The Shape of a Moral Hero

What shapes a moral hero? And how does someone choose to save people that others turn away? 

Research on those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust shows that many exhibited a streak of independence from an early age.  

A second characteristic of such heroes and heroines, as the psychologist Philip Zimbardo writes, is “that the very same situations that inflame the hostile imagination in some people, making them villains, can also instill the heroic imagination in other people, prompting them to perform heroic deeds.”  

David Wolpe writing in the New York Times