Speaking of Psychology - Courage is taking a worthwhile risk, with Cynthia Pury, PhD

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

When we think of courage, we often picture dramatic, high-stakes moments, but courage comes into play not only in extraordinary situations but also in everyday life. Cynthia Pury, PhD, talks about physical, moral and psychological courage; whether courage necessarily involves overcoming fear; how our cultural and social viewpoints shape what we see as courage; and whether it’s possible to practice bravery and become more courageous. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. When you picture someone demonstrating courage, what do you see? A firefighter running into a burning building to save a child? A protester risking her safety to stand up to injustice? Or a middle schooler swallowing his stage fright to try out for a school play? When we think of courage, we often envision dramatic high-stakes moments, but courage comes into play not only in extraordinary situations, but in everyday life.

Today we're going to talk to a psychologist about what it means to act courageously. What do all courageous actions physical, moral, and psychological have in common? Does courage have to involve overcoming fear? Is courage a personality trait, a state of mind, or behavior anyone can choose in the moment? How do our cultural and social viewpoints shape what we see as courage? And is it possible to practice bravery and become more courageous? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life.

I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Cynthia Pury, a professor of psychology at Clemson University. She studies how and why people act courageously and what we think about other people's courage. Her research points to the importance of considering both situational and individual differences to understand how courage works in organizations, in the performing arts, in healthcare, and in interpersonal and civic contexts. She has published dozens of peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters and was co-editor of the APA book, The Psychology of Courage, Modern Research on An Ancient Virtue.

Dr. Purdy, thank you for joining me today. Hi, Kim. Thank you so much for asking me to be here today. I'm excited to talk to your listeners about courage and how it might fit in with their lives. All right, well, let's do that. I want to ask you, since you've been studying courage for almost 20 years, how do you define courage and has your view of what constitutes courage changed over the years? The definition of courage is actually still being debated among psychologists. My lab and I define courage as taking a worthwhile risk.

And this definition has several important parts to it. So first of all, it's taking something. you are actually choosing to do the thing. It is a risk. So there is something that might not go well for you should you choose to do this. And it's for a worthwhile or valuable reason. This definition has evolved for me over the years in two ways. So first off, when I started studying courage about 20 years ago,

the predominant definition was a definition that comes out of clinical psychology, where courage is not letting fear stop you, which sounds appealing, except it's got a couple of downsides to it. First of all, it resulted in some weirdness in the literature where folks who had gotten awards for bravery, there were some decorated bomb disposal operators, for example, the bomb squad who were active combating the IRA in the 1970s. They were hooked up to machines in the lab, and they looked less fearful than people who were not decorated bomb disposal operators. And so the kind of unsatisfying conclusion is that these people aren't courageous because they don't have as much fear to stand up to. And I thought that just seems backwards.

And additionally, when you read things that people say or you talk to people about a time they were courageous, a lot of times they do mention fear. That happens in about 75 percent or so of folks who tell me about a time they acted courageously. But some of those times, the fear that the person's reporting is not necessarily fear of harm to themselves. It's fear of not getting the thing that they're trying to get. So if your child runs into the street, I would presume you're terrified. But you're not terrified for you.

You're going to be terrified about what's going to happen to your child. in other cases, people don't even experience the fear. They know it's risky, but they don't even think about the fear because they're busy thinking about the thing they want to accomplish, or even in some cases, because it's just not a thing that's particularly relevant for them as fear. And so it makes sense. The sort of first step I took was to kind of take a look at what happens before the fear. Like, what is it that everything that people are afraid of has in common, but also these other

actions? and that would be risk. And so we know from the psychology of emotion that fear is a natural, typical human response to risk, but it's not the only response. The other big change that I have made in my thinking about fear over the years is the absolute inclusion and necessity of thinking about why the person might be taking this action. So if you imagine, for example, two people who are in the burn unit and they've been hurt badly in a housefire, because it's a thought experiment, we can even specify that they were even equally afraid when they ran into the house fire because they did choose to run in. The first person ran into the house fire to save a baby. The second person ran into the

housefire to make a really awesome TikTok video surrounded by flames. We're not going to give that second person an award for bravery. We're probably going to give them a psych consult. That's not what we mean by courage. And in my participant's responses, they've almost always talked about things that are deeply meaningful and important to them. I think the reason why the clinical definition, definition exists is because within a clinical context, why is someone coming in? They're not usually coming in because of risk. They're more likely to be coming in because they feel afraid of something that is irrational to be afraid of. They're also not likely to be told or encouraged or even slightly supported by their therapist in taking what most folks would deem a stupid action. So if I come in

