Honor as a Cultural Mindset

Cross-cultural literature typically distinguishes low-honor from high-honor societies, in which honor values are highly endorsed in the latter societies. Individuals who endorse honor values care about their own and their social groups’ social image. They highly value behavior (e.g. by being loyal, trustworthy, and protecting one’s honor) that enhances a positive social image and reputation. As these values highlight the universal necessity of connecting with others and preserving one’s social group, honor values are likely to be comprehensible not only for individuals in high-honor societies, but also for those in low-honor societies. The Culture as Situated Cognition Theory (Oyserman, 2017) articulates that honor may be a cultural mindset, a universally available knowledge network, which can be activated by subtle environmental cues, even if honor is not chronically activated or highly endorsed.

In this presentation I will first show how an honor mindset can be activated by means of responding to statements, open-ended questions, and reading a short story. Next, I will show how an activated honor mindset has downstream consequences on gender judgments, moral reasoning, and anger communication. In a study with European American college students, activating an honor mindset increased judging visually agentic figures as male. In a study with American adults and Dutch college students, activating an honor mindset

increased participants’ moral clarity – i.e. deciding what is morally right and wrong. In a study with Dutch adolescents, activating an honor mindset increased participants’ direct anger communication styles. Theoretical and practical implications of honor mindsets will be discussed.