Courage Unveiled - Featuring Dr. Cynthia Pury

PITY PARTY OVER

Today, we delve into the world of courage and what it truly means to stand up for what you believe. Our guest is Dr. Cindy Pury, Professor of Psychology at Clemson University and an expert in the psychology of courage.

The episode explores the interplay among fear, bravery, and honesty, revealing why courage doesn't conform to a single, standardized model.

Our conversation explores bravery, honesty, and the nuanced nature of courageous actions, emphasizing individual uniqueness.

Dr. Pury warns against using courage for harmful ends and shares leadership insights for fostering a supportive environment.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Podbean, or your favorite podcast platform.

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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: When did you decide what you wanted to pursue professionally?

Cindy Pury: So I drifted into college without having any clear idea what I wanted to do. I had a major in public relations, I didn't love it, but I couldn't think of anything else.

And I got to college and the very first day of class, John Kihlstrom, who was our intro teacher, talked about hypnotism. And I was like, oh! And then we started talking about emotions and I was like, oh! And the whole thing was so interesting that I decided to double major in psychology.

And I clearly remember one day my junior year of college, I believe I was sitting in a windowsill studying in one of the big campus landmark buildings. And I had two exams to study for a psychology exam and a journalism exam. And I remember looking, choosing the psychology book and thinking, boy, I wish any of my journalism classes were as interesting as this.

In graduate school I studied emotional theory and emotional disorders, particularly anxiety disorders. And around the same time the director of our honors college asked me to do an honors seminar about fear and horror. And I thought, great. Okay, sure.

And so I put together all these things and I went at the end, by the time I got done looking at my class reading list and stuff, I thought, wow, that's really depressing. We need to end on a more positive note.

So some kind of irrational fear that you have, what do you do about that? Those are anxiety disorders. We have a whole big bunch of treatments for those. So let's read about the most well supported version of that at the time. So I had a section on CBT.

Then what can you do about some kind of thing that you have a fear of that is rational to be afraid of? Well you can reduce whatever the risk is in that situation and really there's not much else you can do to reduce your risk. Well you can behave courageously. And I thought there's like no research on this at all. And I started conducting research on courage and I haven't really gone back.

During my pre-doctoral internship I worked at a veteran's hospital with a bunch of people who had combat related PTSD and I was struck by how they talked about things that sounded very courageous but they weren't calling them that.

And also how some of the things that they were really continually distressed about seemed to be kind of a function of what Jonathan Shea, the year after I finished my internship, coined the term moral injury.

It seemed to be kind of a combination of moral injury and almost like a failure of courage that was bothering them. And so I've been interested in this for a really long time and it turned out to be a really natural fit and I found I was just super interested in it. And so I've stuck with that.

Stephen Matini: Simply put, what is the link between fear and courage?

Cindy Pury: The link between fear and courage is actually a little bit more complicated than just saying that fear is standing up to courage, 'cause a lot of people say “courage is standing up to fear,” but also they'll say, you were fearless and courageous. And it's like, but those don't fit.

So what we've done is we've taken a step back, me and my colleagues, we've taken a step back from the fear and think about the risk part instead as being central to courage. And this I think eliminates an awful lot of the problem. It doesn't have to be actual risk, it can be perceived risk.

One of the things we know for sure about people who are highly fearful, either dispositionally or just in the moment, is that whatever it is feels much riskier than perhaps it really is. So that happens when folks are afraid of things that aren't really that much of a risk. It still feels very risky. It can feel risky in a really unusual kind of way.

So one of my participants in a courage study wrote about something she did that was courageous, that was smushing, a spider that was in her house. She thought it was courageous that she worried about how if she hadn't done anything, he would come back and get her. And it's like I knew that she knew like most people with specific phobias, she probably knew that spiders aren't smart enough to do that, but it felt that way.

Finally, it helps explain situations where someone describes something they did they that they call courageous. And they'll either say that they didn't feel that much fear in the moment because they were very focused on doing whatever they were trying to do.

