annual report 2011 - Office for Research - Northwestern University

Dan P. McAdams
School of Education and Social Policy and
Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Narratives of Redemption
Who are the adults making the most positive impact
on young people today? What are the psychological
characteristics of the most caring and productive members
of American society? Funded by grants from the Foley
Family Foundation and the Templeton Foundation, Dan
P. McAdams, human development and social policy and
psychology, studies the lives and the life stories of highly
generative American adults. Especially generative men
and women are committed to promoting the well-being
of the next generation and leaving a positive legacy for
the future.
McAdams and his students have shown that highly
generative American adults tend to see their own lives
as narratives of redemption. In a redemptive story, the
protagonist is repeatedly delivered from suffering into
an enhanced status or state. Redemptive personal stories
provide a psychological resource for generative adults,
sustaining their hope that hard work to benefit others today
will pay dividends in the future. In creating redemptive
44 Annual Report 2011 | Excellence in Research
Andrew Campbell
stories for their own lives, American adults shape their
personal experiences to certain common narrative forms
that enjoy tremendous favor in American society, such as
stories of atonement (from sin to salvation), upward social
mobility (from rags to riches), personal emancipation
(from enslavement to freedom), and recovery (from illness,
addiction, or abuse to the full actualization of the good
inner self).
Although redemptive stories in American life foster
generative behavior and sustain hope for many adults, there
can sometimes be a dark side to redemption. In some cases,
redemptive narratives can border on self-righteousness
and arrogance. The hero of the story may feel that it is his
or her manifest destiny to transform or save the world in
some way, even when the world strongly resists. McAdams
explored the potentially dark side of redemption in his
recently published psychological biography George W. Bush
and the Redemptive Dream: A Psychological Portrait (Oxford
University Press, 2011). In the book McAdams argues that
President Bush’s personal narrative of redemption helped
him achieve political success and personal fulfillment, but
the same story also led directly and tragically to his decision
to launch a preemptive military invasion of Iraq.