You 2.0: Cultivating Courage

Why do some people act bravely in a crisis, while others flee or freeze up? Today, we bring you the second part of our You 2.0 series on the mental obstacles that can block us when we're charting a new path. Behavioral scientist Ranjay Gulati argues that courage is a choice, and that we can strengthen the reflexes that will help us to be brave when it matters most.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz, one of the central characters is the Cowardly Lion. He cuts a figure that is recognizable to us all. He longs to be brave, but when his courage is tested, he shrinks in fear.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Look at that. Look at that.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  I wanna go home.

• 0:26Shankar Vedantam?

  The Cowardly Lion eventually discovers his true nature. When he is given a medal to honor his courage, it helps him see that he is, in fact, a lion, that he was brave all along.

• 0:41Shankar Vedantam?

  The moral of the story is clear. The lion always had the capacity to be brave. He just didn't know it.

• 0:50Shankar Vedantam?

  The Wizard of Oz is a work of fiction, but every day, we see the Cowardly Lion's dilemma entailed from real life. Situations where people are called upon to be brave. Sometimes, they rise to the occasion, but many fail to do so, often with disastrous consequences.

• 1:11Shankar Vedantam?

  Fear, of course, is not always a bad thing. Evolutionary biologists find that circuits in the brain that govern the fear response are ancient. But fear can keep us from living our best lives, reaching for our dreams, and upholding our values.

• 1:32Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus, how to discover our inner lion.

• 1:53Shankar Vedantam?

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• 2:55Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:29Shankar Vedantam?

  Sometimes courage means running into a burning building or standing up to an armed enemy. Other times, it involves speaking up when everyone else stays silent or stepping forward when your instinct is to shrink back. Today, we look at those defining moments when life calls on us to be brave, when the choice is between cowardice and courage. Ranjay Gulati is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. He studies how people behave under conditions of great risk. He has thought a lot about the nature of courage. Ranjay Gulati, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Thank you, Shankar. It's a pleasure to be here today.

• 4:08Shankar Vedantam?

  Ranjay, you've looked into the story of a high school language teacher in China. On the afternoon of May 12, 2008, he was in his classroom conducting a lesson. Tell me who he was and what happened next.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Fan Mei Zong was a teacher, and he was in the middle of his class talking about an esoteric 18th century literary Chinese scholar when the building started to shake. You know, it got a little uncomfortable. But then the tremor turned into a full-blown earthquake where now everything was shaking. And Fan Meizong didn't hesitate. He ran. He opened the door and he ran out of the building. He was the first one out of the building, actually. And he got to the main ground and in fact, the boundary wall around the ground starts to collapse also.

• 5:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  And the students eventually also come out. And he asked his students, where were you? Why didn't you come out? And they asked him, where were you? We got so scared, we actually hid under the table. And we were hiding under our desks, waiting for direction on what to do. Their question was, you're our teacher. You should have been there to help us get out of there, rather than run out of there first.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  And Fan Meizong had no remorse whatsoever. And he said, look, when it comes to my own physical safety, I'm a coward. And so I needed to save myself first.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  And, and that was how he completely rationalized his response.

• 6:07Shankar Vedantam?

  So eventually, the earthquake resulted in nearly 90,000 people reported or presumed dead. Many children died across the region when school buildings crumbled on top of them. As news reports got out about this teacher's behavior, what was the public reaction, Ranjy?

• 6:26Speaker 03

  The public's reaction was one of outrage. At one point, he was considered the most hated man in China. They had derogatory nicknames for him, like Running Fan. And so he then comes out and speaks and tries to defend and justify his own action. And this has an even bigger backlash on him. As a society, we really can't stand cowards. Cowardice is one of the most derogatory terms you can use to label somebody. And that was the label pinned on Fan. He lost his job and it didn't end for several months after.

• 7:16Shankar Vedantam?

  You tell another story about a life-threatening emergency. This one occurred in 2023 on the subway in New York City. A man named Adam Klotz was riding the train when he saw something happening in the subway car. What did he observe and what did he do, Ranj?.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  So Adam Klotz is a meteorologist. He's on his way to work and he sees some young kids harassing an older gentleman. And, you know, as a good Samaritan and a good citizen, he chooses to intervene. Nobody else is doing anything. And he just asked them to stop doing what they were doing.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  And, and that then leads them to redirect attention to him. He then tries to avoid confrontation by going to another car. They follow him and at some point they start to beat him up rather viciously. And nobody else comes to his defense.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  And, and, and that to him was the shocker that nobody else stood up for him the way he had for the older gentleman.

