The Gallup polls of the men and women we most admire didn’t help us answer that question

By Herbert Rothschild

By 2020, the Gallup Poll had been asking the U.S. public every year since 1948 to name the men and women they most admire. Since then, no new results have been released, although Gallup hasn’t officially said it’s stopped conducting the poll.

I found those poll results mildly interesting, but I won’t be unhappy if it doesn’t resume. As a story in People magazine noted when the 2018 results came out, they are best viewed as a measure of name recognition. In most years, the most admired man was the incumbent U.S. president and the most admired woman was the first lady.

So, the poll results weren’t a particularly good gauge of what we admire in our fellow human beings. Dwight Eisenhower, who topped the list in all eight years of his presidency, got named No. 1 by more than 30% of respondents, but no one else ever scored that high. In 2020, 18% of respondents ranked incumbent President Donald Trump No. 1 and 15% ranked his predecessor Barack Obama No. 1. That almost equal division between persons of extremely different values and decorum probably reflect our increased political division, not disagreement about what is admirable in a human being.

Possibly countering the implications of those results was the frequent appearance of spiritual leaders lower down the list of 10. Billy Graham made the list 61 times, the most anyone did. Popes and the Dalai Lama also appeared repeatedly. And it may be significant that both Eleanor Roosevelt and Michelle Obama topped the list of most admired women even after their husbands’ terms ended.

It’s of interest to me whether quality in a human life is a meaningful concept and whether differences in quality are discernible to others.

There is some culture-boundedness to the prescriptions for an estimable life that one finds in classic texts like Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” and Confucius’s “Analects.” For instance, humility and deference to authority are prized differently from culture to culture. But there is far more cross-cultural agreement than moral relativists acknowledge. Traits like honesty, generosity, courage, fairness, and kindness to children are widely prized. That isn’t surprising. The basic requirements of social life — and we humans are social animals — pressure us toward certain kinds of conduct, and people who display them almost inevitably are appreciated.

In 2004, psychologists Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson published “Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification.” They intended it as a positive companion to psychiatry’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” They listed six “core virtues” they considered cross-culturally valid. Four of them were the classical virtues — Wisdom, Temperance, Fortitude and Justice. They derived the other two, Humanity and Transcendence, from other sources.

Peterson and Seligman specified “strengths” within each of the six core virtues, 24 in all. For instance, Humanity encompasses the Christian virtue of caritas (various forms of lovingkindness) and the Buddhist virtue of compassion. Also specified within it is social intelligence — being aware of the motives, feelings and needs of others and oneself, plus navigating varying social situations skillfully.

Transcendence is something of a grab bag: Appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope (positive expectation and working for good outcomes), humor and a sense of being connected with something larger than one’s ego-self.

Later, Peterson and Seligman developed a diagnostic tool, a questionnaire, to assess a person’s strengths. It’s called the VIA Classification of Character Strengths, VIA standing for Values in Action. At the website of the VIA Institute on Character, anyone can take the questionnaire, which is called the “survey,” without charge. You simply register and it comes up. There is one survey for youths and another for adults.

The site says that nearly 35 million people have taken the survey and “Discovered Their Strengths and Unlocked Greater Self-Awareness, Confidence, and Well-Being.” I infer from other parts of the site that the survey is used by businesses and professionals as part of their work.

I took the survey. One can complete it in about 10 minutes. The questions are all very affirmative, such as, “I always speak up when I hear people say something mean,” or “People can count on me to keep my promises.” And the five-degree scale — “very much like me” to “very unlike me” — is always presented with “very much like me” first. So, it strikes me that it’s easy to come out looking like a fine person. Were I an employer, I wouldn’t use it in hiring.

I’d be interested in hearing from others who’ve taken the survey, and especially from those who’ve used it in their work, what they thought of it.

Lest I commit a category error, I’ll point out that the survey doesn’t ask about personal achievements. When we’re asked to name those we admire, however, we usually think of people of high achievement, not people of good character. Actually, we often don’t know what kind of persons they were, and I’m not sure it matters much if we do.

It’s in my mind that Caravaggio had a dangerously violent temper, that Isaac Newton was vindictive and jealous of rivals, that Richard Wagner was self-centered and anti-Semitic, that Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly cheated on his wife, and that Steve Jobs often berated his employees. True or not, I admire them all. There’s a difference between being great and being good. We admire the former; hopefully, we imitate the latter.

The world is fortunate that some people are both great and good. That’s what Ben Jonson said of William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, for many years Queen Elizabeth I’s leading minister, “Cecil, the grave, the wise, the great, the good.” He concludes the poem by asking rhetorically, with such an example before us, who wouldn’t wish to be in public service?

Perhaps Gallup stopped its annual polling because the man most likely to come out on top now is neither to be admired nor emulated.

Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear Fridays. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected].