When the thugs arrive — the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan — who stands up to them? That’s a question raised by Rutger Bregman in his new book, Moral Ambition. Bregman, who is Dutch, was fascinated by the example of Nieuwlande, a tiny Dutch town whose residents concealed almost 100 Jews from the Nazi occupiers. “The concentration of people in hiding was higher than nearly everywhere else in Europe.”
So what made the citizens of Nieuwlande courageous? Psychologists have examined the determinants of such heroism. One influential study was conducted by Pearl and Samuel Oliner, authors of The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe and founders of the Altruistic Personality Institute. The Oliners interviewed hundreds of people who had protected Jews in Europe during the second world war. One can understand Sam Oliner’s interest in the topic: he was Jewish, born in Poland in 1930, lost his entire family and, at the age of 12, was hidden from his would-be murderers by a sympathetic Catholic peasant.
A similar project was conducted by psychologist Eva Fogelman, author of Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. And yet, says Bregman, these studies of heroic acts don’t find many indicators of a heroic personality type.
“A resistance hero could be shy or self-assured, silly or serious, young or old, pious or scandalous, rich or poor, leftwing or right,” writes Bregman. There were some predictive factors, such as independence of spirit. But the heroes seemed much the same as anyone else. The only obvious distinction was the vital one: they took extraordinary risks to save others, while others did nothing.
A later analysis by sociologists Federico Varese and Meir Yaish focused on a different set of explanations. What if, rather than a matter of personality, courageous altruism was a matter of circumstance? And there was one circumstance in particular that stood out in the data: people who were asked to help almost never refused. The secret to being a hero? It was to have someone standing in front of you, demanding heroism.
In Nieuwlande, that person was often Arnold Douwes or his friend Max Léons, a two-man resistance army. On one occasion, Arnold and Max dropped in for coffee with a farmer and his wife, and soon raised the question: would they hide a pair of Jews from the Nazis?
As the farmer started to protest, Max breezily announced, “They’re man and wife — very sweet people . . . just a moment, I’ll go get them.” A moment later, they appeared. Max and Arnold stood up, “So, that’s settled. Good night!”
How rude. How presumptuous. But the Jewish couple survived.
Of course it is not a surprise to observe that people are influenced by the requests of other people. Social behaviour is often contagious. In March 2013, millions of Facebook users changed their profile picture to an equals sign as a signal of support for equality in marriage rights between same-sex and opposite-sex couples. Various factors predicted whether people would do this, but a key variable was simply that people were more likely to switch after several of their friends switched.
Switching your profile picture is a low-risk, low-consequence show of support for a cause. It’s not in the same category as defying the SS by hiding someone in your house. Back in the 1980s, the sociologist Doug McAdam drew a distinction between high-risk and low-risk activism, and argued that his fellow sociologists had been all too willing to ignore that distinction.
McAdam studied the Freedom Summer project of 1964, in which unpaid volunteers, mostly white, travelled to the American Deep South to help register Black voters and support other civil rights causes. Several of them were murdered and many of them experienced intimidation or serious violence. Like those who sheltered Jews from the Nazis, these were people voluntarily running mortal risks. Hundreds persisted, but hundreds of others, understandably, dropped out. What distinguished these two groups was not commitment to the cause — they were all committed — but close personal connections to other volunteers. It’s harder to quit, and easier to be brave, if you’re with friends.
In 1986, McAdam couldn’t draw a distinction between friends and “friends”, the people who follow each other on Facebook, Instagram or Strava. But the difference is real. In a 2010 New Yorker essay that predates our current anxiety about smartphones and social media, Malcolm Gladwell argued that the weak-tie networks of social media might be great for raising awareness and signalling support, but not so great for motivating truly brave and committed action.
“The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members,” wrote Gladwell, “who have donated an average of nine cents apiece.”
A few weeks ago, I argued that it wasn’t healthy to spend too much time thinking about Donald Trump, or, to borrow a phrase from Oliver Burkeman, to “live inside the news”. There is a risk that this seems like a recommendation to be selfish: to emulate Erik Hagerman, who lived on an Ohio pig farm and deliberately avoided the news, even donning headphones when visiting a café to avoid encountering anyone talking about politics. After Hagerman was profiled in The New York Times, he was called “the most selfish person in America”.
But Burkeman has more sympathy for Hagerman, who was reported to be spending much of his time and his savings restoring an area of wetlands for public enjoyment. He might not be risking his life, but he was solving an actual problem. It’s just possible that might be more significant than changing a Facebook profile picture.
Hagerman scandalised online opinion by cutting himself off from the news. But what truly seems to motivate the bravest, most altruistic behaviour is not a connection to the news. It’s a connection to other people.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 16 May 2025.
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