A recent Op Ed in the New York Times Sunday Review had a dismissive headline that didn't do the piece justice: "The Trick to Acting Heroically." I was expecting to disagree with whatever the writers were going to say, but the further I read, the more I wanted them to keep going. The authors were offering their perspective on the heroism of three Americans and a British businessman who may have saved the lives of French train passengers when they rushed a gunman threatening the lives of innocent passengers. They subdued him without thinking of the risk to their own lives. In other words, they were genuine heroes, and were recognized as such.
What prompted them to risk their lives for others? The writers pointed to interviews with past recipients of the Carnegie Medal for heroism showing that their actions were instinctive and not the outcome of reasoning. They saw a crisis and they acted on it, almost without thinking. "We found almost no examples of heroes whose first impulse was for self-preservation but who overcame that impulse with a conscious, rational decision to help."
The article then describes an experiment where reasoning about selflessness governs behavior. Two subjects are put into a situation where one is asked to help the other--and is given the option of finding out beforehand what the cost or benefit of helping will be. The other subject is allowed to observe whether or not this potential helper wants to know the cost of his actions. The experiment measured how much each participant felt they had to gain by choosing one way or the other--to help and/or to team up with the other participant.
All of this was configured as if people are simply cost-benefit analysis machines and that all behavior is merely a utilitarian calculation. Whatever results in the greatest benefit for all becomes the most desirable and celebrated: including the act of risking one's own life for another. This struck me as much less persuasive in explaining the action of a hero.
Yet by the end of the piece the writers nailed it by described military training as a way of making heroism instinctive. That's when their view of behavior began to make sense from a moral standpoint, as well as a behavioral one. Boot camp is, more or less, intense and repeated practice of self-sacrifice for the sake of others. And practice is what creates good, great, and even heroic behavior. The ability to choose the right thing, against what appears to be one's own self-interest--comfort, pleasure, personal gain, avoidance of pain, you name it--resides at the heart of moral choices, including the most extreme example of them, heroism. Practice in small things prepares a person for the glory of those rare, big choices that make us the human beings we're meant to be. As the authors point out:
The military hones soldiers' cooperative instincts in an environment that has all of the required characteristics: Soldiers occasionally find themselves helping others at enormous personal risk; and they live, train and work together for relatively long periods, during which they have plenty of opportunities to observe whether a peer helps others without thinking.
Science has been confirming all of this, in its own way, through the study of epigenetics and taking it a step further. Epigenetics has shown that habitual behavior can alter the way our own genetic code switches itself off and on--and thus change who we are and how we are likely to behave in the future. You become the better person you choose to be, if you choose to be that person often enough. Choose to do the right thing repeatedly, and you are not only more likely to do something heroic, but, physiologically speaking, you can essentially turn yourself into a hero. Every choice counts until they are no longer choices, but instinctive behavior, an integral part of who you are. Practicing small acts of goodness prepares us for heroic accts. And maybe, just maybe, if enough of us realize that, over the years, we can create a better, kinder world.
Peter Georgescu is the author of The Constant Choice. He can be found at Good Reads.