• 8:28Shankar Vedantam?

  So here we see examples of both courage and cowardice in a single subway car. Ranj, I understand that you yourself once saw this juxtaposition of courage and cowardice in your own life. You were a teenager living in India with your mother. She had started a successful business. Set the scene for me and tell me what happened.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  So my mother was a successful fashion designer. She had a business and she bought herself a piece of farmland outside New Delhi, where she was going to have a farmhouse for the weekend getaway. This land turned out to become very valuable. A developer was chasing her to buy it. She said, I don't want it. I don't want to sell. I don't want the money. I want to keep my land. So one day I'm home on a weekend and this gentleman comes to the gate and he asks to see my mom. And he's from the developer. I said, no, she's not going to meet you. And he said, listen, tell her this is the last time we'll ever bother her. She says, okay, fine, send him in. Just a regular gentleman wearing a blazer comes in, sits down across from my mother, where she's sitting on a sofa. And he puts in front of on the table, a blank cheque, signed and a piece of paper and says, ma'am,

• 9:35Speaker 03

  you enter the amount, whatever you want. We just want to buy this from you. She says, no, I really don't want to sell. I'm sorry. Here's your cheque back. There's no amount for which I want to sell this land. Gets more belligerent. She pushes back and says, no, I'm not selling. He finally says, ma'am, I can't leave without your signature today. I have to get your signature. So she says, well, I'm sorry, you're not going to. At this point, he pulls his blazer back and he reveals he has a gun tucked in his waist. I'm standing at the door, watching this whole thing unfold. I see the gun too. In my mind, I'm doing my cost benefit. You know, I'm looking at the timing. Should I wait? Should I let him reach for the gun? Maybe it's a bluff. Should I go call the guard at the at the gate?

• 10:21Speaker 03

  I'm working this out in my head. My mother doesn't hesitate at all. She gets up from her sofa, walks across the table and slaps him right across the face. He doesn't even see it coming.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  And and then she says, how dare you? How dare you come into my house? And try to bully me and try to tell me to give you my land? And you're gonna threaten me with a gun? Get out of here.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  He doesn't see it coming. He scampers away, forgetting his chequebook. I have to run after him to give him his chequebook. And I I then asked my mom, I said, mom, didn't you see he had a gun? She says, yes. I said, what, you scared? She said, yes, so what?

• 11:19Shankar Vedantam?

  When you thought about your own behaviour in that moment, Ranjai, I mean, it's perfectly understandable why you would freeze in that moment. But when you reflected back on yourself, did you see some deeper character traits that prompted you not to act in that moment?

• 11:34Speaker 03

  I think, you know, maybe there was something in myself where I was a naturally hesitant. I would always deliberate before action. And sometimes my deliberations would take longer than normal. And whereas my mother was a very, you know, being a self-made businesswoman, she was a very confident person. And, and I think in her mind, she had a sense of herself as somebody who had a can-do mindset, like many entrepreneurs do. And as a woman, growing up in that time in India, where it was a very paternalistic system,

• 12:17Speaker 03

  she was not easy to be pushed around. And she was often being pushed around um by a very male-dominated society and system. So my own hesitation, I think, was a thoughtful cost-benefit, let's do the risk-adjusted returns, if I may say so, you know? I'm doing my risk analysis, scenario planning, working out the scenarios in my head. Um, which I thought was okay. I mean, that's what I'm supposed to do. But it was a learning moment. It was a, it was a learning moment for me.

• 13:01Shankar Vedantam?

  In the aftermath of this, did you feel like a coward?

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I did. You know, again, as a, even though I was only 14 years old, you know, as her son, I felt like it was my duty and responsibility to be the one to have protected her versus her having to do it for herself. Um, but it also made me realize very quickly that fear can paralyze you and that you have to make a choice sometimes. And she didn't give me a long lecture afterward. She just said, "Just because you're scared doesn't mean you do nothing."

