The Fear Factor Read online

  Getting my bearings, I realized that I was in the far left lane of the freeway—the fast lane. Only now it was the far right lane because I was facing backward toward the oncoming traffic. Because the car had come to rest just past the apex of the overpass, it wasn’t visible to drivers coming toward me until they crested the hill, which left them with little time to avoid me. Some of them came so close before they swerved that the car shook as they blew past.

  There was no shoulder to escape onto. The bridge was hemmed in by guardrails and only inches separated them from where I sat. I couldn’t have driven the car onto a shoulder anyhow because the engine had died. Does spinning around kill a car’s engine? I remember wondering vaguely as I stared at a dashboard full of warning lights, including the ominous CHECK ENGINE. My teenage brother and his friends spent many a snowy day turning doughnuts in parking lots, but I didn’t remember hearing that it made their engine die.

  I turned the key in the ignition again and again, willing it to catch, but it stayed stubbornly silent. I knew that if I didn’t do something it was only a matter of time until a car, or worse, one of the eighteen-wheelers barreling by, plowed into me. But what could I do? I turned on the brights. I turned on the emergency flashers. I had no mobile phone in 1996, so I couldn’t call for help. Should I get out of the car and shimmy down the narrow shoulder away from it? And then what? Run across the freeway to an exit ramp? Or should I stay inside where at least I was protected by layers of metal and fiberglass and airbags?

  I don’t know how long I sat there, terrified, weighing these equally unappealing options. Thinking you’re about to die makes time bunch up and stretch out in odd ways. But next thing I knew, I heard a rap on the half-open passenger’s side window, on the side of the car nearest the guardrail.

  I turned toward the sound and flinched when I saw who was standing there gazing in at me. I wasn’t sure whether my situation had improved or just gotten much worse. Tacoma’s downtown was racked by violence back then. The epicenter of the violence was the notorious Hilltop neighborhood just to the west of where I sat. The emergency rooms of the two hospitals that stood like concrete sentries on either side of the Hilltop treated a steady stream of shooting victims, most of them either members or rivals of the Hilltop Crips. People from the part of Tacoma where I lived did not hang out near the Hilltop. We definitely did not go there and interact with men like this one. He seemed an unlikely candidate for a roadside hero. He was wearing sunglasses, despite it being the middle of the night, and an abundance of gold jewelry. His head was shaved and shone like a coffee bean. When he spoke, I thought I saw the gleam of a gold tooth.

  “You look like you could use some help,” he said. His voice was low and rumbling.

  “Um. I think I do,” I responded, my voice catching in my throat.

  “All right. Then I need to get in your seat.” He gestured to the driver’s seat.

  Oh Jesus, I thought. Now what? This man wants to get in the car with me? My mom didn’t even want my friends driving her car (understandably). What would she think of this man driving it? But I had zero other viable choices.

  After a pause, I nodded. “Okay.”

  He walked around the hood of the car and watched the traffic for a moment. His head bobbed faintly leftward as each car passed, like a jump roper finding the rhythm. When a gap in the traffic appeared, he moved fast. In an instant, he was outside my door and yanking it open. I lifted myself over the center console to the passenger’s side in time for him to swing himself into the driver’s seat and slam the door shut behind him. He grasped the wheel and turned the key. Nothing.

  “It won’t start,” I said. He turned the key again. Still nothing.

  His gaze moved systematically across the dashboard and controls. It landed on the gearshift, which was still in drive. Without comment, he moved it back to park, then tried the ignition again. It caught! He pulled the gearshift back to drive, watched again for a gap in the flow of traffic, and, when one appeared, floored the accelerator to launch us in a smooth arc across the freeway. A moment later we were safe again—relatively speaking—on the diagonal stripes of the off-ramp. He eased to a stop behind his own car, a dark-colored BMW that gleamed orange under the sodium lights. Since getting into my car, he had not looked at me or spoken. Now he turned to me, taking in my jagged breathing and my face, which felt tight and drawn. My skin felt cold, and my legs were shaking uncontrollably.

  “You going to be all right getting home? Need me to follow you for a bit?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No, I’ll be all right. I can get home,” I said.

  Did I thank him? I’m not certain. I think I somehow forgot.

  “Okay. You take care of yourself then,” he said. And then he was gone. He returned to his car, and the summer night swallowed him up.

  I never learned his name. I know nothing about him. Was he a Hilltop Crip, or was he an expensively dressed attorney or preacher or salesman? All I actually know about him is that while he was driving on Interstate 5 near midnight—Was he tired? Did he have somewhere to be?—he encountered an SUV marooned in the fast lane facing backwards, brights blazing and flashers blinking. Could he have even seen me inside? If he did, it could only have been for the briefest of moments. Most of the drivers passing by barely had time to veer out of the way. But in the second that passed between when he saw me and when he pulled over, he made an incredible decision: to try to save my life. He pulled into the off-ramp, parked, then ran some fifty feet across four lanes of the busiest freeway in Washington State, in the dark, to reach me. Did he have second thoughts as he stood staring at the cars and trucks blazing past him at freeway speed? If so, he didn’t yield to them.

