Claim: The best way to understand the character of a society is to examine the character of the men and women that the society chooses as its heroes or its role models.Reason: Heroes and role models reveal a society's highest ideals.

The statement claims that the most efficient way to understand the quality of a society is via assessment of the men and women chosen as heroes or role models. The statement further reasons that this is because heroes and role models are highest ideals of a society. While by this method we can illustrate a significant share of the features of a society, it has its own drawbacks.

Assigning individuals as heroes, societies draw an ideal perspective of each member. In recognizing of heroes’ characteristics, we can effectively understand what are the values, hopes, priorities, and wants of a society. In Iran, the medicine society emulates Avicenna, in order to nurture its member toward the Iranian best example of a physician. Moreover, when we know that a society’s role model is Mohammadreza Shajarian, immediately we can attribute characteristics of Persian-traditional-music-fans to that society. The shared attributes among the fans of this music is that they venerate Persian literature, eastern rhythm, and so on.

However, such an approach has its own draw backs rendering it not the best way to qualify a society. First, as the reason holds true, heroes and role models are emanation of ideals. Thus, we can find out about the positive features through that method. The features of a society comprises positive, negative, and neutral forms. To find out about a desperate, hunger-plagued, or a poverty-plagued society, staring at the heroes’ features does not give a clue. Furthermore, when a society gets bigger, heroes and role models become so diverse that we cannot characterize the society by knowing them. Consider the society of youths in Iran. While there are young people who admire national heroes as such as Cyrus or Darius, others are praising Imam Hussein. Many of adolescents’ role models is Selena Gomez, Michael Jackson, and so on. If the only way was to consider the role models and heroes, we could never even put these youths in a united society. Hence in such a heterogeneous society, examining the heroes, fails to help us discover the societies’ qualities.

Finally, there are many other ways that can, if not better, equally help us to characterize a society. Disordered societies can be recognized by observing the behavior of people during driving time; anxious society can be determined by the hospital’s reports of anxious attacks. By the help of history we can understand that, for instance, Japan’s society is stoical one. After the atomic bomb, Japanese tried so hard and build better and bigger cities on the ashes of the older ones.

In short, as discussed above, in any sociological study, via recognizing pertaining heroes and role models, we can have access to values and many positive features of a society. But it is not the best way as negative features could not be extracted from this approach and furthermore it is inconsistent with the big heterogeneous societies.