Courage: Why some people act despite fear

Courage takes many forms, from Alexei Navalny’s fatal opposition to Russian corruption to everyday acts like confronting a friend who drinks too much.

Yet getting a handle on this virtue scientifically, empirically, and psychologically has not been easy.

“Because courage is so intricately tied to an action and that action has a specific context, it is very hard to measure it,” said Aakash A. Chowkase, PhD, an associate research scientist at Yale University who studies human virtues. A lot more work is also needed to understand it conceptually, he said.

There are other reasons courage is not easy to study. It is a multifaceted concept with divergent faces: social, political, personal, psychological, moral, and more. Is courage a rare act of nobility committed largely by extraordinary individuals, or is it an action that any of us can take at any time? Are actions that take place without much forethought—running into a burning building to save someone, for instance—courageous even though they are driven by impulse? Or is courage always the product of deliberate reflection and difficult decision-making that ultimately results in acts of heroism?

Answering those questions could not come at a more pivotal time, according to Robert J. Sternberg, PhD, a professor of human development at Cornell University and a main researcher in positive psychology, which includes virtues like courage.

“The world has plenty of people with high IQs,” Sternberg said. “What the world lacks, and desperately needs, are more people with the courage to do the right thing at a time when so many leaders, including those of high IQ, are scrambling to do the opposite.”

[Related: Building the courage muscle]

Lessons on the science of courage

The following prompts (organized by topic) can support high school and undergraduate educators in discussing the science of courage in the classroom.

1. Motivation and emotion
Using the concept of “approach-avoidance conflict” described in the courage research, explain how the motivational conflict model applies to a real-life courageous decision, such as whistleblowing or joining a protest. What emotions—like fear or anger—compete in this decision, and how might they influence behavior?
Reinforces: types of motivational conflicts, emotional triggers like anger, and decision-making

Cynthia Pury, PhD, a professor of psychology at Clemson University, has spent 20 years testing theories about courage. She draws on a definition of courage first proposed by Christopher R. Rate, Sternberg, and colleagues. The team posited that courage has three aspects: It is a voluntary action in pursuit of a worthwhile or noble goal that involves taking on a risk (The Journal of Positive Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2007opens in new window). That risk may or may not involve overcoming fear; research has shown that fear does not always accompany acts of courage. For example, some people say in retrospect that they weren’t aware of feeling fear when they performed an action that others deemed courageous. Common wisdom, however, holds that courage inevitably involves facing and overcoming fear: If one isn’t afraid, how could an action be considered courageous? To tackle this conundrum, Pury and Charles Starkey, PhD, an associate professor of philosophy at Clemson, came up with two dimensions of courage defined by who is performing and assessing it: accolade courage and process courage. Accolade courage is how courage looks to outside observers. Process courage, meanwhile, refers to a person’s internal state—how much fear they must overcome to take a courageous action they view as having a noble goal but a high level of risk.

Whether running into a building to save another person rates as courage depends on the perspectives of both the actor and witnesses. If the rescuer has no protective gear and realizes the physical harm, this noble action is high in both accolade and process courage (external and internal high risk). But if the rescuer is a firefighter in full gear who feels safe, competent, and protected, then the action is likely high in accolade courage but probably not in process courage (a high risk to onlookers but not to the firefighter themselves), for example.

Pury, whose work has focused largely on accolade courage, tested some of these notions in a study reported in The Journal of Positive Psychologyopens in new window (Vol. 19, No. 2, 2024). Participants—300 undergraduates and 1,254 people recruited online—were randomly assigned to read about either Caitlyn Jenner’s public gender transition in 2015 or county clerk Kim Davis’s refusal to issue same-sex marriage licenses that same year. Participants also completed a moral traditionalism scale, in which they were asked to rate how courageous, risky, and valuable they thought the action was.

In all cases, the team found that people’s assessments of courage depended mostly on the perceived value of the goal; while the amount of risk was seen as important, it was less so. Moreover, people’s sociopolitical views influenced the findings: Courage ratings depended on the extent to which participants agreed with the goals of Jenner’s or Davis’s actions, suggesting the importance of keeping personal values in mind when studying this form of courage.

Another team of researchers has taken the first steps toward understanding process courage and how it might operate psychologically. In Frontiers of Psychologyopens in new window (Vol. 15, 2024), Chowkase, Sternberg, and colleagues laid out a theory of courageous action that involves both cognitive information processing and resolving an “approach-avoidance” conflict that they and others—including Pury in her definition of process courage—posit is at the heart of people’s decision to act courageously or not.

The model focuses solely on situations that give people the opportunity to think and analyze before they act, rather than those that happen so fast that one must behave automatically. In the model, once a person faces a courage trigger—a fellow employee’s mistreatment by a superior, or seeing the opportunity to join a protest, for example—they face the dilemma of whether to approach or avoid the encounter. The quandary is “that you want to approach the situation because you want to do the right thing,” said Chowkase, “but at the same time, you’re afraid to take the action because there is a perceived risk—either to you or to someone else.” In the work scenario, that risk might be angering your boss, and in the protest scenario, it might be the threat of getting arrested.

As this larger conflict is playing out, the person is also asking themselves questions that help inform their decision—specifically whether taking a courageous action is sufficiently meaningful to warrant the risk, and whether they have enough efficacy, or personal power, to take the action. If the answer to one or both questions is no, they will likely retreat; if it is yes for both, they must still decide whether to act.

Finally, the theory maintains that people’s choices have consequences, and that the resulting experiences will influence how they act in similar situations in the future.

While Chowkase acknowledged that the theory is still at the concept stage, he noted the team plans to embark on a variety of next steps, including trying to validate the model and, if it holds up, creating measures that test different aspects of the theory. He also envisions future interventions using the model.

Most important, the model takes the view that everyone, not just a select few, has the potential to take courageous actions, he added.

“In trying to model courage, we don’t think of it as purely as a trait that some people have and some don’t, or simply as a virtue,” he said. “We think of it as a conscious, deliberate set of decisions and assessments.”

While some are proposing theories of courage, others are studying specific aspects of the virtue to better understand how it operates under different circumstances.

Matt C. Howard, PhD, an industrial and organizational psychologist at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, is examining a specific form of courage—social courage—in workplaces. Few empirical tools related to courage existed when he started researching it in 2013, so he wanted to start by creating a basic assessment measure.

To that end, he and colleagues developed the Workplace Social Courage Scale, a highly validated self-report measure that attempts to capture who is prone to take courageous actions in the workplace despite social risks, such as damaging a work relationship or looking bad in the eyes of others.

Howard has found that people reporting high levels of workplace social courage are more likely to report high levels of life satisfaction and low levels of stress, depression, and anxiety than those reporting less of this quality. These individuals also score higher on their tendency to engage in positive workplace behaviors like taking voluntary, nonrequired actions to benefit the organization. His research also shows that those scoring high in social courage are more likely to take an “approach” stance toward workplace problems—a willingness to confront challenging situations and see the benefits of such actions, versus steering clear because of fear, anxiety, and seeing the potential costs of such actions (The Journal of Positive Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 6, 2019).

Reported social courage may also harbor some down sides, Howard and others have found. For example, people scoring high in narcissism are more likely to show courage in the workplace than others, in part because their attitude is, “Hey, I’m too special to have bad things happen to me,” as Howard put it (Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2022opens in new window). Workplace interventions that promote prosocial behavior and transparency, such as team-based recognition programs, peer mentoring initiatives, and open communication policies, are potential antidotes to these more undesirable tendencies, he said.

Can anger make people more courageous? In a study reported in Emotion (Vol. 22, No. 6, 2022), Julia Sasse, PhD, a social psychologist at the Ansbach University of Applied Sciences in Germany, and colleagues examined the possible role of anger in acts of moral courage—instances in which bystanders intervene to stop actions they view as morally transgressive despite potential costs to themselves. Sasse wanted to study anger because emotions are an important understudied topic in courage research in general and because previous research has suggested that anger might play a significant role in courageous feelings and behaviors.

To test these ideas, the researchers brought 145 participants into a lab where they were told they’d be part of a study on learning and emotion. As participants waited for the study to begin, the researchers staged an event in which two members of their team quietly discussed plans to embezzle funds from the project fund. They did so in a manner subtle enough to suggest they didn’t think others would hear them, but loud enough that participants were able to catch on. Independent observers later videotaped and rated participants’ actions, facial expressions, and body language.

Participants had numerous opportunities to confront the wrongdoing, ranging from directly confronting the embezzlers to reporting the incident to the project leader. On average, participants reacted to the embezzlement with anger, reporting feeling more angry after the event than before. The researchers also found that the angrier participants felt, the more likely they were to intervene. That said, only 27% of participants did anything at all, and most chose subtle ways of intervening, like asking the “embezzlers” about their actions rather than taking the information to a superior.

This squares with other findings that moral courage is quite rare, and importantly, that anger can be a useful aid in taking courageous action, Sasse noted. “Anger may be an important source of information that provides us with the necessary boost to stand up for our moral beliefs and show courage,” she said. Given how relatively rare it is for people to choose courageous actions, it’s more important than ever that researchers keep examining the concept, in hopes that this knowledge will eventually help people exercise it more often, Chowkase added.

“Studying courage is a stepping stone to maintaining healthy societies that are just and equitable—to making sure we’re doing the right thing,” he said. “Without it, we’d all be sheep.”