  He then tested his luck against the traffic twice more: once to get around to the driver’s side of the car, and then again to launch the car across the freeway from a dead stop. Any of those three times a miscalculation or a stroke of bad luck could have caused him—and maybe me—to die a violent death. But he did it anyhow. He did it to help me, a woman who found him frightening and couldn’t pull herself together enough to thank him. He was clearly capable of great bravery and great selflessness. He couldn’t have been looking for a reward—not even the recognition of a little story in the Tacoma News Tribune. By not telling me his name, he guaranteed that no one would ever know what he had done. He was a hero in every sense, and I am sorry to this day that I can’t tell him that, and thank him for my life.

  In the immediate aftermath of that night, I was mostly tormented by fear and regret: How did I manage not to hit another car as I was spinning across the freeway? What would have happened to me if the stranger had not arrived? Would I be lying mangled in an intensive care unit in a hospital on the Hilltop? Would I be dead?

  My stomach turned every time I thought about the dog that had set off the whole chain of events. Such a frightened, helpless creature, and through my own stupid actions—intended, with terrible irony, to spare its life—I had killed it. Had it suffered? I hoped not. But I couldn’t erase it from my mind. For weeks afterward I could still see matted, orange tufts of its fur stuck to the asphalt when I drove across the bridge over the Puyallup River.

  As time went on, though, a new kind of torment took hold. It wasn’t so much an emotional torment as an intellectual one. I found myself turning over and over in my head questions about my rescuer and the improbability of what he had done.

  He wasn’t a singularity, of course. Heroic rescues happen everywhere with some regularity. The Carnegie Hero Fund honors dozens of them every year. Everyone has heard news stories about someone who leapt into a river to save a drowning child or rushed into a burning building to rescue an old woman. But these stories are somehow remote and bloodless. It is easy, reading them, to discount the risks and pain that the rescuers faced—the freezing, rushing waters of the river, the heat and hiss of the flames—and the feelings they must have experienced. For most people, even those who can picture the scene vividly, the outlandishn
ess of the rescuers’ decision makes it difficult to imagine what could have been going through their heads. What were they feeling? Were they frightened? If so, how did they overcome their fear to act so bravely? The difficulty of comprehending the decision to risk suffering or death to save a stranger makes it tempting, I think, to treat the mind that would make such a decision as a locked box, remote and unknowable, and somehow fundamentally different from the minds of the rest of us.

  I was stuck in the same trap as everyone else. I couldn’t imagine making the decision my rescuer had made—choosing, in a fraction of a second, to risk my own life to save a stranger. The impenetrability of the final outcome made the mental process that could have led there impenetrable as well. It was a problem with no solution, with no hint of which way the solution might even lie, and no matter how many times I turned it over in my mind I couldn’t seem to make any progress.

  But as it happened, my life had just taken a turn that would begin leading me toward an answer. The previous year I had entered Dartmouth College as one of the many premed students in my class. It was a terrible fit. I quickly found myself fighting to stay awake during the first class period of my first premed biology course. By the second class, I was relying on a classmate’s trick of bringing a plastic baggie of Cheerios with me and eating one of them every few seconds for an hour to stay awake. The trick worked, but I knew the bigger picture was futile. What was I doing studying a topic that literally bored me to sleep?

  As luck would have it, I had also enrolled in an introductory psychology class that term. From the first class, I was hooked. We covered every question about being a person I had ever thought to ask, and many I hadn’t: What is consciousness? How do we see in color? Why do we forget things? What is sexual desire? Where do emotions come from? I can still picture the imposing figure of my professor, the Dumbledore-esque Robert Kleck, striding up and down the aisles of our classroom as he posed questions like, “Is it really true that tall people have better life outcomes?” then pausing dramatically.

  Well, do they?? I wondered frantically, all five feet of me. (They do.)

  I devoured my textbook, festooning it with highlights and scribbling exclamation points and stars on nearly every page, marking all the insights I wanted to commit to memory. I later marked one page with a sticky note as well. It was a page about teaching sign language to apes, and while I was reading it I had an epiphany: psychology research is something people actually get paid to do—people can do it for a living. I decided I was going to become one of those people.

  In 1999, I put this decision into action. I moved to Somerville, Massachusetts, to begin my studies in the doctoral program in social psychology at Harvard University. The program (formerly the Department of Social Relations) is housed in an actual ivory tower—a fifteen-story white stone beacon of behavioral science called William James Hall that rises high above the surrounding buildings in Cambridge. The building is named after the nominal founder of the department, whom many also consider the founder of modern psychology. The students he taught included, among others, Theodore Roosevelt and Gertrude Stein. James was the first of many prominent psychologists to work at Harvard; others included B. F. Skinner and Timothy Leary, the LSD-touting leader of the 1960s counterculture movement. Not all of Harvard’s faculty members have been illustrious. Perhaps the most infamous alumnus of the department was Henry Murray, who in the 1950s and 1960s conducted a series of borderline abusive experiments to learn about stress responses during interrogations, which some say were sponsored by the CIA. The subjects in these studies were twenty-two Harvard undergraduates, one of whom, Ted Kaczynski, would go on to become the Unabomber.

