Buhur. Re\. d Thuup~. Vol 19. pp. 419 to 424. 1981 000~-7967~X1/050419-06S02.

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TOWARDS AN EMPIRICAL DEFINITION

OF COURAGE

PHILIP D. EVANSand DAVID G. WHITE

Departmentof Psychology,North East London Polytechnic.Abbey Lane, London El5 2RP. U.K.-

(ReceiliPd 17 January 1981)

Summary-Receivingattribution of courageor bravery is important to most of us. Three possible

modes of attribution are outlined, two of which are taken to be naive (i.e.. attributing bravery if
one is afraid oneself or identifying bravery with fearlessness), only one is taken as sophisticated
i.e., bravery as a result of approach by a fearful person. Inferences about the use of these modes
are made on the basis of correlational patterns in the data of adolescent subjects who watched
snake-handling by a filmed actor/actress. Subjects rated themselves for hypothetical fear (if they
had had to handle the snake): in addition they rated the handler on fear or bravery. Results
suggested an increasing use of the sophisticated mode of attribution with increasing age. Clear
use of the sophisticated mode however was not demonstrated in the case of attributing to female
actresses. Possible interpretations of this sex of attributee effect are taken up in the Discussion.

INTRODUCTION
The concept of courage (or bravery)* has recently entered the psychological literature as
a ‘mirroring’ concept to that of fear. Writers such as Rachman (1978) and Evans (1981)
have indicated that in many situations where fear is being assessed, it is equally possible,
and in many ways more salient, to point out that courage is being assessed. Examples of
such situations would be the clinical assessment of an agoraphobic patient in a reality-
testing framework-a lone walk to and from a therapist across Trafalgar Square; in the
laboratory study of human fear, an example would be the behaviour of a snake-phobic
female student who is asked to approach a live snake as part of a classic Behavioural
Avoidance Test (Lang and Lazovik, 1963).
In the interpretation of such behaviour as courageous or brave, there lies an implicit a
priori as opposed to empirical definition of courage, as the approaching of an object or
situation by a person who nevertheless fears that object or situation. Such a tight defini-
tion excludes the possibility that courage could be attributed to a person who is not in
fact afraid. Yet, from casual observation, it would appear that people do sometimes
attribute courage in a different way, on the basis not of their judgement of another’s fear,
but on the basis of their own fear. For example, we may watch a film of a climber
ascending the north face of the Eiger and in response to our own vicarious feelings of
fright, we may well comment on how brave we feel the climber is, having little regard for
the possible absence of fear shown by the climber himself. Yet another possible mode of
attribution would be to utilize the person’s fear level, rather than one’s own, but to
identify fearless behaviour with bravery and signs of fear with less bravery. This would
amount to a rather simplistic ‘Siegfried’ notion of bravery, after Wagner’s hero who
“knew no fear”.
In seeking an empirical definition of courage we aim to find out something of what
that concept actually means to people. Such knowledge would have practical as well as
heuristic implications since ‘courage’ is a quality we may attribute to ourselves or to
others with important consequences. To have courage attributed to us by ourselves or by
others is probably an important reinforcing event for most people. ‘Courage’ can be
attributed not only with respect to the occasional and isolated act of rescue or self-

* Courage and bravery are synonyms (see Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus of Psychological Index
Terms); in the context of this paper the terms are used interchangeably. The simple adjective ‘brave’ as opposed
to ‘courageous’ was used as we believed it more appropriate considering subjects‘ age and background.