• 13:41Speaker 03

  And that line kind of has always stayed with me. "Just because you're scared doesn't mean you do nothing."

• 13:56Shankar Vedantam?

  Life frequently presents us with moments that require a fateful choice. Will we hang back in a state of fear and cowardice? Or will we plunge ahead into brave and courageous action? When we come back, the attitudes and practices that separate the timid from the bold. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 14:34Shankar Vedantam?

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• 15:13Shankar Vedantam?

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• 15:29Speaker 04

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• 16:31Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Ranjay Golati is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. He has seen examples of courage and cowardice in his own life and in stories drawn from the news. When he sees stories of people acting courageously, he asks himself, what allowed these people to live up to their values, to stand up for what's right? Ranjay, a few years ago, a question started to nag at you, and you decided to investigate it scientifically. What was this question?

• 17:02Speaker 03

  The question really was, how do people operate in the face of uncertainty? Risk is where you have tools to assess, quantify, even mitigate it. Uncertainty is like a thick fog. No clear odds, no foolproof strategies. It turns out that most of us are able to deal with risk, tackle risk. We make money off of risk in the entire field of finance. Uncertainty actually activates the amygdala, and it triggers what is considered a survival emotion: fear. It moves quickly, and it paralyzes us. So people say fight or flight. It's actually fight, flight, or freeze.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  And fight is the rarest of all responses. It's mostly flight or freeze. I have no scientific basis for this, but I would like to hypothesize that most of us are descendants of cowards. Our ancestors, the ones who made it, ran for cover. The ones who ran after danger didn't quite make it. Now, at the same time, humankind has only progressed by virtue of those few, the daring few, the right brothers risking their lives to say, "I'm gonna give it a try." Madame Curie, others who personally took risks also for themselves, whether it was Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  All these people put themselves at risk. We are all the beneficiaries of those bold actions.

• 18:48Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you talk about the idea that from ancient times, people have puzzled over why some of us are braver than others? And one school of thought has held that bravery is just something that is innate in some people. Some people just happen to be brave.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  This is a real question. Because as I looked at the biographies of some of these people, you know, you read Mahatma Gandhi, he was not always a courageous person. Very early in his life, he was trying to be a barrister. He was living in England. He wanted to be more English than the English themselves, right? And then he had a moment of realization that changed things for him. He was a horrible public speaker. He was absolutely frightened of speaking in public. And here you have somebody who then speaks to millions of people. So you start to see that some of these people actually cultivate courage. And you discover that courage is a choice. It's a choice you make. And it's a choice you make in the face of fear.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  It forces you to become acquainted with the discomfort we feel when we are scared.

• 19:57Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's examine some of the things that courageous people do. You say that they construct the right kind of narrative. What are these narratives and why are they important, Ranjue?

• 20:07Speaker 03

  So Max Weber, a famous sociologist in the last century,

• 20:15Speaker 03

  talked about how human behavior can either be rational, which is looking at all options and trying to evaluate those choices, or interpretive. Interpretive is where you're looking at everything through a lens of meaning, understanding. What does it mean for me? And what is the meaning of the situation? So this narrative is how we construct a story about the situation. What's going on here? Is it personally meaningful to me? And a story we construct of ourselves in that situation. And most times, this interpretive calculus takes us to freeze or flight.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  But sometimes we feel compelled. I have to do something. This situation is the moment where if I don't do it, I can't live with myself.

• 21:21Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the stories that you say can support our efforts to be courageous is what you call a moral quest. Talk about this idea. You've mentioned Mahatma Gandhi, you've mentioned Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. All of them, it would seem, were not just on a political journey, but on a moral journey of some kind.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  I think most of us inside ourselves want to be great at something. I want to be somebody. I want to be known for something. And when you encounter something that you really buy into as a morally potent idea, it elevates our thought. We feel a sense of responsibility. I need to do something. In a previous project I did, I wrote a book called Deep Purpose, in which I looked at even startups. They start not only with an idea. They usually start with an ideal. We want to change the way this thing gets done. We're going to transform the way these customers have to do this. We're going to completely redo the way this is done.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  And that energizes people in these small companies. In fact, when the companies get big, they lose it. And then they're like, oh, my God, we lost our soul.

• 22:36Shankar Vedantam?

