The Cognitive Architecture of Courage

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So imagine this: Joe is a salesperson for a paper company. He has worked there for a few years and, as is true with any job, the work has its ups and downs.

Joe finds himself annoyed quite often with his co-worker Peter. Peter, who is a salesperson at the same level as Joe is, happens to be the son of the owner of the company. Joe's desk is right next to Peter's and Joe often sees Peter doing things that just seem wrong. Peter regularly is on Amazon, purchasing all kinds of things with the company credit card—joking about this with Joe with quips such as "What paper company does not need a high-end bluetooth speaker that can float?" To make it even worse, Joe, whose work history is clean as a whistle, makes a salary 10 percent less than Peter's—in spite of bringing in about 50 percent more in sales to the company each year.

On one occasion, Joe believes that Peter has gone too far. The company is operating under austere conditions and all departments are being asked to cut budgets back by 15 percent. Within days of this announcement, Joe catches Peter using the company credit card to purchase accounts on several online gambling sites—and Peter seems to do nothing but play online poker and blackjack for the next week.

This does it, Joe thinks to himself. Peter's behavior has passed any lines of decency and is clearly hurting the company in several ways. Joe spends the better part of the morning thinking about whether to blow the whistle on Peter.

Cost/Benefit Thinking When It Comes to Courageous Decisions

So here is some more context: Joe has a wife, who is a stay-at-home mom, and three kids. On one salary, Joe and his family have a hard time making ends meet each month. Further, the paper industry is famously on the decline at a global level, and Joe knows full well that he is lucky to have this job. All of these points make it into Joe's decision-making. Joe fully realizes that ratting Peter out might end up with Joe losing his job.

So what should Joe do?

Importantly, this piece is actually not about what Joe should do. Rather, the point here is to get the reader to think that courageous decision-making (such as the kind of processing that Joe is going through in the example) is a highly cognitive endeavor. In this way, courage deviates from boldness in important ways.

The Cognitive Architecture of Courage

In a recent piece on the cognitive decision-making that underlies courage, leaders from the business consultancy firm Be Courageous (including Kyle Hermans and Shannon Geher) make the case that courageous actions must follow from a variety of cognitive, planned-out decisions.

So, while past research on courage has found that true, game-changing courage requires some level of risk-propensity (see Garcia et al., 2023), a fully risky approach to courageous decision-making is really not optimal for various reasons. Imagine if, given our example, Joe blew the whistle on every co-worker each time he observed even the most minimal transgressions (e.g., someone taking a pen home from work). Joe would quickly find himself highly unpopular to the point that he'd have a hard time making true change that is supported by others when such change is needed. Courage comes with risks. Smart courage includes risk analysis that carefully examines both the costs and benefits of potential acts.

Toward this end, the folks at Be Courageous suggest a specific approach to courageous decision-making that takes broader contexts into account. These are as follows:

1. Solve from the future. Bold actions that do not take potential future outcomes into account hardly represent effective courage.
2. Use an ecology mindset. All individuals exist in contexts that exist within broader contexts (see Bronfenbrenner, 1979). An employee might exist in an office that includes various co-workers. But that person also likely has a family context that surrounds them. And that person probably has a broader community (such as the folks in one's town) that they exist in. And that smaller community exists within a larger community. And so forth. Thinking about outcomes across these various ecologies of one's world is crucial to making effective and courageous decisions.
3. Check your emotions. As several models in the behavioral sciences have documented (see Montgomery & Ritchey, 2010), the emotion system and the cognitive system often run separately from one another. Sometimes, emotions are our psychological friends, guiding us toward actions that will benefit us, while at other times, our emotions act as our worst enemies, leading us to take often unbridled actions that end up hurting us in the end. When it comes to effective, courageous decision-making, considering how much one's emotional system may be driving one's thinking is critical.
4. Don't rush it. The older I get, the more I see the value of "sleeping" on decisions. Given how deeply emotions can make it into one's decision-making processes, it is important to take time before making important decisions that might have dramatic consequences. Such time allows one's emotion system to cool down so that you can think about the consequences of your actions in a broader emotional context.
5. Consider carefully your own "psychological safety." The world needs courageous people and courageous actions for sure. But often, actions that might seem courageous on the surface have the potential to totally backfire and to ultimately hurt oneself along the way. Before taking courageous-seeming action, think carefully about how such action might affect your own psychological safety.

Bottom Line

As I've written previously, courage is one of those traits that is universally valued. That said, it is important, from a behavioral science perspective, to understand what courage truly is. While my research team has found that risk-propensity is, in fact, an important element of courage (see Garcia et al., 2023), it turns out that there is more to the story.

As Hermans and Geher tell us, courage actually includes much in the way of cognitive, in addition to emotional, facets. Courageous action that does not include effective consideration of consequences may actually turn out to be more foolish than courageous.

The line between courage and recklessness can be a fine one. A major distinction between these two states may well be seen in terms of differences in well-planned cognitive decision-making versus all-out reckless behavior. They are not one and the same.