419
420 PHILIP D. EVANS and DAVID G. WHITE

sacrifice, but also on the basis of everyday acts such as speaking one’s mind etc. Conse-
quently, if we are to understand such reinforcing and motivating procedures we need to
know how the concept of courage is generally understood and indeed whether the
concept has different meanings for individuals at different developmental stages. Hence in
the study to be reported, our use of subjects covering a range of adolescence was con-
sidered potentially informative.
An empirical definition of courage probably involves three important attributional
dimensions: (a) the fear level of the person making the attribution; (b) the perceived fear
level of the attributee; and (c) salient features of the situation e.g., objective risk involved
and so on. In addition to these superordinate factors, which we might assume are always
important, we could surmise that in specific instances other subordinate factors might be
relevant. In this study a fear of snakes is investigated. This is one of the common fears
which reliably shows a massive sex difference (Bamber. 1979). Consequently, the sex of
attributor and sex of attributee are factors which need to be considered (Evans and
White, 1980).
As work on social cognition demonstrates (e.g., Brooks-Gunn and Lewis, 1978) indi-
viduals’ judgements about psychological attributes show developmental changes. Specifi-
cally, in making attributions about others, young children are influenced more by observ-
able physical events than by any inferences they may make about the psychological
characteristics of others. As they get older inferred psychological characteristics are used
increasingly in conjunction with external physical evidence. However, initially judge-
ments are made on the basis of a few psychological characteristics which are viewed as
operating in a simple and consistent manner. It is only when middle adolescence is
reached that other people are being recognized as inconsistent and psychologically
complex (Livesley and Bromley, 1973). Children also have a tendency to make egocentri-
tally based judgements of others and assume that what they feel is what others feel and
to use their own reactions as a yardstick in making judgements of others (Piaget. 1932). It
has been suggested by Elkind (1967) that this egocentricity continues into adolescence.
With regard to the modes of attributing bravery outlined earlier, it seems that two of
them reflect what may be termed naive attributive style. To utilize one’s own level of fear
in making a judgement of another’s bravery is egocentric to some degree. Likewise to
identify fearless behaviour with bravery is to exaggerate the importance of external
aspects of performance and ignore inferences about the performers’ internal feelings. The
mode of attribution which relates approach of afeared situation to bravery may alone be
considered ‘sophisticated’ in relation to the developmental literature on attribution.
To the degree that the above is true, we should expect age-related trends in our results
from adolescent subjects. Use of what we shall call the sophisticated mode of attribution
should increase with age. This would mean automatically a decrease in that unsophisti-
cated mode of attribution based on an identification of fearlessness and bravery (what we
shall call the ‘Siegfried’ concept). This follows necessarily since the evidence for the one is
a positive relationship between attributed fear and attributed bravery whilst the evidence
for the other is a negative relationship between the same variables. Concerning the use of
one’s own fear as a basis for attribution of bravery (what we shall call the egocentric
concept) we make no predictions. Its use might decline with age, but anecdotally it wouid
appear to be used often enough by adult viewers of ‘daring-do’.

METHOD

Subjects
Subjects were 124 pupils recruited from an outer-London comprehensive school, and
drawn from the first, second and third years of school. There were 14 boys and 14 girfs
from the first year and 24 boys and 24 girls from each of the subsequent years. The age
range was 11-14.
 Towards an empirical definition of courage 421

Videotaped material
Each subject viewed one of eight possible videotaped sequences. Each consisted of a
young adult actor seen to approach a vivarium, remove its lid, pick up a large, harmless
but exotic snake (a royal python), handle it for some moments, put it down, and finally
replace the lid. Each sequence lasted 2 minutes, and in half the cases the actor was male
and in half the cases the actor was female. It was essential that the objectioe sources of
information for making a judgement of fear or courage i.e., the tentativeness, competence
etc. of the snake handling itself, were equivalent across the four male and four female
actors. In fact this was fully achieved by editing the same snake handling sequence into
the middle of each recording of each actor/actress approaching and removing the lid of
the vivarium. then replacing it. In the central snake-handling sequence cues for gender
were removed and only the hands and middle trunk of the handler were shown. All
actors and the real handler wore the same very distinctively striped pullover, which
provided very strong continuity between the edited sections. Before the experiment the
sequences were shown to ‘naive’ colleagues, none of whom detected either the edits or
what the edits concealed.

Procedure
Subjects were shown individually to a room, were they were shown one of the eight
sequences at random, subject only to the constraint that equal number of boys and girls
viewed each sequence. After watching the sequence subjects were given forms which
asked them certain questions about the sequence. The key questions (in order) were:
(a) How frightened did you think the person in the film was?
(b) How would you have felt about picking up the snake?
(c) How brave did you think the person in the film was?
Subjects responded to each question by ticking one of five ordered statements taken to
represent roughly equally spaced points along a scale from ‘Not at all frightened (brave)
to ‘very frightened (brave)‘. Other questions asked concerned the perceived attractiveness
and age of the actor/actress, and how fierce the snake looked. We also asked whether the
child had found watching the film at all frightening-this was mainly to provide ethical
guide-lines for future research and as expected produced virtually no acknowledgement
of any fear.
Intersubject communication is too often an ignored feature in this sort of research
(White. 1977). Within sessions this was controlled by never returning subjects to the
classroom pool.

