Learning Civil Courage: A Citizens’ Perspective

Jurgen Willems

doi:10.3102/0013189x211044159

Abstract

Civil courage refers to the behavior where people actively intervene to protect a victim in a concrete situation of injustice despite the risk of becoming a victim themselves. To act with civil courage, one requires competencies that relate to prosocial values as well as the physical and social ability to act. In this context, this brief reports the opinions of 2,046 respondents—representatives of Germany with respect to age, gender, and region—on what, according to them, are the best contexts for learning civil courage. “At home and/or from family” as well as “through volunteering” are considered the most suitable contexts to learn civil courage. In contrast, television, social media, and the internet are considered the least supportive contexts.

Highlights

Civil courage (Zivilcourage) is defined as the behavior that a person exhibits when helping someone else at the risk of substantial personal disadvantages (Greitemeyer et al, 2007; Rate et al, 2007)
The following three contexts are scored on the negative side of the scale: “from television”, “from social media”, and—most negative—“from the internet”
Civil courage is believed to be learned in a broad variety of contexts, with family/home and volunteering as the contexts with the strongest learning opportunities

Summary

Introduction

Civil courage (Zivilcourage) is defined as the behavior that a person exhibits when helping someone else at the risk of substantial personal disadvantages (Greitemeyer et al, 2007; Rate et al, 2007). The goal of this brief is to provide insights into how citizens believe that various educational contexts contribute to creating more civil courage.

Results

Conclusion