for therapy and I say, hey, Doc, I am really stressed and I'm really afraid, I would like to sit in the center lane of traffic, but I can't get myself to do it. You would not be a good therapist if you encourage the person to do that. You would probably lose your license. And so within the context of psychotherapy, that's what courage typically looks like. But in the context of other situations, sort of a whole life situation, it's more general than that. Although I suspect our listeners think they understand what constitutes courage, isn't it the case that we actually disagree quite a bit on this point? For instance, one of the examples I've seen a lot in researching this talk is that some people think undergoing gender transition.

is a courageous act while other people don't share that view or some people think that, say, harming or killing a doctor who performs abortions is courageous. Are there actions that are objectively courageous? I wouldn't say that they are objectively courageous because I'm not sure I want to use that term. But in our research, we study courage both as a process. So how do people decide to and get themselves to take an action, but also as an accolade. So what is that we call courageous in both others and in ourselves. For someone to call something courageous, they are implicitly saying, I can see how this is a threat for you, and I see this as valuable. And so if we think back to our patients in the hospital, we can add a third and maybe even a

fourth bed for the patients who were burned in the house fire. If third patient ran in to save a pet, The amount of courage you think that person has is likely dependent on how much you value pets and see them as family members versus how much you see them as sort of indoor livestock. You can take it even a step further because I suspect most of your listeners picture pet and you picture your cat, you picture your dog, you picture your bird. But what if you pictured your ant farm? Would it be courageous to run back into the house to save an ant farm? What about running back into the burning house to save your favorite potted plant? You can come up with all sorts of different scenarios here, but when we have actually asked people about the courage of specific publicly occurring events, most notably for one of our studies,

Caitlin Jenner, when she first came out as transgender, and Kim Davis, when she first was in the news for not issuing same-gender, marriage licenses. And we got exactly the results that I think we would all expect that people who endorse very traditional heteronormative values say that Kim Davis was courageous and Caitlin Jenner was not. And it flips for people who do not have those, their values are different. Let's shift for a moment and ask about the different types of courage. So what are the differences among physical courage, moral courage, and personal courage, and how are they similar? Let's start with personal courage first. So for me, in my research and research that I've jointly done with Charlie Starkey, who's a philosopher here at Clemson, personal courage happens when

people do something that is risky for them, but not necessarily risky for others. It might also be, and we don't have as much evidence on this, that they do something that is meaningful for them, but not necessarily others. So for example, someone who traps and kills a spider, even though they're afraid of spiders, that might be courageous for them, but it might not be courageous for others. And so we would call that action high in personal courage. Other kinds of courageous actions are actions for which everyone can see that it's a risk, and quite frankly, everyone can see that it's of enormous value. So I think this is why firefighters are kind of almost at the pinnacle of courage in most places in terms of accolade courage from other folks,

because we all understand that fire is very dangerous, and we all get that saving people from fire is a good thing. There's not really a pro-fire contingency out there that's saying, oh, no, this is wrong. You should just let the houses burn. For other kinds of courage that are out there in the literature, and by literature, I mean like ancient, ancient literature going back to the ancient Greeks and probably before, there's a split, a natural split between physical courage and moral courage. And then there's a little bit of a later addition of psychological courage and vital courage and business courage and a bunch of different little flavors. Where these seem to come from is that the natural landscape of goals and risks don't pair out randomly.

If I'm going to save someone from immediate physical danger, I probably need to face that immediate physical danger myself. Most kinds of physical courage that people report are that kind of courage. If I am going to stand up to other people to do the right thing, I am taking a very particular kind of social risk that they're going to ostracize me. And that is moral courage in most cases. There's not a perfect overlap, though, between all cases of courage and these different kinds of courage. So in really extreme examples, they blend in some interesting kind of ways. Civil rights icons faced tons of physical risks and financial risks and social risks in order to stand up for what's right. And so it's not really possible.