RESULTS

Essentially. the analysis of results hinged on the correlation pattern of key variables,
and multivariate methods were indicated. Since our aim could be seen as finding and
comparing predictor variables for different groups of subjects, multiple regression was
the statistical tool selected. The ICL 1900 Statistical Analysis XDS3 package was used in
all computing of means. variances and regressions. The ‘t’ statistic quoted below for the
significance of any individual variable in a regression equation refers to the ratio of the
variable’s coefficient to the error sum of squares. All regressions were performed on
correlation matrices and coefficients provide normalized data predictions. An earlier
paper (Evans and White, 1980) dealt with the attribution of fear to the actors. Given the
correlation between self and other attributed fear reported in that paper, the importance
of multiple correlational methods of analysis, with their partialling-out procedures, can
be readily appreciated.
The dependent variable in the analysis was bravery attributed to other i.e., actor
(BRAVO). The independent variables were the fear level of the attributing subject
(FEARS). the fear level attributed to the other i.e., actor (FEARO), the age of the subject
(AGESJ) and two dichotomous variables: sex of subject (SEXSJ) and sex of other i.e.,
actor (SEXOT).
422 PHILIP D. EVANSand DAVIDG. WHITE

Two of these came out as significant independent variables: FEARS and SEXSJ.
Together they accounted for over a quarter of the total variance (r = 0.51), although
their strong intercorreIation meant that the multiple correiation was only a little larger
than if only FEARS had been in the set. The underlying tendencies were that higher fear
subjects attribute more bravery (P < 0.001) and that girls are more generous in their
attributions of bravery than boys, and not just because they are more fearful (P < 0.05).
It appeared that over all our subjects were using the egocentric concept of bravery, in
which a person is brave if quite simply they are doing something which would frighten
the attributor. However it was more than possible that this over all analysis obscured
real differences which would appear when more detailed analyses were carried out. In
particufar, inspection of the correlation matrices suggested the possible importance here
of the sex of the actor.
A regression was first carried out on the data from al1 subjects who had been exposed
to a male actor. The independent variables remained as before with the obvious omission
of SEXOT. Quite surprisingly FEAR0 now appeared as a very significant (P < 0.001)
independent variable (see Table 1). Together with SEXSJ (P c O.OOl),a multiple corre-
lation of 0.60 is obtained, which accounts for a lot more of the variance than SEXSJ
alone fr = 0.47). The partial correlation for FEARS is now only 0.16 and its associated ‘t’
value is therefore not significant. With respect to attributing bravery to males, then, the
sophisticated mode of attribution appears to be clearly dominant.
A regression was then carried out on the data from all subjects who had been exposed
to a female actor. Only FEARS appeared as a significant (P < 0.001) independent vari-
able (see Table 1). Other than FEARS the highest partial correlation comes from
FEARO, but in a negative direction ( - 0.15) (this of course explains why the very signifi-
cant trend in the analysis of male actor data was completely submerged in the initial
pooled analysis). The other point of note in this anafysis is that SEXSJ has vanished as a
factor-indeed the partial correlation is effectively zero. Thus our initial statement that
girls are more generous in their ratings of bravery than boys (or that boys are meaner)
must be modified to apply only if the actor is male. It would appear that boys temper
their meanness if the actor is female. Routine analyses of boys and girls data taken
separately brought no new surprises and served merely to confirm that partial corre-
lations involving FEARS and FEAR0 were very comparable across boys and girls. A
marginaIly significant SEXOT effect in the analysis of boys’ data elaborated the tendency
already mentioned: not only are boys’ ratings of the maie actor‘s bravery less than the
equivalent girls’ ratings, they are less than boys’ own ratings of female actors.
Further analysis dealt with the question of whether the predicted age changes in the
basis of attribution occurred. Of interest, were the correlations (for each combination of
the levels of SEXSJ, SEXOT and AGESJ) between FEAR0 and BRAVO, with FEARS

Table 1. The main findings from the three multiple regressions

inde~ndent
Data Dependent variables Partiai Multiple
matrix variable in the set corr. f corr.

FEARS 0.39 4.72ff

All BRAVO 123 0.51
data SEXSJ - 0.20 2.21*

Male FEAR0 0.42 3.58**

actor BRAVO 61 0.60
data SEXSJ - 0.53 4x4**
only

Female FEARS 0.58 5.45** 0.58

actor BRAVO 61
data (not in set)
only FEAR0 (-0.15) (1.16)

+P < 0.05: ** P c 0.001.

 Towards an empirical definition of courage 423

Table 2. Partial product-moment coefficients for attributed fear and attributed bravery
(self-fear constant) at each level of sex of actor, age and sex of subject

11-12 yrs 12-13 yrs 13-14 yrs

Male actor
Male subjects 0.02 0.70 0.53
Male actor
Female subjects -0.25 0.41 0.70
Female actor
Male subjects -0.58 -0.39 0.01
Female actor
Female subjects - 0.27 0.07 0.12

partialled out. The relevant partial coefficents are given in Table 2. The first thing we
notice confirms what has already been revealed by multiple regression, namely that the
more sophisticated mode of attribution is associated with the male actors but not the
female. We also see a clear tendency as predicted for the more sophisticated mode to be,
associated with older children. Indeed there is a tendency for interactions involving
yo mger children or female actresses to yield quite strong negative values. This is a point
tal en up in the discussion. Page’s nonparametric trend test for related samples shows
that the tendency for more positive correlation coefficients between FEAR0 and
BRAVO to be achieved as age increases is significant (t = 55; P < 0.01).
Lastly routine inspection of a similar table of partial correlation coefficients between
FEARS and BRAVO revealed a random pattern with respect to age and no further
analysis was undertaken.

