In this Moral Cultures series, I talk about different patterns of morality. These are defined by what people praise and condemn, which wrongs they consider most serious, and how they respond to them. I focus on three main patterns: Honor culture, dignity culture, and victimhood culture. I’ve also addressed a fourth pattern: Face culture.
This entry considers a social psychological experiment on honor culture.
It was published as “Insult, Aggression, and the Southern Culture of Honor: An Experimental Ethnography” by Dov Cohen, Richard E. Nisbett, Brian F. Bowdle, and Norbert Schwartz.
The authors start with the premise that the American South has a higher homicide rate than the North because it has a stronger honor culture.
Yes, it’s also home to the Black Belt — but white Southerners still have higher rates than white Northerners.
Nisbett and Cohen have a book on this subject, exploring the historical roots of Southern honor in things like Scots Irish traditions and the weaker legal system of the plantation South. This is the region where most American duels were fought, with dueling continuing among the planter class long after the practice had been snuffed out in the North.
Honor culture may have faded since the days of dueling, but there’s evidence that white Southerners remain more honor-oriented than white Northerners.
…southern white males were not more likely to endorse statements about violence in general ("Many people only learn through violence"), they were more willing to endorse violence when it was used to protect ("A man has the right to kill to defend his house") or to answer an affront (approving of a man punching a stranger who "was drunk and bumped into the man and his wife on the street"). Southern white males were also more likely to stigmatize men, described in brief scenarios, who did not respond with violence, criticizing them for being "not much of a man" if they failed to fight or shoot the person who challenged or affronted them.
The experiment was to see how differently Southerners and Northerners responded to provocation. As is common in social psychology, the participants were all college students — in this case, white male college students at the University of Michigan. The 173 students were divided into 111 Northerners and 62 Southerners. To make the groups more comparable, they limited their Northerners to those from outside Michigan, so that both groups were out-of-state students. They also limited the sample to non-Hispanics and non-Jews.
The experimenters used deception to create a realistic stimulus. Students were told they were being recruited for an experiment to measure their performance on tasks. They were asked to give saliva samples so as to measure their blood sugar, and then to fill out a questionnaire. Then they were told to go down the hall and drop off the questionnaire on a table.
As the participant walked down the hall, a confederate of the experimenter walked out of a door marked "Photo Lab" and began working at a file cabinet in the hall. The confederate had to push the file drawer in to allow the participant to pass by him and drop his paper off at the table. As the participant returned seconds later and walked back down the hall toward the experimental room, the confederate (who had reopened the file drawer) slammed it shut on seeing the participant approach and bumped into the participant with his shoulder, calling the participant an "asshole." The confederate then walked back into the "Photo Lab."
Some participants got bumped and insulted privately, with no one else there. Some got bumped and insulted in the presence of two observers, supposedly other participants in the study. And the control group didn’t get bumped and insulted at all.
After the bump-and-insult, the experimenter explained that the procedure involved doing mechanical tasks while receiving electric shocks, and that the participants were asked to decide their own voltage level. The experimenter also took another saliva sample. Then the subject filled out a questionnaire and gave yet another saliva sample.
They never actually got shocked, since the real point of asking them to pick voltage was just to see how much the participant was trying to show off his bravery. And the real purpose of the saliva samples was not to measure blood sugar, but to test levels of the hormones testosterone (associated with aggression) and cortisol (associated with stress).
It turns out that whether the subjects were bumped and insulted privately or publicly didn’t have much effect on either of these. The authors speculate it’s because the only observers were two strangers that the participant wasn’t likely to see again.
But when the experimenters compared bumped to not bumped at all, they found that Southerners experienced a bigger increase in both testosterone and cortisol.
As may be seen in Figure I, cortisol levels rose 79% for insulted southerners and 42% for control southerners. They rose 33% for insulted northerners and 39% for control northerners….
As may be seen in Figure 2, testosterone levels rose 12% for insulted southerners and 4% for control southerners. They rose 6% for insulted northerners and 4% for control northerners….
The bump-and-insult stimulus didn’t have any effect on what level of shock the subjects were willing to request for themselves — though Southerners did ask for significantly higher shocks when they were asked in the presence of other people than when they were asked privately.
If all this is accurate, it shows the way that our physiological reactions are conditioned by moral culture. Which shouldn’t be surprising — other visceral reactions, like what foods you find gross, are also shaped by culture. Still, I find it fascinating to think that Southerners really feel insults more than Northerners.
All this is also relevant to the argument that speech should be censored because it causes real physiological stress. For instance, in a 2017 article Lisa Feldman Barett suggested that offensive speech be classified as violence because it raises stress hormones, and stress can be physically damaging.
But to the extent people can be taught to have stress reactions, or to have greater or lesser ones, emphasizing the harmful effects of speech might actually exacerbate the problem it is meant to solve. And not teaching people to take slights so seriously could help the stress problem without censorship.
As is common in social psych, Cohen and colleagues report several different experiments in the same article. The other experiment I find most interesting used 148 subjects (88 northern, 60 southern). The procedure was the same —having a confederate bump into and insult the subject—but the dependent variable was different.
After the participant was bumped or not bumped, he continued walking down the long hallway. Another confederate—who was 6 ft 3 in. (1.91 m) and 250 lbs (114 kg)—appeared around the corner and began walking toward the participant at a good pace. The hall was lined with tables, so there was room for only one person to pass without the other person giving way. The new confederate walked down the center of the hall on a collision course with the participant and did not move (except at the last second to avoid another bumping).
In essence, we set up a "chicken" game similar to that played by American teenagers who drive at each other in their cars…. The main dependent variable in this "chicken" game was the distance at which the participant decided to "chicken out" or give way to our confederate. We expected insulted southern participants to respond aggressively to the challenge and go farthest in this "game.”
The result was that insult had no effect on Northerners, but significantly reduced the distance at which the Southerners yielded to the confederate.
Also interesting is that non-insulted Southerners more quickly yielded to the passerby than did Northerners. The authors say this is consistent with the idea that Southerners are generally more polite than Northerners—until they’re offended.
This study is nearly thirty years old. Since then, we’ve learned that a great deal of research in social psychology fails to replicate. I haven’t yet found any attempt to replicate this study—comments are open if you know of something and want to share—so adjust your confidence in the results accordingly.
I do think these findings are prima facie more plausible than some of the casualties of the replication crisis. Priming and stereotype threat always seemed a bit like voodoo to me. But if you’ve read much about violence, or just been around the block a few times yourself, you know that bumping into someone and calling him an asshole can have real consequences.
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This post is part of a series considering aspects of moral culture. Prior posts include:
East Asian Edition (Face culture)
East Asian Edition II (Victimhood in Korea)
You may also be interested in Bradley Campbell and I’s book: The Rise of Victimhood Culture.