you are telling someone I see you have a you have a boxing career, yes, yes.

to kick in, you know, get her do this. You know, here's some professional technical advice that I have for you, based on my knowledge of boxing, which for me is nothing. But you know, here's what you want to do that's going to be helpful. It's in the it might be helpful at the end. It might make you feel good at the end if I say, wow, you were so brave in there. But if I if I lead with that before you go into the ring, you're going to be like, well, I don't want to know how tough

she is. I don't want to know that she's probably going to briecklay nose. I don't want to know that right now. Thanks.

than the other. And there's some of the early research in psychology by Jack Rafman on courage looked at the fear proneness of people who were decorated bomb disposal operators and found that they were not they experienced less fear than other people, and so he's like, well, maybe they're not courageous, maybe they're fearless. And I'm like, I don't know. I feel like that's not how we talk about it, and that's not how we think about it as a society.

And that got me headed down the road of thinking about like this difference between what it takes to do the action and what the action and how it looks to the outside. And there are some situations in which someone can be incredibly courageous, but it's really only career, just just for them. So any sort of like personal fear that you have that's more specific to you is going to take more accolade courage for you to do. Now, does that mean that I think you deserve a metal

for it? Not necessarily, but maybe just within your own self, you can be like, oh, I was really afraid to speak in public, or I was really afraid to ask for a raise, or I was really afraid to ask out this person, or I was really afraid to I was really afraid to go up in a high place, or some sort of thing like that, and we kind of neglect those. I think the other thing with the burning building example is that it has to be for

a good reason. And so if there's two people again in the burn unit, they ran into a burning building, let's pretend they're equally afraid. This time the one person ran into, say a baby, but the other person ran into make a TikTok video. Like that other person's just an idiot, right, most of us think that other person's

just an idiot. But I guess I could see where you know, that person might be thinking, oh, I'm pursuing this super important thing, and but yeah, our view of what the risk of what the both the risk and the goal is matters a lot.

happy to have you. But it's it's a There's a famous book in the US that a ton of i think middle school basically kids have to read called The Red Badge of Courage, which spoiler is about a soldier who's excited for the war because he gets to prove he's courageous and then he finds out that that sucks

and that's the Uh. It's kind of like so it's I think you'd get like these weird extremes, and I think people don't know what to do with the fear sort of thing and courage, and so to me, it's easier to just talk about it as risk rather than fear. So you have to think that it's some kind of a risk, whether you focus on that risk or not. If there's absolutely no risk, I don't think people would necessarily think that it was courage, but I think that

they could see how other people could see it. As courage. So I had an interesting discussion once with somebody who, Oh, my gosh, what kind of a He was some sort of a surgeon type person who did what I'd consider like scary operations. Plus I've got a little bit of that ill factor for blood, and so for me his job, I'm like, oh, no, I would be horrified if I

had to do your job. But I was telling him something about my class that I was teaching that morning, and somehow it came up that there were like three hundred people in the class, and he's like, how do you do that? You know? And I think we were both like, thinking, how do you do that? That's you know, wow,

I couldn't do that. So it depends on courage. I often, really often get asked a question about courageous people, and I the longer I do this, the harder I push back against thinking about courageous people just as a whole, because I think we all move through the world with our own sense of what's risky for us, what seems risky, what we may have a fear response to, or we might just think to ourselves that's risky, and or even just that's very hard for me to do well, and

we all have our own goals that we're pursuing, and we often end up with situation so that the things that are held up as as sort of peak courage, that there are monuments to for courage are almost always situations in which the society that puts up that monument thinks that interprets the goal of whatever the action is is really good as a worthwhile, valuable one, and interprets the situation as having a lot of risk for that person.

So we have monuments to fallen heroes, especially who died in service of their country, and we have monuments to great leaders who risk things that are considered societally appropriate. In the US, we had a lot of things happen and where monuments were taken down to causes that people no longer believe in, and monuments put up to other

and it's a huge especially with civil rights stuff. It's been a civil rights versus civil war, which interestingly I'm only connecting now have exactly the same start to them of civil But the rhetoric around that has been absolutely fascinating and I think really gets at what a society, or at least the loudest people in a society are valuing at any given time, or the richest people or the people who own the land who put up the monument, and this whole area of accolade courage can end up

being really controversial and people have really strong opinions about it. When I first started doing research and courage, I would go to a conferences, and the way academic conferences work if you're on some sort of a panel discussion or some sort of a symposium, is that usually the speakers meet beforehand briefly to talk about logistics. Who is going to run the PowerPoint? Do we want all our powerpoints on one computer or do we want them on to