  I remember speaking many years ago with Scott Atran. He studies extremist groups and violent movements and so forth. But one of the things he looks at is this idea that, you know, all of us are motivated, of course, by, you know, costs and benefits. We are making cost benefit calculations as we go through life. But he talks about this set of beliefs that we can have, which he calls sacred values. And sacred values are things that in some ways are not amenable to cost benefit calculations. If someone were to say, you know, how much money would you be willing to accept in exchange for your child's life? You would say, no amount of money is going to be worth it because my child's life is not connected to the realm of transaction of buying and selling,

• 23:20Shankar Vedantam?

  that there's no amount that you could give me that would allow me to betray my country or to betray my family. In some ways, I think that's what you're talking about when you talk about having a moral quest. In some ways, it moves the conversation from a cost benefit calculation to something that in some ways is beyond it.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Absolutely. But I don't want to make the distinction so clean. I think we're doing cost benefit while we are also doing this other factor that is compelling us to take action. So it's usually the intersection of the two, right? I don't know, my mother's no longer here, but I'm not sure if the guy had already pointed the gun and had his finger on the trigger that she would have tried to work around him, right?

• 24:04Speaker 03

  I would imagine that she's, in her mind, she must have decided that if I had a moment, it's now or never.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  And as she explained later, she says, he was determined to get my signature. He had said clearly, his intention was, I'm not leaving here without your signature. So his next move would have been to actually pull that gun out.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Right, he had just shown it to her. So in some ways, it was a brilliant preemptive move. So these ideas kind of intersect. Where there is a utilitarian thought process, and then there is an emotional thought process that are coming together. And hopefully, they intersect. Or sometimes what I found is the emotional trumps utilitarian. You're like, I'm gonna do this no matter what. I don't care. That's where it goes to another whole different level.

• 25:15Shankar Vedantam?

  Years ago, Ranjai, you had a student at Harvard Business School who went on to work at Facebook. The rest of the world was introduced to this former student of yours in October 2021, when she testified before a congressional subcommittee. Here's a bit of what she said.

• 25:31Speaker 05

  My name is Frances Haugen. I used to work at Facebook. I joined Facebook because I think Facebook has the potential to bring out the best in us. But I'm here today because I believe Facebook's products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy. The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook an Instagram saver, but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.

• 25:59Shankar Vedantam?

  So Ranjai, it must have taken considerable courage for Frances Haugen to stand up to a behemoth like Facebook. She wasn't just walking away from a job. She was walking away from her career, from coworkers, from friends. You say that she embedded her actions in a moral quest?

• 26:15Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I think, you know, for her, having seen firsthand one of her own friends getting radicalized by content on Facebook, she had felt it and seen it upfront. It was not an abstraction anymore. And I think that brought her to a point where she felt she had to do something. That doing nothing was not an option. We had this notion of the lone hero myth in Courage. She didn't do it alone. She pondered it for several months. And only when she had a support squad, who were really able to nudge her forward, was she finally willing to go all the way. So courage is not a solo sport. It takes a village.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  And so you have to curate the right kind of support. She got emotional support from her parents and friends. She got informational or knowledge support from a law firm that specialized in helping whistleblowers. She got resource support from news media that was going to cover her story. And she got feedback support from a friend of hers, who was actually an ordained priest, with whom she would have candid conversations, would tell her what she was doing or not doing, and whether it felt right or not. So, you know, there was this multitude of support that along with her own sense of morality, that brought her to a point where she felt she had to do something.

• 27:42Shankar Vedantam?

  And in some ways, I think I'm seeing the same scaffolding in many of the stories that you have told me, Ranjesh. If you think about Gandhi or King or Mandela, they also in some ways combined, you know, a deep moral fervor with real strategy and real tactical sophistication. And Frances Howkin did the same thing. I mean, she had a moral fervor. She believed what she was doing was right. But as you say, she in some ways got her legs under her before she decided to make her move.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And the moral fervor doesn't always involve some higher order purpose. It can. In startups, you know, you can see them saying, I want to transform the way this market works. I'm going to change the way this gets done. And so that fervor can take the form of transforming society, transforming a market, transforming others' lives. In some way, and I think what you discover is people in these moments who are drawn to these higher order or purposeful endeavors. Instead of being engaged in the project, they are actually inspired by it. They are energized in a very different way.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Which is why the behavior you see in small, fast-growth startups of employees is not what you see when those same companies hit 500,000, 2,000 employees. You see a decline and change in people's motivation and how they show up.