Like, it has the risk of physical courage, but yet it's actually moral courage, sort of at its core in terms of what people are trying to achieve. For other instances, we collected data from enlisted army personnel who were undergoing mental health treatment while they were in active duty. And we found that these personnel talked about the goal of wanting to get better, which is often associated with psychological courage. That was their main goal. But they talked a lot about social risks in getting better,

in addition to talking about the discomfort that's normally associated with psychological courage and the courage to get treatment. And so that's another case. We call those cases blended courage. Another example of it that may have occurred for your readers could actually be a case where you save someone from physical danger by taking a social risk. If you've ever taken the keys away

from a very drunk friend to prevent them from driving and that drunk friend is really mad at you, that would be a good example of blended courage. We're going to take a short break. When we return, I'll talk to Dr. Puri about whether it's possible to learn to be more courageous and how to practice courage.

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So is courage, in your view, a character or personality trait and are some people just innately more courageous than others, or is it some kind of behavior that anybody can choose in the moment? I think it's sort of a blend of both. I think that our personality traits, our attitudes, and our identities, tell us what's important to us and tell us what we're afraid of. Research in anxiety disorders and in fear in general shows that it's very multifacifacisting. it. So there's a whole bunch of different phobias in the DSM, for example, that your readers may very well be familiar with. It's not the case that people who are afraid of dogs are also necessarily afraid of public speaking, for example. They're different. And that's going to hold true

in courage as well. So I talk all the time this morning. I gave a lecture to 300,000. I gave a lecture to 320 undergraduates right before I came to my office to talk to you. I like public speaking. It's one of my favorite things. If you asked me to give a talk tomorrow for another 300 people about something, as long as I know something about it, I'd be excited and I wouldn't care and I would not be afraid at all. But I am afraid of heights. And if you asked me to change the light bulb on top of the stage, oh no, I'm not going to do that. I'd have to have a very good reason to get up there and change that light bulb. But someone who's higher in public speaking fear and lower in fear of heights, it may not be a thing at all. And so that's going to be very individualized.

The other thing that's individualized is, of course, what you think is worth pursuing for you. And I think this individual difference in the kinds of specific actions and the kinds of specific goals that people have is one of the things that makes humans rich and common. and interesting and infinitely fun to be around. It also means that something that's a very worthwhile risk for me might not be a worthwhile risk for you, either because the risk level is higher or you just don't value the thing as much as I do. So I think that there's personality traits and there's longstanding individual differences that play into what people will do. It also obviously plays into what they think is courageous in others or in themselves if they're

looking at it later on. But it also is the sort of a thing that you do sort of choose in the moment as well. So it's more complex than just it's a trait. It's not a trait. What about people who are willing to lay down their lives for something they believe in? Is that a special kind of courage? And is there a difference, say, between a hero and a martyr? I think it depends on what their motivation is. So someone who's willing to lay down their life for a cause they really believe in, it's really likely that they really believe in that cause. The extent to which other people will find that courageous is going to depend on whether they think that cause is wonderful or in many cases that that cause is terrible. We've done research looking at published reports like manifesto type

things and folks who have done some genuinely terrible things talk about the genuinely terrible things that they want to do in terms of courage in terms of they know they're taking a risk they know this is very likely to end badly for them they're very committed to doing this what most people reading it would see is a very heinous thing uh silk who is a sociologist has done some some work with terrorists and with the police forces that have been opposing them and find they both talk about their experiences during the Irish troubles the same using that language of courage. It honestly goes back to a quote that I remember from my teenage years from Ronald Reagan that one man's freedom fighter is another's hero. Someone who has a strong desire just to be martyred,

I guess I would also be a little bit concerned that they may have other issues interested in their own self-destruction as well, which is totally outside of the realm of courage. Which kind of leads me to this question that if you do something brave for personal gain, right, which a lot of martyrs do. They think they're going to heaven. Are you therefore less courageous? Does altruism make courage more valuable? Some of the more current research and courage insists that it does need to be altruistic. I've not seen that in my own research, but that's probably because of the way I've been asking the questions. I've been asking the questions in terms of describe a ton you acted courageously. I'm interested in what people think about their own courageous behaviors and how they're describing them. some of the earliest psychological thought on courage came from Herbert Gardner Lord in 1918. He wrote an almost delightful book also called the Psychology of Courage.