plug in our computers separately? Do we want questions after everybody's talk or after each individual talk. And I would be in a group of people who'd done research on courage, and we would we would have these conversations, but then it would always turn into what I got to calling the Courage Researcher support group, where we sat around and we talked about how people would get offended by our

research because they would be offended by our research. This one woman, I'll never forget, she would on a job interview talking about her dissertation research, and someone like banged on the table ball at dinner and stood up and said, you're cheapening the idea of courage. And he huffed out,

and I'm like, wow, that's kind of a lot. That's a lot, And I think that a lot of it is this accolade courage sort of idea that if I call something courageous that you don't agree with the goal or you don't see as risky, you're gonna be kind of offended by it, Like how do how do you don't see that as risky? So at that same conference, we had a discussant, the person at the end who kind of summarizes what all three people talked about, who was just simply offended by me. Because I had a

scale where we asked people. It had a whole bunch of questions about I would willingly give my life for my country if needed, down to I I would have dental surgery to save a tooth, or I would ask for a raise if I really needed one. It had sort of these lower level ones also, and he was just super offended by this, and he asked everybody, He's like, cool, here thinks it's courageous to ask for a raise if you need one, that's just being good at work. And

I was like, wow, okay, Bud. And outside of the clinical psychology community, I've gotten a lot of pushback from people about these risky kind of actions that people take that feel risky to them but not to most other people. Weirdly, within like this therapy kind of community, people get that because that's what therapists see. They see people who come in and they say, here's this thing that everyone else can do and I can't do, and I want your

help doing it. But yeah, it's it's just wild. And people also have really strong opinions about the the worth of the action and what that risk benefit thing turns out to be. So I do a lot of research where I ask people to describe a time they've acted courageously, and then I will have undergraduate students help me code them into different categories. Every single person who's done some coding for me has encountered something where they read it

and they think to themselves, that's not courageous. And what's happening is they're identifying that they don't really see that as risky and or they don't see it as valuable. So a couple of my favorite examples. I had a student who was from South Africa and she had a hard time reading any of our statements that people in the US had made about being courageous when dealing with a vicious dog because she grew up with lions near

The kids were worn about lions. You know, if you're outside you see a lion, they're going to eat you, so watch out. And that's different and perhaps so Australia. You have a different thing. I don't know. The perception in the US is that Australia is filled with dangerous animals who will kill you. But that may be a little bit of an overstatement, but the I thought that

was super interesting. I was later on talking with a physician, one of my a personal physician of mine, and he did the little you know, like let me chat with you a little bit before you're sitting there in your paper gown and it's awkward, And he was asking me about my research, and I told her about an older person we had interviewed who talked about how her doctor told her that she couldn't have any more, that she should not get pregnant again because it could kill her,

but she really wanted another child. So she went ahead and had another baby, and he just like, he just was like, that's a terrible idea. That's not courageous, that's just dumb, and you know, but he's seen very different things, right,

so he's seeing that from a totally different perspective. For me, the one that stood out for me was reading a was reading a narrative of someone who said that she was dating this guy and they were really in love and they'd talked about marriage, but the problem was that her that his parents, his mom didn't like her, and one day the mom asked her to break up with him, and so she did, and she never told him why,

and she described this as courageous. I know, it goes against it goes against the narrative that we all have of how true love should go. But her description of why this was courageous was that she knew that he always came with his mom and this was setting him up for lifelong tension with her, and if she didn't tell him that it was his mom, then he would

continue to have a good relationship with her. And now I still have a hard time wrapping my head around that one, but it is what it is, and there's in the extreme sort of a version of it. People who've done heinous things will call themselves courageous, and you think to yourself, no, that was a really bad thing

you did. You shouldn't do that. But if you read writings that they have put out in their crazy manifesto, for example, they'll use the language of courage like, nope, this is this is a good thing, and I'm risking it all for this good thing that everybody's going to hate.

where you're coming from. And we did this with little kids, right, so we'll tell little kids that they're brave or courageous for having done some kind of a thing. It's super common here in the US, if you get little kids after they get their vaccines, they'll get a little sticker from the doctor's office. Very commonly they'll say, oh, it was brave, right, And you know, is it courageous to

get poked with a needle? You know, if you're an adult, probably not, unless you're fearful of needles, in which case it probably is. But you're not going to go around being like, I was so brave I got a vaccine today and I'm forty five. You know, you're not going to say that that.

