> If there’s a universal law of human behavior, I think it’s this: People will believe whatever allows them to be the hero of their own story.
It's far from universal. Moral scrupulosity exists and sometimes takes disorder-level proportions — think moral OCD. The inversion of the law is true for some people.
Ozy wrote a lot about scrupulosity on their blog Thing of Things:
I think one might view scrupulosity akin to an overactive version of the mechanism you proposed, and there might be a version of the law that generalises to these cases. But it still means that the law should be stated differently: plenty of people think of themselves as unsympathetic or terrible — continuously for months.
I actually think scrupulosity and depression provide great evidence of how important this mechanism is — when you don’t have a robust self-narrative, your whole life becomes about dealing with the hole in that bucket
Thank you for this thoughtful article. In addition to the concept of wanting to be the hero of our own story, I also think about the idea of homeostasis in human psychology - namely, the unconscious tendency to seek whatever is familiar to us through our actions. I have found this to be remarkably consistent in 30yrs as a mental health professional. Your article also reminds me of Robert Wright’s book, “Why Buddhism Is True” (interesting book, terrible title). Here’s a decent overview if you’ve not read it:
Possible, but there are other ways to carve reality here that maybe reverses causation.
Scrupulosity can be viewed as an attempt to control what you can't control. If you are scrupulous about your past actions, you are trying to control what you can't: your past actions are not under influence from your current self. If you are scrupulous about the way different people view you, you are again trying to control other people's opinions (which you fundamentally can't, the most you achieve is indirect influence).
So maybe robust self-narrative is what you get once you stop trying to exert excessive control. And maybe the causality is reversed: your life becomes about dealing with various holes in the bucket first and then you lose robust self-narrative. "Just let the bucket have holes, you know".
The question of the laws of causation between these abstractions is above my pay grade — nonetheless, this is an interesting account, and feels more like the contemplative phenomenological account? Like, wholeness comes from teaching yourself to stop tanha-ing at inner dissonance...
i assume she’s using it the way I’ve seen others use it, and describing basically, the story she tells herself in her head. the story in your head is the thing that tells you that you’re a hero after all.
just make sure no matter what you can always figure out how to frame yourself as the hero. in your head.
Maybe there's a distinction between *believing* anything necessary in order to be the sympathetic protagonist of your own story, and *doing* anything necessary to salvage that image when it's constantly under threat from not being able to do the former? Scrupulosity and perfectionism are both ways to head this off at the pass through preventative counter-actions; depression is a form of retreat that at least prevents the ultimate sin of presuming to be good when we're really bad. We continue to feel and believe shitty things about ourselves, but our actions serve to minimize or head off damage that would make us even worse. (I say "we" because I speak from experience!).
I think this is a basically correct understanding that's a specific instance of a more general principle, and the more general principle makes your framing more inescapable.
Stories are a compression mechanism that humans use to understand and transmit information. They rely on archetypes, tropes, and symbols to replace the complex detail of actual life.
So, when someone tries to understand their life, decide what to do, or make predictions about it, they are doing it in the context of "the story of their life", in which they are naturally the protagonist.
This is why most advertising is a short story that invites the audience to simply drop themselves in.
This is one of the clearest and most compassionate frameworks I’ve read for understanding human behavior — including my own. And it's got a lucid humility that feels like a genuine invitation to grow.
(At risk of being tangential) Your blog made me think about a related issue that might be even more insidious than the hero mechanism, because there's no conscious defense happening. The person has lost track of what they're defending toward.
I'd call it "baseline drift" - when people unconsciously accept diminished states as normal without realizing the shift happened. Unlike your hero story framework, where people actively revise their standards to maintain their self-image, this is about genuinely losing track of what "good" looked like in the first place.
For example, someone recovering from depression might feel elated at the first positive thoughts and abandon therapy, not realizing they've mistaken "better than terrible" for "actually well." They indeed need to keep working toward full recovery, but are at risk of slipping back. After a few cycles of ups and downs, they might even start wondering if they're "bipolar"(similar to how stopping antibiotics at the first sign of relief risks creating a chronic condition; I digress). Or someone who grew up in a dysfunctional family might never strive for genuine care and warmth in their adult relationships - not because they're defending dysfunction as good, but because their childhood baseline for "normal family life" is so low they don't even know to reach for something healthier.
This shows up everywhere - workplace toxicity we gradually accept as "just how jobs are," relationship standards that slowly erode, financial stress we normalize as "adulting," declining health we write off as inevitable aging. This baseline drift might explain why the "revision" process you describe often seems so unconscious and natural to people. They're not actively deciding to redefine what "good" means - their reference point has already drifted without them noticing, making what looks like defensive rationalization feel like an obvious truth to them.
