The Cultural Logic of Honor and Social Interaction: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Project Information

HONORLOGIC

Grant agreement ID: 817577

DOI

10.3030/817577

Project closed

EC signature date 5 April 2019

Start date 1 September 2019

End date 28 February 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 998 693,75

EU contribution

€ 1 998 693,75

Coordinated by

THE UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - HONORLOGIC (The Cultural Logic of Honor and Social Interaction: A Cross-Cultural Comparison)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-02-29

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Understanding (un)willingness to coordinate with others, to compromise when faced with choices, or to apologize for transgressions is crucial as these behaviors can act as strong facilitators or inhibitors of important interpersonal processes such as negotiations, conflict management, and coalition building. These behaviors occupy a significant role in how individuals from different cultural backgrounds in political, military, social, organizational, and community contexts work together to solve disputes or address joint challenges. Yet, we know little about what these behaviors mean in different cultural groups and how they are approached.

HONORLOGIC aims to initiate a step-change in our understanding of cultural variation within these important domains of social behaviour by providing unique, multimethod, comparative and converging evidence from a wide range of cultural groups that promote honour as a core cultural value. Specifically, in HONORLOGIC we ask the question: “How do cultural groups that promote honour as a core cultural value approach coordinating with others, reaching compromise, and offering apologies?” We do this by collecting quantitative data using economic games, experiments, and surveys from Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Egypt and Tunisia, as cultural groups where honour (albeit in different forms) has been shown to be a value deeply ingrained in individuals’ social worlds. We also run the proposed studies in the US, the UK, Japan and Korea to provide a broader comparative perspective.

In addition, HONORLOGIC aims to examine the assumption that members of cultures that promote a cultural logic of honour display interdependent social orientation and holistic cognitive tendency (i.e. have a view of self as interdependent, socially connected, and embedded within the social context, to endorse an interdependent social orientation associated with harmony, relatedness, and connection, and to process information holistically) and compares them with a subgroup of cultures where other cultural values than honour (e.g. dignity, face) are more salient, and also form the majority of the evidence base in cultural psychology (Western, East Asian regions).

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

As this project relies on new data collection from 12 different countries across the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdowns have caused significant delays to our progress on the project. In spite of this disruption, we have managed to successfully complete data collection and analyses for Work Package 4 based on a study examining views of self, social orientation, and cognitive style (using a battery of nine different tasks) as well as honour, face, and dignity values and concerns in 12 sites in 8 different languages (Japan, Korea, US, UK, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus [South & North], Lebanon, Egypt), recruiting 4,897 participants.

Analyses of this dataset has so far revealed results that challenge the long-standing assumption that individuals from all non-Western regions would exhibit an interdependent orientation in their self-views, relationships with others and cognitive styles just as has been observed to be the case in studies with participants from the East Asian regions. Our data suggest that individuals from the Mediterranean region show a greater similarity with participants from the Western (US, UK) compared with participants from East Asian (Japan, Korea) regions and that on some measures they exhibit even greater independence than do Western participants.

These findings have stimulated debate about regional similarities and differences in the psychological literature that has traditionally been largely restricted to comparisons between Western and East Asian regions. Moreover, our findings challenge the assumption that the Mediterranean region can easily be classified as an honour region by demonstrating varied patterns in the regional endorsement of honour values/concerns (i.e. Mediterranean cultures do not form a homogenous unit in their endorsement of cultural values) and by highlighting that the observed patterns depend on the type of construct and how it is measured.

Finally, capitalising on the large selection of samples from the Mediterranean region, we analysed groups that vary along ethnic, religious, and linguistic lines and demonstrated that when social groups bear similarities to one another in terms of their self-views, social orientation, and cognitive style, this is less to do with background characteristics such as ethnicity and religion and more to do with their interactions within a shared socio-ecological environment. The insights gained in the initial work package of the project contribute foundational knowledge which will be essential for use in the upcoming work packages as well as the project's methodological grounding. We are currently working on Work Package 3 where we study the role of honour in offering and receiving apologies circum-Mediterranean, East Asia, and the West.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

HONORLOGIC examines for the first time three social behaviours fundamental to the tension between self-interest and collective welfare (coordinating, compromising, apologising) across a wide selection of cultural groups in relation to honour value endorsement at the individual and cultural level. As such, it moves away from the study of interpersonal retaliation which has dominated the social psychological literature on honour and opens up new directions in this field of research.

It is built on the premise that individuals from cultures that promote honour as a core value are particularly sensitive to events that may imply weakness, and that they might experience apologies, compromise, and coordination/cooperation as potentially damaging behaviours to their social image. Project findings will contribute to the anthropological literature on honour by examining different facets of the construct in a variety of contexts, systematically linking it to previously untapped interpersonal outcomes.

Furthermore, it will highlight honour as a meaningful variable for the study of cultural variation in processes commonly examined in political science (e.g. intercultural disputes) and economics (e.g. economic development as a coordination problem). In addition, the project tests the assumption that members of cultures that promote honour as a core cultural value (e.g. cultures circum-Mediterranean) would exhibit interdependent features in their social orientation and cognitive style, just as has been shown with individuals in East Asian cultural groups that promote a cultural logic of face which emphasise not losing face through pursuing humility and ingroup harmony. Yet, there is reason to predict that cultural groups that promote a logic of honour may not follow a monolithic pattern of social orientation and cognitive style (i.e. as either interdependent or independent) as honour is about having both a positive self-image and a positive social-image and is implicated by the social image of the relationships and groups to which individuals belong.

HONORLOGIC examines these untested assumptions by gathering evidence from different measures of self-views, social orientation and cognitive style in groups that endorse different cultural logics. This research helps HONORLOGIC produce data from understudied and underrepresented regions of the world and put the Mediterranean region on the map of psychological literature. By the end of the project, we expect to have a much deeper understanding of the cultural underpinnings that play a role in social interactional processes.

Finally, HONORLOGIC has become a resource hub for researchers around the world via its activities, which so far include a growing archive of ecological, social, and political indices, published social science articles that use honour as a theoretical framework, and a monthly webinar hosting honour researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds. Through these resources, the project promotes research in understudied regions of the world and honour-related social science research and connects researchers from different parts of the world.