And I think that this definition comes at this, well, I know this definition comes out of clinical work, where my theory says that, well, sure, within a clinical context, courage is acting despite fear, because that's the problem people are coming to you to solve, Right, They're afraid of doing something. They want help doing the thing, and so they've come to you for assistance doing the thing that

they're afraid of. And because because you know you're good therapist, you're not going to treat somebody who comes in and says, I'm afraid of standing in the middle of traffic on an interstate, but i'd like some help in being able to do that. That person is going to get a different kind of evaluation and they're going to get a different kind of treatment, and you would never help to

systematically desensitize them to standing in traffic. Right, that would never even occur to you that that's a thing you should consider. But if you describe courage, if you define courage as acting despite fear, you end up saying that those folks are courageous, that that would be a courteous action, because that's a terrifying thing to stand on the interstate and like face down a semi truck, Like why would you do that? You shouldn't do that, don't do that.

It's a bad idea. But the if you just leave courage that way, that's how it ends up, and if you define that. The philosophy definition of courage, on the other hand, is super heavy on the objective good of all of it and the objective fear that people feel

or feeling the proper amount of fear. And as a psychologist, that doesn't resonate with me very much, because we all have very different opinions about what the good is and about what risks are for us, and about what feels appropriately risky for us and what we are the risk

is overblown. But I think that those are really personal excuse me kind of things, and I always have to Oh, and also, philosophers are excited about moral exemplars and exemplars of things, and I am not a giant fan of exemplars because I think that people who can be very courageous in one situation might not be courageous at all in a different situation. So someone who's afraid of public speaking, I think, would see my life and think, oh, you

do all these courageous things. You must be a very courageous person.

the auditorium, I'd be like, no, that's not me. And I found out I was afraid of inclosed spaces when I had an MRI, or tried to have an MRI once, And so I'm in the MRI machine and I'm going, oh, this is very tight and very loud, and then at one point I wiggled a little bit and they were like, we have to start over again. Lay still, and I was like, oh, I can't, you know. And I did

everything I could think of to do this. I trained as a clinical psychologist specializing in anxiety disorders and desensitization. So I tried all of those things. I teach an online class that involves a ton of breathing exercises and relaxation, mindfulness kinds of things. I tried all of those things. I actually it was a General Electric MRI machine. My

father designed X ray equipment for General Electric. Although he never designed MRIs, he was friends with the MRI group, and one of his friends probably got a patent on some of the stuff that was in that very machine. So I thought about my dad's friend, who I was sure had designed this. None of that helped. I pressed the little panic button and I noped out of it, and yeah it, Yeah, I'm going to need sedation if

I need another one of those. But anyways, the the you know, the if you look at me in a medical context, or you look at me in the context of free climbers, for example, I and the biggest chicken in the world, and I think that's true. I mean, I'm kind of extreme on both of those. I think. I think I'm more fearful than most people of the one thing, and I'm less fearful than most people of

the other thing. But I all of us have some of those different characteristics, right, So you'll often see first responders, for example, who are super courageous in doing and taking physical risks of some sort for their own for the

sake of other people. I mean, admirably so. But you'll see that if some sort of traumatic kind of thing happens on the job, they're now very often sent to talk to someone, and a lot of them just don't want to do it and find that threatening to their idea of who they are that they would even need this, or threatening to you know, it's threatening to open up

like that. So that would be a case where the person who's not taken physical risks but who jumps wholeheartedly into therapy when needed would be more courageous in that context. And so that's mostly about like the differences in the risk, but I think the difference in the goals are striking too.

So we had a study published a couple of years ago now looking at how courageous Americans rated two different women who both were in the news at the time that the data was collected, Kitlyn Jenner and Kim Davis. And so Kitlyn Jenner is a famous transgender woman who had rose to fame as a male athlete and publicly came out and since has had a whole lot of political weirdness that wasn't a part of it at the

time of the study. At the time we collected the data, it was really just her being on the cover of various magazines saying I'm Caitlin and I'm transitioning. And Kim Davis was a county clerk who issued marriage licenses, and when same sex marriage became legal in the US, she refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples because

of her religious beliefs, she said. And so those two women were both in the news for sort of politically opposite reasons, and we asked people how We gave people little description of what one of the two women did, and we said, how courageous is this person? How much risk did she take? How much did she do a valuable thing? And how much she did a valuable thing

predicted their ratings of courage better than anything else. How much she did a valuable thing was also very much predicted by their traditionalism, their their belief in traditional gender roles and traditional family structure. And it was exactly the results that you would predict. And since then, I've had this weird little hobby of looking at whenever anybody calls someone else courageous in the news, and it's virtually always someone calling somebody courageous for doing a thing that they

that the person saying it's courageous believes in. It's never Oh, I'm pro right to choose, but I can see how these pro lifers are are courageous, Like, no, that never happens. That doesn't happen. That's a thing where we kind of fight against. And that's that's part of your horrified expression when I was for those listening, she had had a horrified expression when I was describing the woman who dropped her boyfriend and didn't tell him why.