• 29:17Shankar Vedantam?

  So cultivating courage might start with examining the stories we tell ourselves about our capacities. But we also need to gather information about what's out there, the scary situation that requires our bravery. You talk about the idea of sense-making. What is sense-making here in this context, Ranjy?

• 29:34Speaker 03

  So what I discovered was, once you've got the kind of the moral fervor and the identity and meaning to move you into wanting to do something, people resource themselves in a variety of ways. They have a set of a toolkit and tactics they absorb. One of the first ones I discovered was sense-making. Sense-making is a classic term used by a very famous organizational theater from Michigan named Carl Weich. And Carl Weich looked at firefighters. When a firefighter goes into a building, they don't know. There's a tremendous amount of uncertainty. How fast is the fire happening? How combustible is it? Are there other kind of combustible liquids in the building?

• 30:18Speaker 03

  Are there people in the building who need to be saved? How much time do I have before I need to make a hasty exit? All this is going on. Now, if you're gonna do your risk-adjusted calculation over here, you're never gonna go into the building. They don't have that option. So they go into the building with an initial hypothesis. They've seen the building, the structure. They know how long the fire has been going on. They have a guess as to point of origin, entry.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Looking around cues. What's here, what's there? Updating your theory.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Taking some more steps. Should I be going upstairs to look for people? Should I go into the basement? Should I look for point of origin? What should I be doing next?

• 31:02Speaker 03

  So it's a story of kind of tippy toeing your way into the fog. What is called acting your way into knowing. Rather than knowing before acting. Sometimes you have to act your way into knowing.

• 31:26Shankar Vedantam?

  You say that a masterful example of acting your way into knowing took place in the wake of the major tsunami that hit Japan in 2011. Tell me that story. What happened there that in some ways exemplifies this idea?

• 31:41Speaker 03

  So everybody knows about the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which had a meltdown. Just eight miles away was another plant complex called the Daiini plant. This too was damaged equally badly. Both of them had a boundary wall of 20 feet high. And the tsunami had crossed 55 feet of water, which had submerged the nuclear reactors, the cooling systems and everything else. And all these people, the 300 odd employees, had raced into the emergency response center, where they were trying to understand what's going on. A power plant like that works off of gauges, sensors and gauges, all blanked.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  And in there is the plant manager, Masuda. Mr. Masuda says, what are we gonna do?

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Headquarters says, we don't know. They don't know. He says, okay, he got five volunteers to go outside and take a, do a recce tour to find out how bad our things. So they go out and they find out, well, the power supply to the cooling system is gone. There's no other immediate source of power we can get. So we need to get power back somehow into our systems or else the meltdown is guaranteed. Back, taking stock. Another group. Let's send you out to different sources of power to see is there any place we can find power. Let's send people out to find out about access to cables, power cables. We'll need cables to create a little extension cord, if I may say.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  So now you're trying to grapple with the situation. Then you start, you get the cable, you find the power source, and you then say, let's take it to the nearest reactor to where the power sources. They start to do that. When they discover another reactor, suddenly the temperature is rising much faster. They call GE and say, all these reactors were the same model. Why is this one moving, heating up much faster? They come back and say, you know, actually, this was a slightly older model. It has the same numbering on it, but it's a slightly older version. That's why it's probably heating up faster. So they say, OK, forget taking the power to that first reactor. Let's bring it straight to this other one, because this one is heating up too fast. So you know, you're going in, improvising,

• 34:01Speaker 03

  adjusting, and learning by doing. And they successfully avoided catastrophe here.

• 34:24Shankar Vedantam?

  You talk about the importance, Ranjre, of trying to convert uncertainty to risk. And you say that one person who pulled this off in 1974 was a man named Philippe Petit. What did he do?

