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).