But it's it's usually my spineless, my spineless colleagues from the other party are trying to do this cowardly something some some some compared to my brave colleagues from my own party, who are doing this heroic and noble thing and standing up to evil blah blah blah. And it's it's a it's it is so wrapped up in how much you believe in what that goal is.

they do. Yeah, because encourage has it feels like it has a very different context.

can you totally you can do this. And that's a common kind of a thing. But a thing that most the thing that people do most often to try to make themselves feel more courageous is they think about how

valuable the goal is. They think about how good that outcome is going to be if they get it, and that you know, at least if they try excuse me, And that's also sort of a kind of encouragement, right, so you know, like if you if you just say he was encouraged to do he was encouraged to make this investment, well, probably he was told that the investment would pay off in the long run. Right now, is that a good thing or is that a bad thing? I guess it depends on if it pays off or not,

and if you believe in whatever the investment is. But the the but yeah, the whole idea of encouragement. We do encourage others. We usually encourage them to do things that we want them to do, though we don't encourage them to do something that we think is bad. Like you would be a terrible friend if you encouraged your friend to date someone who you thought was really inappropriate for them, Like, that's that's wrong. You shouldn't do that.

It should be you know, you'd encourage them to date the person if you thought, oh, they'd make a good couple.

with my research. I honestly, I got very bored with it. And in the US we have I'm in a tenure track. I was in a tenure track job. I'm now tenured. What that means is you have about six years to publish a certain amount of research or you're fired. And unfortunately, I discovered I was very bored with my research probably about three years, two or three years into my tenure track job, and that was really unpleasant. Another article would come out.

the attention span for. And I've never been good at the fuying details, finishing things. I remember in middle school. I had loved art up until this point, but in middle school, all of a sudden you had to like polish your art and finish it completely. It couldn't be just like, you know, here's the general outline, Oh I'm done. No, it was it was all about like craft and completing things.

And I remember we did this statue right, and halfway through the statue it was time to sand our statues, and the teacher, mister Ackert, he was great, but he was like, you know, now it's time to stand it. You know this is going to be most of your time. And I was just like, oh no, it's not. I got so It's like I had the overall sort of thing right, but I couldn't stand it. I just I took like a wirebrush and I scraped it so that

it just looked done faster. But anyway, I felt like the research on fear and attention felt like that to me. It felt like the standing part. And I thought I just I can't do this, and every time a new article would come out, I would think to myself, crap, another thing to read. And that was really long. It was really it was a long, long, long three years to finish that out and to get enough done, and

I just barely made it eat. But around the time that I got tenure, I had a colleague asked me to do an honor seminar for fear and about fear and horror, and I said sure, And so I put together the readings for this seminar and they were all pretty depressing, and so at the end I thought, well, let me put together let me have them read some things about what you can do about this. Okay, what if your fear is reasonable? Is unreasonable? Well, gosh, there's

so many good treatments for that. Let's do some readings on treatments for phobias and for anxiety disorders. What if your fear is reasonable? Well, oh wow, there's so much safety sort of things, so much safety research being done, much of it in my own department. We have a thriving human factors program and graduate students with degrees in how to make products safer. So let's read some stuff

about that. Oh gosh, but what about threats? What about like if you're afraid of something and it's reasonable and you can't do anything about it, Well, I guess you can respond with courage. So I thought, well, I'm going to look up the research on courage. And I found out that the research on courage literally like fit in my purse.

I was terrifically encouraged myself by the late Shane Lopez, who I met at a conference in twenty twenty three or two thousand and three, two thousand and three. I guess that's the right way we say that now, and it was just now two thousand and four doesn't matter anyways. It was just a life changing experience because he was so warm and so encouraging, and it was one of the most It was like the best professional conversation of my life. And that was a real turning point for me.