• 34:37Speaker 03

  He's a tightrope walker, a daredevil, if you may say so. And, you know, at that time, he walked between the World Trade Center buildings. Subsequently, he's done a walk over the Grand Canyon and several other such feats. So in some extensive writing by him, he actually describes it. He says, people describe me as a daredevil. I don't see myself that way. I am a very, very methodical, very calculating, very careful. So what you are seeing as completely reckless, to my mind, is methodical, thought-out activity. He spent almost 11 years collecting data

• 35:20Speaker 03

  on wind patterns and other aberrations that can happen over the Grand Canyon, before he did that walk. So what you see as kind of reckless behavior is actually very, very well thought out.

• 35:36Shankar Vedantam?

  In other words, it's very tightly controlled. At one point, Philip says, if I think I'm a hero who is invincible, I will pay for it with my life. So in other words, he understands that if he actually goes outside the realm of what he is tightly prepared for, if he goes off script, if you will, that's exactly when very bad things happen.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now, take another example, which is of heroic behavior, is Tom Cruise, who does most of his own stunts. In fact, he drove a motorcycle off of a cliff and then parachuted into the valley. And he did it six times till he got it right. And when asked, you know, like, Tom, aren't you scared doing this? And he says two things. One is, he says, yes, I'm afraid, but you know, I'm OK and comfortable with being afraid. That's the first thing. So he's tamed and managed his own fear. But at the same time, you should see the entire team that is supporting this effort, right?

• 36:37Speaker 03

  How they've trained up for this, how they've simulated and planned for this. This is not just Tom finding a random cliff and saying, let's just race off the cliff. So the massive amounts of preparation that have gone in, probably much more than if they'd used a backup stunt artist.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  So that's where people are taking what looks like an uncertain story, turning it into risk, and then learning to manage that risk.

• 37:11Shankar Vedantam?

  In order to become brave, we need to tell inspiring stories about ourselves and our journeys. We also need to learn about the nature of the frightening or daunting challenges we face and to deliberately test our abilities to deal with them. When we come back, the role of the psychological factor known as self-efficacy. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 38:59Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you had times in your life when you found yourself unable to do the brave thing? When you shrank back from a challenge and failed to live up to your values? Or can you think of a moment when you were frightened but somehow managed to be brave?

• 39:17Shankar Vedantam?

  If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience, or a question or comment about this episode about the science of bravery, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo. Two or three minutes is plenty. Then email the file to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line frightened. Again, that's [email protected].

• 39:46Shankar Vedantam?

  At a commencement address some years ago, the writer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said, "You can be kind and true and fair and generous and just and even merciful occasionally. But to be that thing, time after time, you have to really have courage." Ranjai Guladi is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. He is the author of How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage. Ranjai, in your studies of courageous people, you found that they deliberately cultivate a capacity known as self-efficacy. What is self-efficacy? And how does it help people become braver?

• 40:27Speaker 03

  So self-efficacy, the construct, was first studied by a famous Stanford psychologist, Albert Bandura, who was trying to convince people who are fearful of snakes to hold a corn snake. And what is interesting is, in that study and several others that he did, he makes a very important distinction between the domain-specific efficacy that you may have and then a generalized efficacy that you may have. Domain-specific is, I am the master of my craft. I know my task. I'll do it. I'll get it done. Generalized efficacy is this general notion of, I can do it. I got it. Bring it on.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Captain Sullenberger landing a plane on the Hudson River. You know, sure, he was a seasoned veteran, forty-year pilot, fighter pilot before that, but he had never really trained simulated landing on a river. But, you know, when he was interviewed by Katie Couric, who asked him, like, look, you know, what do you need to do? He said, "Oh, yeah, I knew the textbook, this, this, this, this, this." He says, "But there was still a big if." And he looked at her and he says, "I knew I could do it." That, "I knew I could do it." That kind of confidence, if I may call it that, which is this generalized can-do spirit, that becomes the kernel of what allows us to then ultimately take bold action, even in the face of uncertainty.

• 42:09Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, in some ways, we heard this in the story you told about your mother. I mean, she had a domain-specific self-efficacy. She was a designer. She must have been very good at her craft. But clearly, she also had a higher-level sense of self-efficacy because she said, "Even when I'm confronting somebody who shows up at my house with a gun, I know that I'll be able to handle the situation."