  That was all in the distant past by the time I began my graduate work under two advisers with no history of abusing any participants whatsoever, Nalini Ambady and Daniel Wegner. Both were among social psychology’s greatest minds in their day, for very different reasons.

  Among Wegner’s many claims to fame was the originality of his ideas. One of these ideas was critical in helping me to understand, if not altruism itself, at least why altruists are so difficult for the rest of us to understand, and why we tend to put them in a psychological box that walls us off from their real experiences and personalities.

  With his student Kurt Gray, Wegner explored a phenomenon they called “moral typecasting.” The idea is that we automatically and unconsciously divide other people into two categories: moral “agents” and moral “patients.” Agents are people who commit moral or immoral deeds—they rescue or rob someone. And patients are the recipients of those deeds—the rescued or the robbed. Agents are the actors, and patients are the acted-upon.

  Because moral agents, good or bad, are doers, we focus on their capacity for planning and self-control and ascribe more of these qualities to them. That means we think of rescuers as better planners, as more self-controlled and more capable of complex thought, than the average person. The same goes for robbers. The outcome of their actions may be different, but what heroes and antiheroes share is that both are planners and actors. Typecasting works in reverse too. People who are seen as having a lot of capacity for planning and self-control are also allotted more moral agency. This is why we say that adults have more moral agency than children, and it is one reason why we think it’s fair for an adult to be punished more harshly than a child who commits the same crime.

  But we don’t grant moral agents more of everything. The flip side of having more agency is that moral agents are seen as having less of what Gray and Wegner call “experience”: emotions like fear and joy, and sensations like pain and hunger. This might be because we see moral agents and patients as non-overlapping categories, and we grant patients all the experience. The patients are the ones to whom something good or bad happened, so we focus on the fear and relief of the rescued child, or the sadness and rage of the robbed shopkeeper. But the feelings of the hero who planned and executed the child’s rescue, or those of the criminal who robbed the store, get left by the wayside. This binary worldview of moral agents and patients, recognized as far back as Aristotle, typecasts heroic rescuers as people with great capacities for willpower and control, but little capacity for feelings.

  These stereotypes play out nicely in cartoons and action movies, which portray heroes as stoic and impassive. Superheroes like Spider-Man and Batman, or even the nominally human protagonists of the James Bond or Mission: Impossible series, might brood sometimes, but we don’t get the sense that they feel deep-seated, vulnerable emotions like fear, even when they throw themselves off the edges of buildings or dodge fusillades of bullets. Their job is to skirt death and suffer injuries with barely a grunt. It is nearly impossible to imagine Batman or James Bond screaming in terror.

  So do the movies, and our own stereotypes, have it right? Does being an actual, living hero require being resistant to deep, distressing emotions like fear and panic? If we can believe a United States senator, former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and real-life heroic rescuer, the answer is clearly no.

  Back in 2012, when Cory Booker was still the mayor of Newark, he was returning home one evening with two members of his security detail. Approaching Booker’s house, they realized that the home of his next-door neighbor was in flames, with smoke pouring through the second-story windows. In the yard outside stood Booker’s neighbor, Jacqueline Williams, screaming that her daughter Zina was trapped on the second story of the house.

  Booker said afterward that he acted on instinct. He leapt from the car and raced across the yard past Jacqueline and into the house, with his bodyguard, detective Alex Rodriguez, on his heels. The air inside was thick with smoke. Gasping and choking, Booker and Rodriguez made their way up the stairs to the second-story kitchen. They arrived there to find flames licking up the walls and across the ceiling, accompanied by what sounded like small explosions. That was enough for Rodriguez. His job was to protect the mayor. He grabbed Booker by the belt and started to pull him back out of the kitchen. Booker was having no
ne of it. They tussled for a moment, Booker struggling to free himself. Rodriguez shouted at him, “I can’t let you in—that’s my job! I have to keep you from danger!”

  “Let me go! If I don’t go in, this lady is going to die!” Booker shouted back.

  Reluctantly, the detective released Booker, who plunged further inward.

  He couldn’t see Zina anywhere. But he could hear her voice calling faintly, “I’m here! I’m here!” from a nearby room.

  Booker moved toward Zina’s voice through heat so intense and smoke so thick that he could hardly breathe or see. He was disoriented and slowly suffocating. His lungs filled with searing black smoke with each breath. He realized he might be about to die. But he didn’t turn around. He groped blindly onward through the heat and smoke until finally his hands found Zina, who was slumped across a bed, limp, and barely conscious. Unless he wanted to have fought his way to her for nothing, his only option was to pick her up and carry her out. So he heaved the forty-seven-year-old woman over his shoulders and staggered back toward the kitchen, which was now engulfed in flames. Burning embers rained down on the exposed skin of his hands as he struggled back down the stairs with the help of Rodriguez. Once outside, both Booker and Rodriguez collapsed onto the ground, the mayor gasping and struggling to breathe. EMTs loaded him into an ambulance and rushed him to the hospital, where he was treated for smoke inhalation and second-degree burns to his hand.