Or sometimes they described fear, but their fear has more to do with the fear of whatever bad outcome they're trying to prevent typically for someone else who they love or otherwise care about.

So if a a small child who you love wanders into the street, you're going to be much more afraid of something bad happening to that small child most likely than yourself.

Stephen Matini: Is there any difference between bravery and courage?

Cindy Pury: The difference between bravery and courage, if your listeners are familiar with the VIA or the Values and Action System, is that the VIA’s bravery component is standing up to fear or difficulty in a particular way. And so it has a lot to do with that emotion and it doesn't have to do with how you aim it.

So I would argue that it would be possible for someone to have an isolated strength of bravery but use it in a completely inappropriate way.

So, if you imagine two people who are equally afraid running into a house fire; cool, they're equally burned and equally likely to die, they're in the burn unit, they're in adjoining beds.

The person in bed A ran into the burning house to save a baby, that person is likely to be hailed as courageous and publicly hailed as courageous by other people. The person in bed B ran into the burning house to make a really cool TikTok video. People aren't likely to say that person's courageous.

Stephen Matini: What is as of now after many years of research, your own definition of courage?

Cindy Pury: My own definition of courage at this point is that it involves taking a worthwhile risk. So it's got to be taking, it's gotta be a voluntary sort of thing. It's a chosen action. It's not something that just happens to you, it's something that you choose to do. And I suppose I could extend it to choosing to take a worthwhile risk.

It's also something that is risky to you. It also is worthwhile. So it is something that is proportional to the risk that's involved. Risking your life to save the life of another is definitely courageous. Risking your life to pursue some incredibly personally valuable goal can be courageous if you the observer or you the rater shares that value of that goal.

Risking your life for a very trivial thing in a way that need not have happened that way does not feel that way.

A few years ago there was someone who literally did run back into a house fire to get her season baseball tickets, which could have easily been replaced and in fact the baseball team said, we're replacing your tickets but just know we would've replaced these anyways. So that doesn't seem terribly courageous.

I've taken that a step further and I've looked at people who've won the Carnegie Hero medal, which in the United States is a big civilian award for bravery and for the Carnegie Hero medal.

I looked at one year's worth of it, and in that one year most people who won, saved the life of another person, and they themselves were alive.

Some people won dying while saving the life of another person.

Other people won dying and the person they tried to save died, nobody won, when the person they tried to save died, but they lived. There's this sort of hindsight bias that that was worth it.

We have other data on that too where we just made up stories and the stories changed. So like you move to another country for the perfect relationship or the perfect job and A) it works out and 10 years later you're still married or B) after about a year you see that you're really not compatible and you split up, that second person is not likely to see themselves as courageous.

Stephen Matini: So if I understood correctly, there seems to be cultural and contextual differences that it impact what people perceive as courageous.

Cindy Pury: Oh absolutely. Absolutely. And they'll vary based on both cultural values and individual values and they'll vary based on both cultural threats and individual threats.

And so, if you are in a culture where being perceived as showing any sign of fear is like a terrible thing for you and you're willing to get up and speak in public, that may be more courageous than if, if you're like, oh, okay. Sometimes people are afraid and they go on and it's cool.

Or if you are raised in a culture where showing any sign of sadness as a man is perceived as negative and you're crying in public and you're a man, that's gonna be much a much bigger risk in some cultures than in others. Likewise, the values of course change from culture to culture.

They also change individually. Charlie Starkey, Laura Olson and I just published some data looking at how courageous Americans rated two women who did sort of different things.

A few summers back, Kaitlyn Jenner publicly came out as transgender, and Kim Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to same gender couples.

Not surprisingly the extent to which you agree that marriage should be between one man and one woman and people should adhere traditional gender norms point you in completely opposite directions in rating if that woman was courageous or not.

Stephen Matini: As you're talking, there are different scenarios they play in my head particularly about what's considered to be socially courageous. And I'm thinking about organizations or the example of Kaitlyn Jenner. Some of them they say, I'm openly gay but at work, I'm not because you know, that's not the place where I could do that. So from your perspective, should I be more courageous, or what?