• 42:30Speaker 03

  I think most entrepreneurs, I shouldn't say most, but many entrepreneurs have that general sensibility because, you know, things are changing so fast around them and the curveballs coming at them are so many from so many directions by necessity. But you're right. I think if I look at her from afar, you know, her life was always one of the, "I got it." Nothing would kind of faze her. How do we cultivate that? That's the question now.

• 43:00Shankar Vedantam?

  And what is the answer to that question? Because again, I think people might say, "Some people just have it, some people don't." But I think your theory is that, in fact, this is something that can be grown, can be cultivated.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Look, it starts with domain-specific efficacy, first of all. You have to be the master of your craft. You have to really understand your craft in a way that nobody else does. It should be deeply internalized into who you are. Then, when you go beyond that, I find you can take yourself so far, but sometimes you need external validation. What do coaches do so well for teams? You know, what do they do? They help the player believe in themselves. That self-belief, "I know you got it." And I think that becomes part of the story. So you're looking for external sources of validation as well.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  And then, when you're playing for somebody else, when you're doing it for something bigger than yourself, that further boosts up your confidence, that, "I got it, I can do it." This self-belief sometimes comes from within and sometimes comes from an externalized source who also believes in you.

• 44:22Shankar Vedantam?

  A very dramatic example of how domain-specific self-efficacy can lead to generalized self-efficacy is in the story of the terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, India in 2008. What happened that day, Ranj, and how did employees at the hotel respond?

• 44:40Speaker 03

  So several terrorists found their way into the hotel and laid a siege on the hotel for the next 60 hours. They were marauding around the hotel, they were lighting fires, they were shooting guests, they were shooting employees, basically trying to wreak havoc as much as they could. And meanwhile, there was no way for the police and commandos to even go in. They didn't know what to do. There was a bit of a mess over there. And what is interesting is, none of the employees ran away. Even the, in fact, the hotel operators, whose cubicles were right behind the front desk, evacuated soon after the attacks, came

• 45:24Speaker 03

  back in because they realized all the guests stuck in their rooms were calling and trying to get help. And so they all went back into the hotel. But the story I think best exemplifies this is Malika Jagat, 24 years old. She's been assigned an event to welcome the new CEO of global Unilever, Paul Poelman. And there is a farewell for the departing CEO. And the global leadership of Unilever is there, including the Indian leadership as well. And she's in charge of this event. And now you have the siege in the hotel. She locks the doors, tells everybody things are not okay, makes them lie down on the floor, and asks them to stay quiet. This goes on the whole night.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Right, and she's in charge. She's the, as she explained later, she was the youngest in the room, actually. But she was in charge. And there's no script for this, right? She's now working way beyond script. All she, no, her script is take care of the guests. And the, the, the purpose statement in the Taj is guest is God. Atthi si deva bhava, which means guest is God. And that's all she can think of. And then, early hours in the morning, one of the, there's a fire lit outside in the hallway. So now, smoke is coming into this conference, in this big room. And they have to get out, or they're gonna die. So she instructs two of her staffers to try to break the windows, which are big, thick windows.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  They use chairs and manage to break one of the windows. They see the general manager down there. They wave to him. He sees them. He sees the smoke coming out of the room. He directs the firefighters there. A ladder is put. Malika makes everybody, all the guests get out first. She's the last one off, out of the room. Now, you ask yourself, like, what training did she have, you know, to carry her through this moment? And, and she said, you know, in an interview afterward, she said, "I was just doing my job."

• 47:44Shankar Vedantam?

  So Ranj, we've been talking about very rational and deliberate approaches to cultivate courage. But you also write about a different path to becoming braver, and that is calling upon our faith. What have you discovered about the link between courage and faith?

• 48:00Speaker 03

  So, human beings, for thousands of years, have had to deal with uncertainty. You know, weather uncertainty, you know, geopolitical uncertainty. And for the longest time, we have believed in a higher power, a higher source, something bigger than us is there to take care of me. Now, I don't want to debate right now whether there is a force or not. We can have a long discussion about that. But at the venomum, it definitely calms us down. Knowing that there is a higher power of force there for me. In some ways, I would call it outwitting our fear or taming our fear.

• 48:45Speaker 03

  Because knowing that I'm supported by this higher force gives me the comfort, the confidence, the belief that, you know what, it looks dangerous, it looks scary, but I know something bigger than me has my back. And people manifest this in many different ways.

