56 Chaotic Good Acts That Were Equal Parts Mischievous And Magnificent

At its core, heroic behavior is pro-social and courageous, and revolves around generosity, compassion, altruism, and empathy. It helps and protects people, improves society, and embodies the values and morals of your community. An everyday hero takes responsibility for helping others, whether that involves simple acts of kindness or actually risking their lives.

According to Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D, the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Claremont McKenna College, if you want to think and act like a superhero, you should first identify yourself as a person who will and can help others.

Everyday heroes are also mindful and aware of what’s going on around them, embrace self-efficacy (the belief that you can do something specific or reach a goal), and are deeply empathetic. Heroes help instead of ignoring or criticizing.

The term itself, Chaotic Good, is taken from the moral alignments that you see in the D&D tabletop roleplaying game. There are a total of 9 moral alignments: Lawful Good, Neutral Good (hi, this is yours truly), Chaotic Good (you are here in this list right now), Lawful Neutral, True Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, and Chaotic Evil. They all describe a fictional character or real-life person’s values, ethics, and relationship with the world.

Lawful individuals tend to value rules, customs, stability, and traditions, while Chaotic ones embrace freedom, change, and independence.

Lawful characters can be too rigid and controlling at times, while Chaotic people are rebels who can sometimes be too destructive for society to function properly.

Good characters tend to be altruistic and pro-social, while Evil is associated with selfishness and immorality (aka knowing that you’re doing something wrong and going through with it anyway). Neutral individuals find a balance between caring for others and their own self-interest.

You don’t need to single-handedly save the world from any and all evil overnight and rebalance the scales of justice to be a hero. While that would be awesome, it is naive, impractical, and requires more resources, power, and influence than you (probably) have.

What you can do, however, is make small changes in your local community and make daily decisions that resonate outwards and affect society for the better. Heroic behavior can be incremental. And small acts of kindness are powerful. You have to be incredibly cynical to deny the broader effect they have.

Ira Hyman, PhD., a professor of psychology at Western Washington University, points out that we can all turn our “minuscule contributions into something gigantic,” even if we don’t feel we wield a lot of power.

We can better understand our impact on society, the world, and our environment when we zoom out and look at trends, instead of just focusing on tiny, isolated actions. The bigger picture is more optimistic.

Something as simple as biking to work instead of taking your car has a big impact in the long term (even if it feels small). Small decisions snowball into bigger and bigger trends.

“We frequently base our judgments and decisions on things that come to mind easily. This judgment bias is called the availability heuristic. The thoughts that are easily available are the ones that guide our decisions, even when that isn’t very valuable information,” Hyman writes.

“One aspect of the availability heuristic is that we don’t search for information that doesn’t come to mind easily. All those little things add up, often into tremendous things. But the addition of all those little things doesn’t come to mind very easily.”

Beyond the direct impact that your daily habits and decisions have, you also need to consider how they influence the people around you.

“We also create another change by our individual minuscule behaviors: We make it easier for others to do things too. When we use alternative transportation, others see this and may try similar changes. Good behaviors have a tendency to snowball (of course, bad ones do too),” Hyman explains.