This makes the hero defense even stronger. When you point out someone's baseline has drifted, you're basically saying "your life is worse than you think." That's threatening, so they'll defend it - either denying what you're showing them or insisting their lowered standards are actually better. The baseline drift sets them up to be even more defensive when challenged. Which means we need even more of exactly what you suggest, careful attention to offering people alternative heroic narratives rather than confrontation.
I loved this and think about it often! In my random thoughts note, I had it down as "Being the villain in someone else's story". I contemplate this when I'm feeling particularly smug or self righteous, though I never can quite get there in terms of inhabiting the mindset of my villain/person who is hero in their own mind as I am so obviously blameless, as always. But it's still a nice exercise to attempt and remind myself that others with opposite instincts are as wed to their perspectives as I am.
I really liked the documentary Behind The Curve for embracing the approach you offer. It's about flat earth community but I feel like a strength of the documentary is that it portrays these folks as curious and industrious scientists, who put forward and test hypotheses. With this framing, it's easy to explain them as having bad hypotheses, rather than being bad people. Seems more effective way to engage, if engagement and dialogue are the point.
This is so good. Congratulations on writing this down!
I'm curious what a template would look like to help oneself understand and predict others' behavior. Filling it out on a piece of paper might help it become a reflex. Questions would be like:
"Roughly what is this person's hero's narrative?" "What do they believe which makes them good?" "What do they believe which makes them important?" "What are symbols which trigger their antagonism, and why?" and then a set of questions which help you figure out how to find opportunities for collaboration.
"If your goal is to actually change someone’s mind — not just to feel like you won, or produce a nice YouTube clip, but to actually change their mind — then you should be operating in the conversation as if you’re talking to the hero of the story, who is basically good but has been misled."
And this:
"if you do want to persuade, you have to offer people an alternative narrative. A new heroic story they can inhabit. With some emotional intelligence, you can make someone feel as if you’re not a villain mocking them, but rather, a sympathetic helper who can bring them new information. After all, many heroic plots involve the hero breaking free from a false allegiance, with the help of an unlikely sidekick who alerts them to some deception."
Elements of what you're proposing here have arguably been around for awhile in the political/moral psych and some evolutionary psych literature (motivated reasoning, self-deception, social signaling, tribalism etc.). But I love the way you distilled this into a parsimonious overarching principle with a more humanistic and narrative spin. Still, we need to explain why someone might gravitate toward one moralistic framing and not another. Why go NIMBY and not YIMBY, why right-wing not left-wing (or vice-versa), if either one could serve our hero narrative? So there must be a complex interaction with genuinely held values as well as diverse epistemic resources. I also think morality gets coded as many different things. So for Joe Rogan bros or someone in the manosphere, maybe being the hero means strength and macho toughness more than Christian morality. For a nerdy Rationalist, maybe it means being "smart."
Your environmental activist example makes me think of of a new book you might appreciate, Atomic Dreams (about the nuclear power battles in California, especially the pro-nuclearists):
I finally got around to watching the entire cycle of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul recently. These two shows seem like great examples of characters who have a powerful need to believe they are good, and when they cannot sustain this, cope by doubling down on the bad parts as a perverse way to justify their self-narrative. Also Bojack Horseman....
I feel like scale matters here. It's one thing to use the "I am the hero of my own story" framework in the context of your personal life. When discussing larger-scale matters, like the fate of the country, one should have the wherewithal to understand they are just a small part of the collective body, that they are explicitly NOT the main character.
This is a nice summary. I've been thinking lately that beliefs of unfairness and deserving are behind much of the evil and selfish behavior in the world. People justify their actions by believing that others have taken unfair advantages, and that they are simply doing what's necessary to get what they justly deserve.
I wonder if there's a more effective way to persuade people based on this perspective? Perhaps by acknowledging their perceived unfairness, while surfacing other factors in order to convince the person that their actions are not really leading to more fairness?
> If there’s a universal law of human behavior, I think it’s this: People will believe whatever allows them to be the hero of their own story.
It's far from universal. Moral scrupulosity exists and sometimes takes disorder-level proportions — think moral OCD. The inversion of the law is true for some people.
Ozy wrote a lot about scrupulosity on their blog Thing of Things:
1. https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/03/03/scrupulosity/
2. https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/tag/scrupulosity-sequence/
I think one might view scrupulosity akin to an overactive version of the mechanism you proposed, and there might be a version of the law that generalises to these cases. But it still means that the law should be stated differently: plenty of people think of themselves as unsympathetic or terrible — continuously for months.