We were doing kind of a nod to his book. And he starts off with a definition that's strikingly similar to our own, which is courage happens when the sentiment of fear is overcome by a more. more noble sentiment. That sounds really cool. Sentiment was like early 1900 speak for emotion also. So that sounds really cool. So I started reading this book and I thought, this is great. And then I kept reading it. And then he proceeds in a very prescriptive sort of format to tell you what are noble goals and what are more noble goals and what are more noble goals still. and the book ends with a rousing reassurance that we should not worry about the Great War that is currently raging,

because that was around the time of World War I, because Americans and the British are inherently more noble than the Germans. And that's not really a psychological approach. And my own professional stance as a psychologist is that one of the things that differentiates for, us from philosophy, which is a wonderful discipline. I work with tons of philosophers. I love philosophy. But I think one of the things that differentiates us is that we are more interested as a discipline in finding out where people are than in saying you need to conform to how we think the world should be. And if you're one of my philosophy friends listening to this, I still love working with you. Please don't ghost me. And psychology grew out of philosophy. It did. Yeah. So can courage be taught, can someone become more courageous with practice, much like strengthening a muscle

through exercise? I definitely think courage can be taught, and I would love to have more researchers out in the field studying how this can happen. This is a direction that I'm trying to take my own work right now. One of what I think is a potentially very cool area to think about this, is in terms of people's hobbies and leisure time, there's an incredibly cool concept from Robert Stebbins in leisure studies, which is looking at serious leisure, is the kind of leisure where people have developed a strong identity around it. They develop a community about it. There's an ethos in the activity that they love. They have to persevere and get over difficulties in order to be good at the thing that they want to be good at and there's a whole career path. It's like a calling,

except it may not be seen as quite as noble as a calling, for example. But leisure activities are freely chosen. And so these are things that people find important. I genuinely think that a lot of the attempts to try to get people to be more courageous could do well if they were situated within an activity that people find inherently meaningful and valuable so that they'll do it without being paid and many times they'll even pay to do it in some sort of activity that already has a community around it and has specific trainings and so forth. And so there's a lot of different areas that are like this. There's dance, there's music, there's art, visual arts of various sorts. There's writing. In my own free time, I have been performing as a comic improviser and teaching

introduction to improv comedy for the past several years. And it is a wonderful place to see people decide that they are going to do this scary thing. Every single class, we have students who say that they're feeling anxious, they're feeling nervous, they're feeling afraid. Many classes, we will have someone walk in and the first day when we go around and like, why are you taking this class, they'll happily and loudly say, my therapist sent me, which I just think is delightful. But there are pinch points. There are places in learning how to make funny things in front of a live audience that make people particularly nervous.

And you can see the growth arc in them getting over that. And you can also see how helping them reduce their amount of anxiety, reduce the sense of fear. And it's more of the actually reducing that sense of risk rather than reducing fear. It's also reducing the actual risk and pointing it out to them and it's increasing their ability to make the right choices and have a successful outcome and meet that goal, which, by the way, this is a side note, just encourage research in general, people are much more likely to think that they were courageous when whatever it is that they did succeeded than when it failed. In our research, we've had biggest effect I've ever had in 30 years of doing psychological research is looking at the difference between someone describes

a time they acted courageously, how much did what you do make the situation better, how much did it make it worse? Biggest difference, the modal response, so the most common response for how much didn't it make it better was 10 out of 10. The modal response for how much did it make it worse was like a one or a two, which is incredibly powerful. We've followed up on that. with a bunch of other studies and the evidence of points that you want it to be successful. But people who are helping you learn whatever serious leisure kind of hobby you want to pursue are typically experts at making sure that they've laddered the steps for you to be successful in my case in improv, in other cases in painting and exhibiting your painting,

in writing, in your dance, in your musical performance, in your running, in your whatever activity it is that you're trying to pursue. What got you interested in this field? I mean, why courage out of all the things you could have studied? I started off doing research in anxiety and cognition, and that is an incredibly rich and very, very, very well-studied field. In fact, it's probably a little bit too well studied for my personal taste. There are, I think there's individual differences also in how much people like to be looking at something really new versus really, really, really getting in there and knowing about things. I'm more of the, I like new shiny things. And as I was coming up for tenure, which is this multi, multi-year process in academic institutions where you have to do the right amount.

