Management scholars and psychologists have puzzled about how best to define, identify and measure hubris and hubristic tendencies, with only partial success. Such attempts try to help us see what lies behind the analogy between the ancient vice of hybris and its modern re-conceptualisation. In this chapter we explore how the processes of making metaphors work and how storytelling affects the teller and the audience. We examine what purposes storytelling serves, especially when its achieves a mythic character. We explore where aesthetics and literary theorising intersect with evolutionary psychology, and by connecting that to management studies. This leads to observations about the nature and practice of leadership that might signal hubris in the making. That might just help us see when the dark side of modern hubris snuffs out its bright-side potential, and perhaps how to prevent it doing so. This may help leaders learn when not to believe their own storytelling (or press releases).

Adolescence is a pivotal stage for developing life narrative coherence, yet little is known about the impact of early adversity on this process. Given the importance of narrative identity in adolescence, this chapter explores how adolescents in care centers construct life narratives after experiencing family ruptures and socio-emotional adversities. Using Habermas and Silveira’s (2008) life narrative task, narratives from 66 adolescents (22 in care centers, 22 with families in low SES, and 22 with families in medium/high SES) were analyzed based on temporal orientation, causal-motivational, and thematic coherence. Results indicated that adolescents from medium/high SES families demonstrated a significantly higher temporal orientation than the other groups. Living in a care center alone did not account for poorer coherence; instead, socio-economic context played a pivotal role, particularly in temporal coherence. Highlighting the foundational role of temporal coherence in narrative structure, the study emphasizes the need for narrative scaffolding interventions for adolescents in care centers or low SES contexts to foster identity development and improve life narrative coherence.

Causal coherence (Habermas & Bluck, 2000) is a cognitive process that is integral to the life story and is shaped by social and cultural forces. However, the majority of life story research focuses on individual recall of life events, obtained either via interviews with a researcher or from participants writing down their memories. This chapter analyzes four narratives of recent, negative events shared among friend dyads in which listeners made many contributions. Narratives were coded for causal coherence and categorized as independently produced, prompted by listeners, or suggested by listeners. Qualitative analysis shows examples of how the most responsive listeners prompted statements of casual coherence. Comparisons to other narrating scenarios – four from distracted listeners and six from long narratives told to attentive listeners who made fewer contributions – show that the narratives told to the most responsive listeners had the most statements of causal coherence. Based on these results, this chapter explores the disconnect between the theoretical role of social and cultural processes in the life story and the dearth of studies examining these processes directly.

Parental shared reminiscing and positive parenting are important for the development of autobiographical memory and narrative identity. Yet, even though parents influence the content and structure of narrative identity throughout the lifespan (Camia et al., 2021; Köber & Habermas, 2018), it is understudied whether narrative themes such as agency and communion are associated with experienced parenting and whether this sustains beyond early childhood. Therefore, we investigated the influence of parenting on agency and communion in life stories provided at ages 26 and 32. Narratives with and without parental topics scored similarly on agency and communion. However, agency in narratives with mentions of parents was supported by an increased understanding of parents and by opposing parents’ advice. Communion in narratives mentioning parents was supported by positive evaluations of the parental relationship and by an increased understanding of parents. These results suggest that parents not only are part of the content of personal narratives but also influence narrative themes well into adulthood.

The prototypical form of hybris in the Greek sources involved the self-assertion of the rich and powerful, which resulted in their disrespecting their subordinates in arrogating to themselves claims to respect they were not entitled to. This contribution looks at the flipside of this scenario, because hybris can also work in the opposite direction: from the bottom up. Hybris, that is, can also involve subordinates overstepping their position in the social hierarchy and arrogating to themselves prerogatives reserved for those higher up the social ladder. While denouncing the hybris of the powerful has egalitarian implications – it defends the right to equal respect (or at least to some respect) of those who are disrespected – denouncing the hybris of the downtrodden towards their superiors is a tool for maintaining and reproducing a social hierarchy by grounding it on an allegedly shared (yet heavily asymmetrical) recognition order.

Research on life stories has a short history but has emerged as a thriving field. While several key papers have spurred research (e.g., McAdams, 1985; Pasupathi, 2001) from a philosophy of science perspective, it is interesting how an individual paper helps a field to flourish. We traced the impact of one early theoretical paper, Habermas and Bluck (2000), using structural topic modeling. Grounded in classic lifespan theory (Baltes et al., 1998), this article bridged the gap between telling individual memories in childhood and narrating life stories in adulthood. The authors made the first formal argument for the emergence of the life story in adolescence. Since publication, the article has provided a reference for the study of life stories (> 2,000 citations; APA PsycNet, 2022) for authors in over forty countries. Structural topic modeling uses an unsupervised learning algorithm sensitive to temporal context. It was applied to the abstracts text of all articles ever citing Habermas and Bluck (2000). Modeling identified nine topic areas, showing their citation fluctuation. We report these historic trends, providing a lens for examining the evolution of the field of life stories over time.

