You 2.0: Cultivating Courage

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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. Look at that. Look at that. I wanna go home. 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. The moral of the story is clear. The lion always had the capacity to be brave. He just didn't know it. The Wizard of Oz is a work of fiction. But every day, we see the cowardly lion's dilemma in tales 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. 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. This week on Hidden Brain and in a companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus, how to discover our inner lion. 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. Thank you, Shankar. It's a pleasure to be here today. Ranjay, you've looked into the story of a high school language teacher in China. On the afternoon of 05/12/2008, he was in his classroom conducting a lesson. Tell me who he was and what happened next. Fan Meizong was a teacher, and he was in the middle of his class talking about an esoteric eighteenth 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 when now everything was shaking. And Phan 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. Wow. 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 …