The Virtue of Courage: Acting on Your Convictions

The virtue of courage: holding to what’s right when it’s hard

Acting on your own convictions despite the risk, without that meaning an absence of fear: this willingness to hold to them anyway is what Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman called courage in their 2004 classification of positive psychology.

People who lead with this virtue don’t necessarily seek out risk: what sets them apart is that they don’t systematically avoid what’s hard when they believe it’s the right thing to do.

The four strengths that make it up

• Bravery: acting voluntarily, even when afraid, in a risky situation, in pursuit of something good for yourself or for others. It isn’t limited to physical risk.
• Persistence: voluntarily continuing goal-directed behavior despite obstacles, until you finish what you started.
• Integrity: being consistent in what you think, say, and do, even when that consistency carries a social cost. It includes honesty but goes further: it also means taking responsibility for your own feelings and behavior as they are.
• Vitality: the subjective experience of feeling alive and full of energy, tied both to the body and to mood. People who have it live life as an adventure, not a chore.

How to recognize it

• They say what they think even when it’s unpopular, when they believe it matters.
• They persist through obstacles instead of dropping a project at the first serious difficulty.
• They face problems directly, instead of systematically postponing or avoiding them.
• They’re consistent in public and in private: what they claim to stand for in a conversation is, by and large, what they do when no one is watching.

What psychology means by courage

Courage is hard to study in a lab, so much of the research has started by asking what people mean by it.

• What makes an act look brave. Christopher Rate, Jennifer Clarke, Douglas Lindsay, and Robert Sternberg (2007) studied implicit theories of courage, the ideas people use to judge whether an act is courageous. Their studies point to a definition with several ingredients: a voluntary, intentional act, taken after deliberation, that involves a real and substantial risk to the person doing it, that pursues a worthy end, and that is carried out despite feeling fear. What doesn’t appear on that list is the absence of fear, or risk for its own sake.
• General courage and personal courage. Cynthia Pury, Robin Kowalski, and Jana Spearman (2007) distinguished between the courage anyone would recognize as such (for example, entering a burning building to pull someone out) and personal courage, the kind found in acts that are brave only for the person doing them because they touch that person’s specific fears. For someone very shy, speaking up in a large meeting can take more courage than it takes someone else to address a hundred people. In their data, people reported feeling more fear in situations of personal courage and more confidence in those of general courage.
• Persistence and “grit.” Angela Duckworth and her team (2007) popularized the concept of grit, perseverance and passion for long-term goals, and found that it predicted achievements such as cadets staying on at the West Point military academy. A later meta-analysis of 88 samples and more than 66,000 people lowered expectations: grit overlaps heavily with Big Five conscientiousness and its relationship with performance is moderate, although the facet of perseverance of effort does contribute something of its own (Credé, Tynan and Harms, 2017).

Two findings from the VIA-IS questionnaire round out the picture. Vitality was among the five strengths most closely tied to life satisfaction in Park, Peterson and Seligman’s (2004) study of 5,299 adults. And in Robert McGrath’s (2015) analyses of more than a million cases, the strengths of this virtue were split up: bravery and vitality weighed on a factor of intellectual curiosity, alongside creativity and curiosity, while persistence grouped with prudence and self-regulation in a self-control factor.

Persistence as a talent

In Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001), a popular business book, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton argue that the greatest room for growth lies in developing your own strengths, rather than in trying to turn every weakness into a strong point. From that angle, being persistent is a talent in the same sense as creativity: a pattern that can be applied productively by seeking out the contexts where seeing things through is most valuable.

The idea needs a caveat: working on strengths doesn’t mean neglecting the weaknesses that do matter for a task, and the authors themselves propose managing them (with support, by delegating, or by surrounding yourself with people who cover them) rather than ignoring them. It’s a popular-press proposal, not a research finding, but it fits Credé’s data: what pays off most in persistence is sustained effort applied to a specific goal.

Training courage, starting small

Voicing a minority opinion in a safe setting, for instance in a small, trusted meeting rather than a packed room, is often associated with training the same mechanism needed in harder situations. In Pury’s terms, it’s practicing personal courage.

Looking back afterward at the moments when you avoided something out of fear, without judging yourself for it, helps you identify your own patterns. And courage, properly understood, weighs the risk rather than ignoring it: prior deliberation is precisely one of the features that, according to Rate and his colleagues, separates courage from recklessness.

Finally, vitality works as the physical foundation for the other three strengths of this virtue: rest, movement, and looking after your health sustain the energy available to exercise them, although any significant change in health habits is best made with guidance from a professional.

Anyone who wants to compare courage with the other virtues, for example with the virtue of wisdom, can take the Character Strengths Test.

Sources

• Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford University Press.
• Rate, C. R., Clarke, J. A., Lindsay, D. R. and Sternberg, R. J. (2007). Implicit theories of courage. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2(2), 80-98. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760701228755
• Pury, C. L. S., Kowalski, R. M. and Spearman, J. (2007). Distinctions between general and personal courage. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2(2), 99-114. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760701237962
• Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D. and Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087-1101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087
• Credé, M., Tynan, M. C. and Harms, P. D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492-511. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000102
• Park, N., Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Strengths of character and well-being. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23(5), 603-619. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.23.5.603.50748
• McGrath, R. E. (2015). Integrating psychological and cultural perspectives on virtue: The hierarchical structure of character strengths. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 10(5), 407-424. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2014.994222
• Buckingham, M. and Clifton, D. O. (2001). Now, Discover Your Strengths. Free Press.