And I went, Yes, this is very exciting, and this is new. And I was right that this is new, and I was right that this is in set, that this is meaningful to people, and that it can help people. And so that was super helpful. But I also realized

well before that. Before I finished my graduate degree, I was an intern at a veteran's affairs hospital and I was lucky enough to work on a unit or severe post traumatic stress disorder from the viet mostly from the Vietnam War, and we had all these patients who had this blend of like trauma and courage and it was

really remarkable. And it was and the themes courage of things that they talked about and the consequences of failure to act courageously and what that did to what that the implications that had for them later in their life, and trying to get over things, and watching patient after patient after patient confront like the worst thing that ever happened to him for the goal of getting better or in some cases, for the goal of being a better

family member. Was actually really inspiring. And yeah, and I kind of took that with me and I didn't realize at the time that, but I think a lot of what I liked about that rotation was seeing the courage up close like that. One of my really neat Yeah.

we're not learning? Why are we not learning from this?

thing is and compare it to somebody else? I think that's a that's a choice you have to make, yes, And I think when people make that choice for themselves it can be amazingly powerful and amazingly wonderful. But when other people try to make it for you, you just feel like they're a calling you weak or be disrespecting the actual suffering that you have experienced. And everybody's This was a big thing that helped me during the pandemic,

which was everybody's worst thing is their worst thing? Yeah, whatever, it was that you lost during the pandemic. That was the worst thing for you, was your worst thing, And if you want to mourn that and be sad about it for yourself, you should be able to do that. Now. If you're going around demanding that other people respect that suffering, you know you're probably going to get pushed back from, and rightly so, from people who lost relatives or lost

their job or something like that. But if I want to be sad about not taking a couple of planned trips with my adult children, I'm going to be sad about it because I was looking forward to those. Yeah, you just they're never going to happen.

people that go through real shit. I understand that it's a pretty fucking cushy problem to have, But right now, what I was trying to do was get a bid.

therapy exposure each class. And so I did that. And so there was a stairwell right outside our classroom and we were on the second floor, but it went all the way down to the first floor, and they were pretty tall. It was pretty tall too, and it's very open. And so during our break every week I would or every I guess it was every week or every two days, I would get a little closer to that railing. And my goal is to be able to chat with my friends who were checking their mailbox in the basement of

that stairwell. And I hate it, and I'm still proud of that, and I'm still afraid of heides, but I'm less afraid of heights than I was. And you know, for me to say that it took courage for me to move closer to that railing, I think is one hundred percent accurate. But you know, if someone goes, you're cheapening the idea of courage. What about people who have

died for our country? You know, I'm going to be like, you know, like literally I was trying to say this thing about my life or like for me, I have kids, and I had an induction with my first pregnancy and I remember like standing next to the bed, going you're going to hop into that hospital bed and then it's

gonna hurt a lot. Yeah, and like I had to make myself do it, right, I had to make myself do that, and it it was you know, and again, you know, am I saying that I risked my life or you know, no, I'm not saying that am I saying that I took a public stand in the face of being and being thrown in jail. No, I'm not saying that I did that. But I did do this thing that I needed to do for me, and that kind of that kind of and.

for arthritis and cats. And she can now do that because that was one But what I say courageously, it was it was well And you know, and if you think about it, like it's courageous if she has the if she's in a lot of pain for the arthritis, but if you reduce that pain, she's more likely to be able to do the thing. I think that's a great analogy for courage right, Like if you reduce the sense of felt risk, you're going to be more likely

to be able to do it. If you're with your friends, you're gonna and they're giving you social support, or you're all doing the same thing, you're going to be more likely to be able to do it. We have the greatest exercise that the owner of the theater I worked for came up with for improv, which is an exercise where you play some silly music and y'all stand in a circle and one person does a dumb dance move. Right, So they're doing this dumb, stupid looking dance move and

it looks really stupid until everybody else joins in. And when everybody else is doing it, like the risk of doing it, the risk of looking stupid is totally gone, and it actually looks kind of cool and it flips from being stupid to sort of cool. Yeah, yeah, I love that, And I think that's a lot of the social support for some of the socially courageous things we see that people do.

that would be that would be one of them. So yeah, I guess that would be my only My only vague recommendation and if you're ever in Greenville, South Carolina, come see the Alchemy Comedy Company. I love that.

but yeah, that would be. That would be my takeaway to people is if if social courage is the thing you're looking for, that is it's kind of the social courage equivalence of boxing or ultimate fighting, or you know, any of the challenge and rock climb, free climbing, any of the sort of physical danger, confrontation sort of things you might encounter. I actually love it, and I love it.

kind of apparently dangerous thing. And I was like, well, I'll do something that I think is meaningful to me rather than meaningful to others.