A price to pay: Turkish and Northern American retaliation for threats to personal and family honor (original) (raw)
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A price to pay: Turkish and American retaliation for threats to personal and family honor
2015
Two studies investigated retaliatory responses to actual honor threats among members of an honor culture (Turkey) and a dignity culture (northern U.S.). The honor threat in these studies was based on previous research which has shown that honesty is a key element of the conception of honor and that accusations of dishonesty are threatening to one’s honor. In both studies, participants wrote an essay describing the role of honesty in their lives and received feedback on their essay accusing them of being dishonest (vs. neutral feedback). Turkish participants retaliated more strongly than did northern U.S. participants against the person who challenged their honesty by assigning him/her to solve more difficult tangrams over easy ones (Study 1) and by choosing sensory tasks of a higher level of intensity to complete (Study 2). Study 2 added a relational honor condition, in which participants wrote about honesty in their parents’ lives and examined the role of individual differences in ...
Confrontation versus withdrawal: Cultural differences in responses to threats to honor
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 2013
This study compares evaluations by members of an honor culture (Turkey) and a dignity culture (northern USA) of honor threat scenarios, in which a target was the victim of either a rude affront or a false accusation, and the target chose to withdraw or confront the attacker. Turkish participants were more likely than American participants to evaluate positively the person who withdrew from the rude affront and the person who confronted the false accusation. Participants in both societies perceived that others in their society would endorse confrontation more than withdrawal in both types of scenarios, but this effect was larger for Turkish than American participants. Honor values were associated with evaluations of the targets most strongly among Turkish participants who read about a person who confronted their attacker. These findings provide insight into the role of cultural norms and individual differences in the ways honor influences behavior.
The social and cultural psychology of honour: What have we learned from researching honour in Turkey
European Review of Social Psychology , 2018
A growing literature in social and cultural psychology has examined cultures of honour primarily focusing on southern states in the United States and on Mediterranean countries of southern Europe. In this article, we review a programme of research that has extended theories of cultures of honour to an under-researched context: Turkey. We first describe research that assessed lay reports of the situations that enhance or attack a person’s honour and lay prototypes of honour. Next, we review research that built on this foundation and examined emotional implications, actual retaliatory responses, and preferences for different types of actions (e.g., attack vs. withdrawal) in the face of honour threats. We then briefly comment on our current research focused on the ways that honour threats can impede goal pursuit, on the distinction between different types of honour threats, and on acculturation processes in immigrant groups from cultures of honour. We conclude by highlighting the contributions of this programme of research to the literature on cultures of honour and discuss future directions.
Honor Bound: The Cultural Construction of Honor in Turkey and the Northern United States
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2012
The authors tested the hypotheses that Turkish and (Northern) American cultures afford different honor-relevant situations and different responses to these situations. In Study 1, the authors found that honor-attacking situations generated by American participants focused more on the individual than did situations generated by Turkish participants, whereas situations generated by Turkish participants focused more on close others and involved more references to an audience than did situations generated by American participants. Moreover, the situations most frequently generated by both groups tended to also differ in nature. In Study 2, new participants evaluated these situations for their impact on the self, close others, and acquaintances' feelings about their family. Turkish participants tended to evaluate situations as having greater impact on all targets than did American participants. Turkish participants also evaluated all situations to have a similar impact on their own feelings and close others' feelings about themselves, whereas Americans evaluated the situations to have more extreme impact on their own feelings than on the feelings of close others. Situations generated by Turkish participants were evaluated to have stronger impact on all targets.
Emotional responses to honour situations in Turkey and the northern USA
Cognition & Emotion, 2013
The main goal of the current research is to investigate emotional reactions to situations that implicate honor in Turkish and northern American cultural groups. In Studies 1a and 1b, participants rated the degree to which a variety of events fit their prototypes for honor-related situations. Both Turkish and American participants evaluated situations generated by their conationals as most central to their prototypes of honor-related situations. Study 2 examined emotional responses to Turkish or U.S.-generated situations that varied in centrality to the prototype. Highly central situations and Turkish-generated situations elicited stronger emotions than less central situations and U.S.-generated situations. Americans reported higher levels of positive emotions in response to honor-enhancing situations than did Turkish participants. These findings demonstrate that the prototypes of honor relevant situations differ for Turkish and northern American people, and that Turkish honor relevant situations are more emotion-laden than are northern American honor relevant situations.