I actually think scrupulosity and depression provide great evidence of how important this mechanism is — when you don’t have a robust self-narrative, your whole life becomes about dealing with the hole in that bucket
Thank you for this thoughtful article. In addition to the concept of wanting to be the hero of our own story, I also think about the idea of homeostasis in human psychology - namely, the unconscious tendency to seek whatever is familiar to us through our actions. I have found this to be remarkably consistent in 30yrs as a mental health professional. Your article also reminds me of Robert Wright’s book, “Why Buddhism Is True” (interesting book, terrible title). Here’s a decent overview if you’ve not read it:
https://www.lionsroar.com/why-buddhism-is-true/
Possible, but there are other ways to carve reality here that maybe reverses causation.
Scrupulosity can be viewed as an attempt to control what you can't control. If you are scrupulous about your past actions, you are trying to control what you can't: your past actions are not under influence from your current self. If you are scrupulous about the way different people view you, you are again trying to control other people's opinions (which you fundamentally can't, the most you achieve is indirect influence).
So maybe robust self-narrative is what you get once you stop trying to exert excessive control. And maybe the causality is reversed: your life becomes about dealing with various holes in the bucket first and then you lose robust self-narrative. "Just let the bucket have holes, you know".
The question of the laws of causation between these abstractions is above my pay grade — nonetheless, this is an interesting account, and feels more like the contemplative phenomenological account? Like, wholeness comes from teaching yourself to stop tanha-ing at inner dissonance...
Could you explain more how lacking a robust self-narrative relates to having a hole in your bucket?
i assume she’s using it the way I’ve seen others use it, and describing basically, the story she tells herself in her head. the story in your head is the thing that tells you that you’re a hero after all.
just make sure no matter what you can always figure out how to frame yourself as the hero. in your head.
I think it's a great point, and I added a line about it -- depression and psychopathy are other counterexamples.
I can maybe see why you’d think psychopathy could produce that perceptual disturbance. But .. depression has nothing to do with that at all.
Maybe there's a distinction between *believing* anything necessary in order to be the sympathetic protagonist of your own story, and *doing* anything necessary to salvage that image when it's constantly under threat from not being able to do the former? Scrupulosity and perfectionism are both ways to head this off at the pass through preventative counter-actions; depression is a form of retreat that at least prevents the ultimate sin of presuming to be good when we're really bad. We continue to feel and believe shitty things about ourselves, but our actions serve to minimize or head off damage that would make us even worse. (I say "we" because I speak from experience!).
I think this is a basically correct understanding that's a specific instance of a more general principle, and the more general principle makes your framing more inescapable.
Stories are a compression mechanism that humans use to understand and transmit information. They rely on archetypes, tropes, and symbols to replace the complex detail of actual life.
So, when someone tries to understand their life, decide what to do, or make predictions about it, they are doing it in the context of "the story of their life", in which they are naturally the protagonist.
This is why most advertising is a short story that invites the audience to simply drop themselves in.
It's why narratives are so important to politics.
It's also why Tarot works so well.
I really like this!
This is one of the clearest and most compassionate frameworks I’ve read for understanding human behavior — including my own. And it's got a lucid humility that feels like a genuine invitation to grow.
oh, what a kind thing for you to say!
(At risk of being tangential) Your blog made me think about a related issue that might be even more insidious than the hero mechanism, because there's no conscious defense happening. The person has lost track of what they're defending toward.
I'd call it "baseline drift" - when people unconsciously accept diminished states as normal without realizing the shift happened. Unlike your hero story framework, where people actively revise their standards to maintain their self-image, this is about genuinely losing track of what "good" looked like in the first place.
For example, someone recovering from depression might feel elated at the first positive thoughts and abandon therapy, not realizing they've mistaken "better than terrible" for "actually well." They indeed need to keep working toward full recovery, but are at risk of slipping back. After a few cycles of ups and downs, they might even start wondering if they're "bipolar"(similar to how stopping antibiotics at the first sign of relief risks creating a chronic condition; I digress). Or someone who grew up in a dysfunctional family might never strive for genuine care and warmth in their adult relationships - not because they're defending dysfunction as good, but because their childhood baseline for "normal family life" is so low they don't even know to reach for something healthier.
This shows up everywhere - workplace toxicity we gradually accept as "just how jobs are," relationship standards that slowly erode, financial stress we normalize as "adulting," declining health we write off as inevitable aging. This baseline drift might explain why the "revision" process you describe often seems so unconscious and natural to people. They're not actively deciding to redefine what "good" means - their reference point has already drifted without them noticing, making what looks like defensive rationalization feel like an obvious truth to them.