Cindy Pury: It would depend on so many different things about how the person sees their job. I'm gonna make up a super extreme example here.

So if the person's spouse, who they love, is unable to work for some reason, and they are providing all of the means of financial support for their family, and they go out to work every day in a homophobic environment, and put on their mask to get money so that they and their partner can live a decent life, that could almost be seen as courageous.

Doing exactly the opposite. For them, jobs aren't plentiful and they would never find anything that would support them in that way. It might be courageous for them to stay closeted.

Similarly, in an organization that specifically goes out of its way to say we are a proudly WOKE organization and we welcome all of our LGBTQIA+ employees and in fact here's our gay employee association and people in the gay employee association actually have kind of a leg up, then that risk is just obviously a lot lower.

Likewise, if you are seeing yourself as strongly committed to advancing the rights of other people by being an example yourself, which I think from what I have read arguably is a large part of the reason why we have so much more acceptance in society today, which I personally really welcome, is because people have been willing to step out and say I'm gay, I'm still the same person that you knew before and I'm still just as competent as I was before and and all these other things and here is my life and I am willing to be an example, that could also be part of it.

Stephen Matini: So it seems to me that courage oftentimes ignites when someone is willing to go against the grain.

Cindy Pury: Yeah, certainly in terms of any sort of a social thing, that definitely would seem to be the case. And social risks are huge. We're very social creatures and our social risks feel every bit as real as physical risks and do every bit as much of the same sort of jazzing up your autonomic nervous system and feeling really awful and feeling a sense of dread. We definitely feel that way about social things also.

Personal courage I think is a real big thing and when you know the person's full story, sometimes their actions make a lot more sense.

I mentioned I worked at this VA hospital. I had a patient who before I was even studying courage, his goal during treatment was to wrap a Christmas present for his child. That doesn't sound like very much but his whole backstory was that the worst thing that had ever happened to him was over Christmas time.

Every December it reliably resulted in terrible flashbacks for him and he avoided every reminder of Christmas whatsoever to avoid being reminded of this very terrible incident in his life.

So he came in and he wrapped a Christmas present and he wrapped it in a session with me and while he was wrapping it like he was crying and his hands were shaking and he was sweating and we had to have a bucket nearby 'cause he thought he was gonna throw up, but he did it, at the end he's like, I'm sorry, I'm such a mess, something, something about being weak.

Well, before I started studying this, like almost a decade before, I said that was really brave, because I knew what he was going through, in order to do it.

Stephen Matini: If someone is not that courageous, or let's say wants to be a little bit more courageous, where do you draw the line between, what I'm thinking of doing is courageous or just being stupid?

Cindy Pury: That is such a good question. It is a fine line between brave and stupid.

The place where I saw that drawn most clearly was a story about this family out, I think in California or they were at least driving in California. They were driving along one of the twisty roads by the coast and the little kid threw a teddy bear out of the window and it fell down a cliff.

And so they stop the car, one of the parents gets out of the car and goes down the cliff to try to get the teddy bear. That parent gets stuck. The second parent then, leaving the child alone in the car, goes down the cliff to try to rescue the other parent and also to try to rescue the bear. They're both stuck and then rescue had to come out and helicopter got them and the family went on their way.

Had it been the case that the first parent had rescued the teddy bear, this would just have turned into a story about how much mommy and daddy loved you.

It's always going to come down to someone's personal values and their personal values are funneled through their societal values, but the risk also matters a lot. So is this a risk that you are taking just for you, or are you taking this risk for other people?

So, the second parent who got out of the car leaving the child alone should have thought it's not that smart to leave a child in the car by themselves, because this was a kid that was young enough to have a teddy bear and a tantrum, that also matters.

I had an interesting conversation once with a student who was a police officer and he said that for him confronting someone who may be unhinged with a weapon is a lot less dangerous than it is for me. And I'd say I'd have to agree with him.