Abstract Honor values articulate gender roles, the importance of reputation in maintaining one’s place in society, and maintaining respect for the groups one belongs to. In that sense honor provides a template for organizing social interactions and hence may be functional even among people and societies that do not report valuing and endorsing honor. We test the prediction that honor influences judgment and attention when activated in two experiments (N=538). Using a culture-as-situated cognition perspective, we predicted that activating one aspect of honor would activate other aspects, even among individuals who do not much endorse honor values. We tested these predictions among European Americans, a group that is not typically associated with honor values. In each study, participants were randomly assigned to experimental or control groups, which differed in one way: the experimental group read statements about honor values as a first step and the control group did not. Participants then judged stick-figure pairs (judging which is male; Study 1, n = 130) or made lexical decisions (judging whether a letter-string formed a correctly spelled word; Study 2, n = 408). In Study 1, experimental group participants were more likely to choose the visually agentic figure as male. In Study 2, experimental group participants were more accurate at noticing that the letter-string formed a word if the word was an honor-relevant word (e.g., noble), but they did not differ from the control group if the word was irrelevant to honor (e.g., happy). Participants in both studies were just above the neutral point in their endorsement of honor values. Individual differences in honor values endorsement did not moderate the effects of activating an honor mindset. Though honor is often described as if it is located in space, we did not find clear effects of where our letter strings were located on the computer screen. Our findings suggest a new way to consider how honor functions, even in societies in which honor is not a highly endorsed value.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Honor means having a good reputation (e.g., being known as an honest person) and self-respect (e.g., being proud of one's own competence). In honor cultures (e.g., Turkey, Southern U.S.), people are more sensitive to threats to their moral reputation (e.g., being called a liar) than in dignity cultures (e.g., Northern U.S.), and they respond more strongly to these threats to restore their damaged reputation. Taking a goal conflict approach, we propose that among members of honor cultures, restoration of honor in response to a morality threat can become a superordinate goal, and can result in the neglect or derailment of other goals. In two experiments (n = 941), participants from Turkey (a non-Western honor culture), the U.S. South (a Western honor culture), and the U.S. North (a dignity culture) received a morality threat (accusation of dishonesty), a competence threat (accusation of poor writing ability), or neutral feedback. As predicted, participants from honor cultures, but not the dignity culture, were more likely to delay their subsequent goals after receiving a threat to their moral reputation (vs. competence threat or neutral conditions; Study 1). Moreover, Turkish participants were more likely to display goal derailment after receiving a morality threat compared to a competence threat, but there was no difference in responses to the two types of threat among the U.S. Northerners or Southerners (Study 2). This research is the first to examine honor using a goal conflict framework and to conduct laboratory experiments in two honor cultures.
Shared Burdens, Personal Costs on the Emotional and Social Consequences of Family Honor
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2014
We present two studies on the consequences of threats to family honor. In Study 1, 99 Pakistanis (67 females, 30 males, 2 undisclosed) and 134 European-Americans (65 females, 69 males) reported a recent insult to their family where the offender was either a family or a nonfamily member. The insults targeted the family as collective or individual family members other than parents. Across targets, insults to one's family had more negative emotional (e.g., more intense anger, shame) and social (greater relationship strain) consequences for Pakistanis than for European-Americans. Study 2 examined whether these effects extend to insults to parents. Fifty-one Pakistanis (29 females, 22 males) and 58 European-Americans (30 females, 28 males) responded to an insult-to-parents or an insult-to-self scenario. Insults-to-parents and insultsto-self elicited similar emotional responses among Pakistanis. By contrast, European-Americans responded more negatively (e.g., more intense anger) to an insult-to-self than to an insult-toparents.
Emotional responses to honor situations in Turkey and the U.S
Cognition & Emotion, 2014
The main goal of the current research is to investigate emotional reactions to situations that implicate honor in Turkish and northern American cultural groups. In Studies 1a and 1b, participants rated the degree to which a variety of events fit their prototypes for honor-related situations. Both Turkish and American participants evaluated situations generated by their conationals as most central to their prototypes of honor-related situations. Study 2 examined emotional responses to Turkish or U.S.-generated situations that varied in centrality to the prototype. Highly central situations and Turkish-generated situations elicited stronger emotions than less central situations and U.S.-generated situations. Americans reported higher levels of positive emotions in response to honor-enhancing situations than did Turkish participants. These findings demonstrate that the prototypes of honor relevant situations differ for Turkish and northern American people, and that Turkish honor relevant situations are more emotion-laden than are northern American honor relevant situations.