Rule 7: Avoid The Heroic (Or Tragic) Exception

Not all messaging is created equal. It is highly contextual, dependent on audience, environment, medium, and messenger. For those trying to change the world – advocating for a cause greater than themselves and mobilizing others to move big ideas – these mission-driven organizers must follow a different set of rules. Each week, we will unveil our Nine Rules for Movement Messaging. We welcome you to share this with your colleagues and friends. By delivering one rule per week, it is our hope that as advocates and communicators, you can apply them to your own work one by one.

Who doesn’t love a good hero story? We have been hearing a lot of them lately. When circumstances are so dire, we seek the stories of those heroic individuals overcoming the odds. But it isn’t just times of tragedy that keep us hungry for the hero story.

The child growing up in poverty beating expectations and graduating law school. The athlete who overcame a horrific injury. The superstar teacher who goes above and beyond for their students. These are rich and captivating stories that advocates use to draw attention to their causes and illustrate the impact of their solutions. But there is a problem with summoning heroism, and it lies in our understanding of psychology.

Researchers have identified troublesome effects triggered by stories of heroism. They rest on the common cultural myth known as the “heroic elect,” or the human tendency to assign superhuman attributes to a select few, rather than understanding heroism as something all of us are capable of. When audiences are exposed to hero stories, we risk a reinforcement of two basic human tendencies. The first is to ascribe rare personal characteristics to people who do something special. We see them as beyond comparison to the rest of us. The second is known as the bystander effect, a sort of trap of inaction. This is when different people witness an emergency and all assume someone else will help.

When we tell hero stories – the poor, broken school lifted up by an extraordinary principal – we look for the conditions in the story that don’t apply to us and use them as reasons to dismiss the lesson of the story. “My neighborhood school doesn’t have a leader like that, so that wouldn’t be possible here.” By tying heroism to individuals rather than systemic circumstances, structures, and conditions, we are giving license to our audience to assign all of the outcomes to the individual actions of our hero, rather than an appreciation of the policies, investments, and procedures that made such outcomes possible.

The hero story lets government off the hook. The story of the little old lady knitting face masks make us feel good about humanity, but ignores the tragic systemic shortcomings that caused the problem in the first place.

The same is true for stories of individual tragedy. When we tell tragic stories of despair, hoping to win empathy and action from our audiences, audiences may feel a sense of sorrow and even a sense of guilt. But these reactions are not applied broadly to the systems that created the despair. Instead, audiences will assign individual blame to those experiencing the despair if the message does not apply the tragic conditions to the larger system that created those conditions.

Should we stop telling heartwarming stories about remarkable individuals? No. Keep sharing those stories. But when you do, tell a story that places the individual within a system of support. Doing so robs people of the ability to identify a “heroic elect” or a tragic exception, and instead see the larger context at play.

Watch how Health Care for All places an individual’s story of tragedy and injustice within the broader system of health care access.