So the question is, is it less courageous for him to do that than it would be for me? In a way, yes, but also he signed up for this career that required that sort of training and that sort of regular confrontation.

But definitely people are inspired by reading about what other people have done and seeing what other people have done and being told the stories of what other people have done. And a motivating sort of thing is when you see someone, especially someone who's similar to yourself or believing in a similar cause or ideally both of those things, if you are reflecting on something they did that was courageous, much like your friend, you're more likely to be inspired to go, I can do this too.

Stephen Matini: Just that based on anything we talked, courage is not a clean cut.

Cindy Pury: Absolutely not. It's wickedly hard to measure because either you end up with scales that simply ask you how courageous you are and how much you stand up to fear and you don't let fear or risks stand in your way, or you end up with scales that have what in psychology we call double barrelled items, where you have to be willing to do this for that, that requires two sorts of things instead to be in alignment rather than just one, and so it's not as clean. So it has turned out to be a difficult thing to measure.

I don't think we're likely to find that there are people who are uniformly brave and people who are uniformly cowardly. I don't think we're going to find that. I think everyone has their own individual constellations of things that they think are really worthwhile to do. Some people are very career-focused and they will do all sorts of things for their career, for their organization, which are different things obviously.

And other people are not. Some people are very focused on personal advancement and they're willing to do things that are growing and enriching and feed their curiosity and their need to know other people aren't.

Some people really see the value in some particular kind of artistic or other personal expression. Other people don't see it as being as important to them. Likewise people feel differently about different kinds of risks that are out there.

The distribution of things that people are afraid of is not kind of random and people have different amounts of risks for different things. So for me, I do public speaking all the time. I routinely teach classes of 300 or so people. If you told me I was gonna give a speech to 300 people tomorrow, I'd be like, sure, that's fine. So it depends on the individual and the situation.

Stephen Matini: Is there any correlation between courage and honesty? Because we're talking about values ...

Cindy Pury: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people describe courageous actions as being very high on integrity, which is a component of honesty. And certainly you may need to be courageous in order to be honest about something. And the coward, the less courageous action in a situation may be to cover it up or to lie about something.

It's somewhat contextual but for most people, most of the time honesty is probably the thing that they would feel prouder of, and would be better for society if we were honest. And so, in those cases, definitely. And in studies that we've done our typical study, we ask people to describe a time they acted courageously and we get a wide variety of responses.

Some of those responses definitely involve honesty. So another response that we got commonly were people who went and got needed treatment and needed to be honest. One of the steps in that is being honest with yourself and with other people. Especially if it happened when they were younger that they needed to go get treatment for their eating disorder or whatever it was.

Stephen Matini: If I said to you anyone who's willing to fight for what he or she believes in, is courageous, would this be a fair statement?

Cindy Pury: Yeah, I think so. Would I wanna give them the accolade of courage? Would I be happy to see that they won an award for valor? No, not necessarily, depending on what they were fighting for, 'cause Sometimes people fight for things that I think are terrible, and in that case I'm not going to be calling them courageous.

I can guarantee you though that every instance that I've found of someone being called courageous in the public press, or in the semi-public weirdo space that the Internet inhabits, if they're being called courageous, the person who's calling them courageous agrees with the goal of what they're trying to pursue and agrees in some way that they are taking a risk.

Stephen Matini: You said it at the beginning of this conversation that ,your interest for courage began because you did not want just to focus on fear, you wanna focus on something that this seemed to be more positive. After all these years of your research, of your experience, what would you say that is the main reason why you are still passionate about courage?

Cindy Pury: I think it's still interesting and I find the stories very uplifting for the most part. And also I've been motivated to write any number of book chapters by a warning that I wanna give people, which is that courage can be used for very bad things. Many people who have done just atrocious things believe that they're acting courageously and they talk using the same language that people use when they talk about courage.

Silk is a famous researcher who studies terrorism and in interviews with incarcerated terrorists and the police officers who stop them, both describe their actions in very similar ways, that fit the definition of courage.

