The “culture of honor” hypothesis says that it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up but in terms of your ancestry
In the early 1990s, two psychologists at the University of Michigan — Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett — decided to conduct an experiment on the culture of honor. They decided to gather together a group of young men and insult them. The young men were between 18 and 20 years of age.
The experiment went like this. The social sciences building at the University of Michigan has a long, narrow hallway in the basement lined with filing cabinets. The young men were called into a classroom, one by one, and asked to fill out a questionnaire. Then they were told to drop off the questionnaire at the end of the hallway and return to the classroom — a simple, seemingly innocent academic exercise.
For half the young men, that was it. They were the control group. For the other half, there was a catch. As they walked down the hallway with their questionnaire, a man — a confederate of the experimenters — walked past them and pulled out a drawer in one of the filing cabinets. The already narrow hallway now became even narrower. As the young men tried to squeeze by, the confederate looked up, annoyed. He slammed the filing cabinet drawer shut, jostled the young men with his shoulder, and, in a low but audible voice, said the trigger word: “Asshole.”
After a battery of tests, they found that there were clear differences in how the young men responded to being called a bad name. The deciding factor in how they reacted was where they were from. The young men from the northern part of the United States mostly laughed off the incident, while those from the southern part were angry.
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behaviors that we cannot make sense of our world without them. While it is true that success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages (when and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were), it is equally true that the traditions and attitudes we inherit from our forebears can play the same role.