of research in order to get tenure. I found that I was just, to use the hobby metaphor, hitting a wall and new studies would pour out of psych info about anxiety and cognition. And I would think to myself, oh, explicative, another thing to read. And it didn't bring me any joy. It was just like, oh, no. There's so much here. And I did just enough to get tenure. And after I did get tenure, I was fortunate enough to be asked to put together a seminar for students, a multidisciplinary

kind of seminar about fear and horror. And that was interesting and that was cool. And so I put together a bunch of readings and stuff. And I got to the end of the class and I just thought, this is just grim and depressing. So how can I end us on a positive note? So the first way I thought I could end us on a positive note is if the thing that you're afraid of is irrational for you to be afraid of. Like legitimately you're afraid of something that is not risky or you are vastly overestimating how risky it is. Those are phobias. There's so much research out there on that and there's so many good technologies out there. There's so many good therapies out there to treat irrational fears. So we did a little bit of reading on that. Then we moved on and I thought, okay, well,

what about if the thing that you're afraid of is actually a legitimate risk? Well, you can make the situation safer. So there's a lot of research out there about how we can make our world safer. human factors psychologists are excellent at this. And so we did some human factors reading. And then I thought, well, but what if the thing you're afraid of is a legitimate risk, and by legitimate I'm clearly throwing in my own bias, but it's a risk that you're not likely to be able to modify. And, you know, it's appropriate to be afraid of it because that's pretty dangerous.

Well, you could at least respond to it with courage. So I thought, well, I'll do, I'll throw in the basic readings on courage. I printed them all out because that's what we did back in the early 2000s. And they all fit in a small tote bag. There was no other research beyond that. And most of the definitions that were out there were all incredibly standing up to fear-based. And I thought, oh, as an instructor, I'm incredibly sad about this because what will they read? There's not much to read here.

Oh, no. But as a researcher, I thought, wow, that's super fascinating. So I'm not a particularly courageous person. I sometimes get asked that. I do think I'm I look courageous in some areas of my life where for me, whatever it is is less risky and or more valuable. But in other areas, I'm really not. But I am super, super, super curious. And I thought this was a lovely unexplored sort of an area that could make a real difference in people's lives. Which leads me to one of my favorite wrap-up questions, which is what are the big issues that you still want to find the answers to? Oh, wow. There are so many questions I want to find the answers to. First of all, I would just like more replication of the research that we've done. There's not many researchers out in the field doing research on courage. Secondly, I would like better answers to what courage looks like in a psychotherapy context, because that's where a lot of the research is taking place. And I think that's a very valuable thing and a really neat reframe for folks who go into treatment because they're anxious, that they're actually in treatment just simply being asked to be courageous. And I think that's very cool.

I would like research into how we give awards for bravery and valor and what that looks like for people years down the road. I'd like research into when is it not cool to tell somebody that they're being courageous. So because by saying that someone is courageous, you are saying this is a risk and boy, that was a valuable thing you did. if you can definitely run the risk of making someone feel badly or even making them feel unseen because they're just out there trying to live their life and you're saying you're so courageous, you're such an inspiration. Well, not necessarily. This is just me living my life. It also can be vastly inappropriate. So I said earlier about how courageous actions are successful actions, if you tried to do something and you fail, especially if you fail badly, that feels

icky and bad, especially in any of these real high stakes life or death or serious moral issue kinds of things, it feels bad to fail and be reminded of it. So being given a award for this thing that you fail to do but tried is probably not a cool thing or a good thing. Especially, like I said, I would really love to see research that can help leverage people's natural interests and things that they naturally value into ways that they can be more courageous and then ways that they can think about themselves and reframe how they think about themselves and their abilities and their interests to see themselves as having that capacity in other situations when they might need it.

Will it generalize to everything? I don't necessarily think it would. I do know that I once heard an intro to improv students say right before their showcase. This is the, I've been doing this for six weeks and now I'm going to go and make things up on stage while other people look at me. Experience. Right before that, I heard this one student say something along the lines of, I deliver babies for a living. I remind myself of that, and I know, I can do this. And I thought, well, that's really interesting. That's a bigger leap than I think we make a lot of times. Well, Dr. Purry, I want to thank you for joining me today. It's been really interesting. And I would love to see you doing your improv. Thanks so much, Kim. It was a delight to be here.

To learn more about Dr. Purry's and other researchers work on courage, go to the September issue of APA's magazine Monitor on Psychology at www.apa.org backslash monitor. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future episodes, you can email us at speakingof psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman.

Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.