This makes the hero defense even stronger. When you point out someone's baseline has drifted, you're basically saying "your life is worse than you think." That's threatening, so they'll defend it - either denying what you're showing them or insisting their lowered standards are actually better. The baseline drift sets them up to be even more defensive when challenged. Which means we need even more of exactly what you suggest, careful attention to offering people alternative heroic narratives rather than confrontation.
I loved this and think about it often! In my random thoughts note, I had it down as "Being the villain in someone else's story". I contemplate this when I'm feeling particularly smug or self righteous, though I never can quite get there in terms of inhabiting the mindset of my villain/person who is hero in their own mind as I am so obviously blameless, as always. But it's still a nice exercise to attempt and remind myself that others with opposite instincts are as wed to their perspectives as I am.
I really liked the documentary Behind The Curve for embracing the approach you offer. It's about flat earth community but I feel like a strength of the documentary is that it portrays these folks as curious and industrious scientists, who put forward and test hypotheses. With this framing, it's easy to explain them as having bad hypotheses, rather than being bad people. Seems more effective way to engage, if engagement and dialogue are the point.
I will check it out!
One that you're willing to have falsified.
This is so good. Congratulations on writing this down!
I'm curious what a template would look like to help oneself understand and predict others' behavior. Filling it out on a piece of paper might help it become a reflex. Questions would be like:
"Roughly what is this person's hero's narrative?" "What do they believe which makes them good?" "What do they believe which makes them important?" "What are symbols which trigger their antagonism, and why?" and then a set of questions which help you figure out how to find opportunities for collaboration.
Thank you for writing this @Cate Hall
Dear Cate,
Beautiful piece!
I love this:
"If your goal is to actually change someone’s mind — not just to feel like you won, or produce a nice YouTube clip, but to actually change their mind — then you should be operating in the conversation as if you’re talking to the hero of the story, who is basically good but has been misled."
And this:
"if you do want to persuade, you have to offer people an alternative narrative. A new heroic story they can inhabit. With some emotional intelligence, you can make someone feel as if you’re not a villain mocking them, but rather, a sympathetic helper who can bring them new information. After all, many heroic plots involve the hero breaking free from a false allegiance, with the help of an unlikely sidekick who alerts them to some deception."
Thank you for your heroism!
Love
Myq
Thank you, Myq!
Thank you for this beautiful essay.
See also the fundamental attribution error
Elements of what you're proposing here have arguably been around for awhile in the political/moral psych and some evolutionary psych literature (motivated reasoning, self-deception, social signaling, tribalism etc.). But I love the way you distilled this into a parsimonious overarching principle with a more humanistic and narrative spin. Still, we need to explain why someone might gravitate toward one moralistic framing and not another. Why go NIMBY and not YIMBY, why right-wing not left-wing (or vice-versa), if either one could serve our hero narrative? So there must be a complex interaction with genuinely held values as well as diverse epistemic resources. I also think morality gets coded as many different things. So for Joe Rogan bros or someone in the manosphere, maybe being the hero means strength and macho toughness more than Christian morality. For a nerdy Rationalist, maybe it means being "smart."
Your environmental activist example makes me think of of a new book you might appreciate, Atomic Dreams (about the nuclear power battles in California, especially the pro-nuclearists):
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/rebecca-tuhus-dubrow/atomic-dreams/9781643753157/
I finally got around to watching the entire cycle of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul recently. These two shows seem like great examples of characters who have a powerful need to believe they are good, and when they cannot sustain this, cope by doubling down on the bad parts as a perverse way to justify their self-narrative. Also Bojack Horseman....
It's at least partially stolen from "The Storytelling Animal"
I feel like scale matters here. It's one thing to use the "I am the hero of my own story" framework in the context of your personal life. When discussing larger-scale matters, like the fate of the country, one should have the wherewithal to understand they are just a small part of the collective body, that they are explicitly NOT the main character.
>Maybe it seems like this is a Republican issue in particular — the pattern of “deny the facts, up until you full-throatedly embrace them”
For an example on the other side, see the origins of Covid debate. It was all natural origins, until suddenly it wasn't.
This article is a good read on White psychology, but don’t let the talk about we as a “species” fool anyone into thinking it applies to other races.
This is a nice summary. I've been thinking lately that beliefs of unfairness and deserving are behind much of the evil and selfish behavior in the world. People justify their actions by believing that others have taken unfair advantages, and that they are simply doing what's necessary to get what they justly deserve.
I wonder if there's a more effective way to persuade people based on this perspective? Perhaps by acknowledging their perceived unfairness, while surfacing other factors in order to convince the person that their actions are not really leading to more fairness?