DISCUSSION
The developmental pattern of the results broadly confirmed our expectations. Corre-
lation between attributed fear and attributed bravery (with self-fear partialled out) moved
decisively from negativity to positivity with increasing age. If what we have called a
‘Siegfried’ concept of bravery (fearless = brave) is gradually being replaced by what we
have called a ‘sophisticated’ concept (fearful = brave), then this is reflected in our results,
regardless of sex of attributor and sex of attributee.
With respect to what we have called the egocentric concept of courage (“me fearful-
you brave”) there was evidence that this was used quite widely, but there was no evidence
that its use reliably falls off with increasing age. Thus we can probably assume that this
concept of bravery probably continues to coexist with the sophisticated concept, regard-
less of age throughout adolescence and possibly beyond.
One of the most robust but unexpected findings concerned the different patterns of
attribution to male and female attributees, found in the data as a whole and cutting
across age trends. This means that a clear demonstration of a positive, independent and
substantive relationship between attributed fear and attributed bravery (sophisticated
mode) was only achieved in the data pertaining to male attributees. Likewise the re-
lationship between subjects’ own fear and attributed bravery (egocentric mode) was only
substantially present in the data pertaining to female attributees. Moreover, in the case of
the data pertaining to female attributees, there was a distinct, if insignificant, tendency for
attributed fear to be negatively related to attributed bravery (‘Siegfried’ mode).
If one accepts that the data from subjects exposed to male actors is broadly as
expected, what can we make of the female actor data? Why is it that, in judging females,
our subjects showed no sign of utilizing a concept of bravery based on our ‘sophisticated’
notion? Why, if anything, was the opposite true, and females were possibly being judged
brave only in proportion to their being judged fearless? An attempted answer can be no
more than posr-hoc speculation. However, one might wish to argue along the following
lines. Let us assume that, given the usual sex difference in fear of snakes, snake-handling
424 PHILIP D. EVANSand DAVID G. WHITE

is perceived as a usually male sphere of action. Snake-handling by females would then be

seen as particularly brave. Our data partly confirm this. Whilst girls, in absolute terms,
tended to see all handlers as brave, and thus made no distinction between the sexes of
handfer, boys did indeed tend to attribute more bravery to females than to males. Why,
then, were all our subjects so relatively mean-minded when (by inference) they took
perception of fear to be a cue for devaluing that bravery’? It is just possible that our result
has wider connotations, namely that when a female competes in a maie preserve, as long
as she performs well, she does not suffer negative discrimination (from other females?)
and may even receive positive discrimination (from other males?). However this advan-
tage is not bought for nothing, since the manifestation of the tiniest chink in the armour
of competence invites an unequal devaluation compared with her male counterpart.
Short of such speculation, we can say that our subjects, for one reason or another, do
not seem to have learned to use a ‘sophisticated concept of courage with respect to
females in this kind of situation. If our results prove generalizabie, they are not without
importance. What of the agoraphobic woman, who struggles towards the town centre
despite her fear? is it likely to be true, in the general scheme of things, that she will not
receive reinforcement in the form of bravery points for conquering her own fear except
perhaps by the deliberate act of a therapist. In fact we would expect that her only likely
source of reinforcement is someone who is as terrified as herself. Perhaps there are
particularly female notions of bravery based on chronic endurance of suffering, illness.
and childbirth, which we have not touched on here. Certainly Lewin f 1979) in a study of
immigrant women in the U.S.A. uses the term marianismo (aspiring to the status of the
Virgin Mary) to cover such a female notion, in direct comparison with the male notion of
machismo. If this is the case then perhaps our agoraphobic patient had better stick with
her illness, since it probably earns her more bravery points-or do we mean ‘secondary
gain’ (Meyer and Chesser, 1970)?
What is certainly clear from our results is that an empirical definition of courage-
following Wittgenstein’s dictum to ask for the meaning by asking for the use-is a good
deal more complicated than an a priori one, however rational. As we pointed out earlier,
having something like courage attributed to us on the basis of even everyday actions is
important for most of us. That is also the way in which we learn to attribute it to
ourselves and therefore presumably learn to value ourselves. For this reason. if for no
other, this subject warrants study.

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