As a cognitive bias, hubris leads entrepreneurs to overestimate both the likelihood of success and the contribution of firms’ resources to their success. Accordingly, in this chapter, we investigate how entrepreneurs’ hubris influences strategy formulation, performance attribution and responses to performance outcomes. We posit that heightened levels of  hubris in entrepreneurs diminish the significance of external performance in shaping strategy while amplifying the importance of relative performance. When evaluating performance, hubris plays a pivotal role: elevated levels of hubris lead entrepreneurs to attribute positive outcomes to themselves while shifting blame for negative outcomes onto external factors and others. In addition, we recognise that heightened hubris intensifies the commitment to chosen strategies, potentially escalating their pursuit despite adverse circumstances. In disentangling the effect of hubris bias in defining and interpreting firm performance, this chapter assists entrepreneurs in making more conscious and informed decisions.

Chapter 2 describes the original concepts and related research of the author Brave Heart and Indigenous colleagues. The new operationalization of historical trauma described in the Introduction is applied to this context, for example when it comes to discrimination, intergenerational transmission, and social pathologies. The chapter provides empirical material on, among others, the immediate consequences that fully or partially substantiate the assumptions, including assumed mediating factors of historical trauma effects such as traditional values or cultural identity. The chapter concludes by reviewing the first available studies on healing, involving an adjunct program to group therapy with traditional Indigenous content, as well as empowerment through entrepreneurship programs tailored to youth. The conclusion of the chapter is that not all the possibilities of a broader conceptualization of historical trauma in this area have been realized.

Studies investigating diverse phenomena as life story development, the reminiscence bump, emotional and important memories, and future expectations across different ages, as well as experimental and cross-cultural studies, provide converging evidence that cultural life scripts are decisive for individuals to organize autobiographical memories and future thoughts, to draft a meaningful life story, and to navigate their personal future within one’s culture. Recently, researchers have identified cultural life scripts as a type of master narrative (McLean & Syed, 2016), but both autobiographical memory and narrative identity research have overlooked the potential of conceptualizing cultural life scripts as master narratives. In this chapter, we conceptualize cultural life scripts as master narratives, possessing the five defining features of master narratives – utility, ubiquity, invisibility, rigidity, and compulsory nature. Based on the background of the substantial body of research, we propose that conceptualizing cultural life scripts as master narratives can enrich and inspire research on narrative identity approach and autobiographical memory.

Culture offers a unique set of values and traditions that profoundly impact how individuals narrate their life stories. When asked to recall important autobiographical memories, individuals can draw on internalized cultural norms and expectations to define what is appropriate for inclusion in their life stories. But how is the life story told when people choose a path that prevents them from experiencing culturally typical life events such as getting married and having children? This chapter explores the life stories of 48 religious sisters in comparison with the life stories of 48 women from the general population. Like many life stories, important memories of religious sisters center on important themes such as family life (i.e., parents and siblings), education, and work-related events. They rate their memories similarly in terms of emotional valence and subjective control. Moreover, both groups show a typical reminiscence bump in their memory distribution. Despite these remarkable overlaps, two issues are discussed as possibly specific to religious life stories: the predominance of early (negative) life experiences and the (redeeming) decision to join the consecrated life.

The chapter discusses the only partial coming to terms with the genocide trauma against the background of the socio-economic-political and cultural-religious conditions of this Southeast Asian country. The surviving victims and their descendants suffered severe marginalization in their role: their fates were not really dealt with publicly, and they were not granted the status of historical victors. The psychosocial and social science research conducted in relation to genocide survivors, generally from the late 1990s and largely only in the 2000s and 2010s, mirrored in many respects the international developments. It was mainly researchers from the Global North who published studies on the post-genocidal situation in Cambodia. However, anthropologists from the Global North dealt extensively with certain cultural Cambodian aspects of the genocide aftermath. One cultural syndrome garnered particular attention: baksbat, which is characterized by a subjective feeling of ‘broken courage’. This phenomenon manifests as both a normal reaction and a pathological, exaggerated reaction. The treatment approaches for survivors usually include Buddhist or ethnically mediated rituals as an amalgam alongside internationally developed testimony therapy.

The possible neural and neurochemical bases of the hubris syndrome are reviewed by considering relevant evidence from behavioural and cognitive neuroscience in relation to biological psychiatry. This multidisciplinary evidence includes studies of brain-damaged patients and functional neuroimaging and identifies the prefrontal cortex as a crucial region of a brain network undertaking decision-making. The prefrontal cortex is also identified as important for the subjective and behavioural expression of relevant personality traits such as narcissism and impulsivity. Factors that adversely affect so-called executive functions of the prefrontal cortex, such as stress, drug abuse and illness, are also taken into account to highlight possible neurochemical and endocrine influences. A novel hypothesis is presented which postulates a key role for the chronic stress of leadership status depleting monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline, which interact with pre-existing temperamental traits, to produce dysfunctional modulation of decision-making circuits controlled by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex