Are courageous actions successful actions?

When asked to describe a courageous action they have taken personally, people overwhelmingly describe an action with a successful outcome (Pury, Kowalski, & Spearman, Citation2007). Study 1 replicated these findings in observations of other people. Fifty participants described a courageous action taken by another person and made parallel ratings to Pury et al. Participants in Study 1 also described actions with overwhelmingly successful outcomes. In Study 2, 152 participants rated otherwise identical scenarios differing in success of outcome and attribution (internal vs. external) for outcome. Successful actions were rated as more courageous than unsuccessful outcomes, although this effect was attenuated for external attributions. Thus, we suggest that successful outcome is an unarticulated part of implicit theories of courage. Keywords: couragevaluesattributionsuccessimplicit theories Acknowledgements This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense ASSURE Program under Grant No. SES-0353698. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the Department of Defense. We thank Melissa Granger, Mary Jane Huey, Jen Kentera, and Tasha McRae for their assistance with data collection and coding. Notes Note 1. Given that more participants in the Other condition described the actions of those known to them, and given that people rate friends and family as superior to others (e.g., Suls, Lemos, & Stewart, Citation2002), we ran a repeated-measures ANCOVA on the 49 participants in the Other condition who indicated how well they knew the actor, with one within-participants condition (outcome: Better or Worse) and one covariate (the extent to which the participant knew the actor). The effect of outcome remained, F(1, 47) = 179.43, p < 0.001), while knowing the actor had no significant main effect, F(1, 47) = 1.88, p = 0.18, or interaction with the effect of outcome, F(1, 47) = 0.004, p = 0.95. Additionally, a within-participants t-test on the 8 participants who reported a 0 for knowledge of actor found an identical effect to the rest of the samples, t(7) = 6.69, p < 0.001, with a mean score for making the situation better of 9.2 (SD = 0.7) and a mean score for making the situation worse of 1.3 (SD = 1.9).