• 49:13Shankar Vedantam?

  You write about a firefighter named Joe Ibarra and the way he used his faith to face a terrifying situation with great courage. Tell me his story.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  So here's a firefighter who is in Idaho fighting a forest fire. And on day one, the fire looks pretty okay, tame and so forth. And they're trying to kind of contain it and figure it out. And then the next day, the fire explodes. It gets so, so dangerous and so bad. His supervisor announces that they, this is out of control. We need to go into our fire tents. And so here he is, he has a radio, he has his fire tent, and he has a rosary. And he's holding on to this rosary because he believes that if he has the rosary, he'll be protected. And he's praying. And magically, just soon after, a helicopter comes and dumps a bunch of water on them and douses the fire.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  And in his mind, this was just another manifestation of this higher power that was there for him. In his mind, he believes firmly that with this rosary, he'll always be safe.

• 50:27Shankar Vedantam?

  So you told me at the start of our conversation, Ranjui, that you yourself have always been a very cautious person, a very deliberate person. You think about the risks before you embark on something. Have you, after all of this study about the science of bravery, have you tried to take it upon yourself to become a braver person?

• 50:45Speaker 03

  You know, I think that moment with my mother probably haunted me more than I would like to admit. But I actually, soon after, I actually decided I was gonna try and put myself in situations that made me a little uncomfortable. So very early, when I came to the US, I went to flight school to learn how to fly a plane. I never told my parents about that. But off I went to fly. And, you know, it was okay as long as I had an instructor next to me, you know, and you're okay flying and, you know, it's a... And he showed us that you can glide the plane if the engine shuts off. And so intellectually, you kind of got it. But the big moment for a person training is when you go solo. Your first solo flight.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  That was a long time ago. It was 1985. I still remember my solo flight. Because I had in my head, decided that I was gonna imagine that Jerry, my instructor, was sitting next to me. And the entire flight, I was in conversation with Jerry. You know, Jerry, props are up, you know, taking off, you know, calling ground control, I'm talking to Jerry, and here I was, talking my way through the flight.

• 52:02Speaker 03

  I needed to comfort myself. I came to realize, you know, that fear is natural. You know, I had gotten over the shame of fear. That was very important. Now, for me, the first step was the shame I felt when I felt scared. I needed to overcome that part. Now I overcome the shame, now I had to figure out how to tame my fear. Right? And I'm trying to find a way to tame my fear. And then I have to take it to the next level. I'm going to act in spite of my fear. You can never eliminate fear. I can't tame it to zero. So I had to cross that chasm from shame to tame to really transcend.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  And that was my first foray. I did another thing as well. I also then realized that I was not too comfortable in deep water. I think watching the movie Jaws really did me in. So I learned how to windsurf. And off I went to learn how to windsurf. And I spent several summers windsurfing. And, and again, not the most comfortable thing for me when I first started it. But I was determined to show myself. It wasn't to show my mother. My mother didn't even know most of these things were happening. But I was determined to show myself that I could do it.

• 53:36Shankar Vedantam?

  As you have listened to this episode, you might be thinking of people in your life who could use a dose of bravery. Do you have a fearful child or a fearful parent? A colleague who always worries about worst case scenarios? Would you like to help them discover their inner lion? In our companion story to this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus, we explore how we can help others become more courageous. If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled, "How to Help Others Be Brave." If you're not yet a subscriber, please visit support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co/hiddenbrain.

• 54:19Shankar Vedantam?

  You'll instantly have access to all our subscriber-only content, including past episodes. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co/hiddenbrain. Ranjai Kullari is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. He's the author of How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage. Ranjai, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  Thank you, Shankar. It's been a pleasure to be with you today.

• 54:57Shankar Vedantam?

  If you have a question or a personal story about courage that you'd be willing to share with a Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo. Two or three minutes is plenty. Then email the file to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line frightened. Again, that's [email protected].

• 55:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 55:44Shankar Vedantam?

  Next week in our U2.0 series, how to get going again when you're stuck in a rut.

• 55:50Speaker 09

  In any pursuit, it doesn't really matter what you're doing, but trying multiple approaches, experimenting, figuring out whether the dominant approach is the right one, or whether you should try something a bit different is the way forward.

• 56:03Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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