I was struck by this when the Virginia Tech shooting happened. I still remember very clearly I was on an overnight sleepover field trip with my middle daughter and I just had caught little glimpses of it like on my phone.

And I waited until she was in the bathroom taking a shower to like actually watch any of it. And he issued this creepy manifesto that was on a videotape and I was struck by listening to it how he sounded like a crazy evil version of my participants.

My participants at that time were almost all, were all college students, so they were all about his age and the way he described what he was doing, which was killing other people, sounded very much like the way my college student participants described taking an action that they thought was courageous.

And so I also feel very compelled to always put that message in there that, just because you think something's courageous doesn't mean it's not a bad thing. Just because you feel courageous doing it, doesn't always mean it's a good idea. And that doesn't necessarily mean it's stupid. I would say there's kind of the two bands, there's almost like two labels.

One of them is like stupid courage, where it's like I'm gonna run into this burning building to get a zillion TikTok followers, or I'm going to quit my job just to stick it to the man and now I'm unemployed and have no career.

Or I'm going to be brutally honest with this person who I dearly love. I'm just gonna be honest all the time with them. And that might not help our relationship actually and I might end up losing it. That sort of courage, I put it a different bin, than the things that are objectively meant to do bad.

Stephen Matini: So we can say, the end does not justify the means.

Cindy Pury: No. And if the end doesn't justify the means, then that is not a thing that we should say is courageous. But again, with the warning you might feel like you're courageous and then it turns out maybe you really weren't. It's a whole big picture. We need wisdom in order to properly evaluate these things.

Stephen Matini: We talked about different things, so many different components of courage. If there’s anything that you believe that our listeners should focus on based on anything we said, what would that be?

Cindy Pury: One of the biggest takeaways that I've gotten from doing research on courage is appreciating how unique everyone is, and recognizing the unique ways in which everyone has been courageous. I would argue everyone has been courageous.

Everyone has taken a risk that they think is worthwhile. That risk varies from person to person and what they think is worthwhile varies from person to person.

One of the things that happened I think during Covid is that we saw risks that people never considered on their job suddenly being present on their job, and the extent to which people were willing to engage in those risks for their job, which had changed, changed.

And ordinarily there's a lot of self-selection. People who are afraid of public pushback don't typically go into roles where there's not a lot of public pushback. They're not necessarily going to sign up to work for a politician.

But a lot of healthcare workers found themselves in that situation, and a lot of educators found themselves in that situation. A lot of school board members are still finding themselves in that situation where school board in the United States at least used to be a very non-controversial kind of a thing.

When Covid happened, suddenly almost everyone's job involved that, and that was a negotiation, and I think what I saw personally, and what I saw professionally was a mismatch, in how much people wanted you to pursue the goals of the organization, and what they thought your risk tolerance should be for something, and what the individual employee's risk tolerance for that was, or sense of riskiness about that was.

And that sense of riskiness depended on two things. Broadly speaking, it depended on their actual risk level. So you might be immunocompromised and you haven't told anybody that, or you might live with someone who is medically fragile and you haven't told anybody that.

And also just how much people have their own perception of what they're comfortable with. Those are somewhat separable things, but I think a lot of the misunderstandings that I saw in organizations at the time were due to that change.

So I guess from like a leadership perspective, being aware of what others in your organization, what the people you are leading find risky and find valuable, that may differ, and their picture of what that is, may be different than yours.

My other tiny little bit of leadership advice is don't be the reason why someone else needs to be courageous. If you are so intimidating that your employees need to work up courage to come and talk to you, that's problematic. But we all know that those leaders are out there.

Stephen Matini: And maybe it's their way of believing that they're being courageous in some sort of tough or strong, you know?

Cindy Pury: Absolutely. And I have definitely seen this. That's really not such a great strategy. Let them save their being courageous for other sorts of things that are more valuable to the company rather than just having to come to you.

Stephen Matini: Cindy, you taught me so much today. Thank you so much.

Cindy Pury: No problem, Stephen. This was super interesting.