The social and cultural psychology of honour: What have we learned from researching honour in Turkey?

ABSTRACT

A growing literature in social and cultural psychology has examined cultures of honour primarily focusing on southern states in the United States and on Mediterranean countries of southern Europe. In this article, we review a programme of research that has extended theories of cultures of honour to an under-researched context: Turkey. We first describe research that assessed lay reports of the situations that enhance or attack a person’s honour and lay prototypes of honour. Next, we review research that built on this foundation and examined emotional implications, actual retaliatory responses, and preferences for different types of actions (e.g., attack vs. withdrawal) in the face of honour threats. We then briefly comment on our current research focused on the ways that honour threats can impede goal pursuit, on the distinction between different types of honour threats, and on acculturation processes in immigrant groups from cultures of honour. We conclude by highlighting the contributions of this programme of research to the literature on cultures of honour and discuss future directions.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture of honour
• retaliation
• threat
• emotion
• prototypes

Notes

¹ We use the term “northern American” here and elsewhere in the paper to refer to northern United States and “northern Americans” to refer to participants recruited from the northern United States.

² We use “Turkish” not to refer to an ethnic group, but as a shortcut to refer to the samples that we worked with when conducting our studies in Turkey.

³ For example, American contexts have been shown to afford many more opportunities for self-enhancement than do Japanese contexts (e.g., Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakkunkit, 1997).

⁴ Namus is a term used to refer to sexual honour that presupposes certain physical and moral qualities that women are expected to have (Sev’er & Yurdakul, 2001), but the term is also used to denote a person’s trustworthiness and morality in a more general sense.

⁵ In the honour threat condition, the feedback was “This essay isn’t very persuasive, because I think this person just made this up and doesn’t really mean it. It’s easy [for someone’s parents] to say that you value honesty, but do you really live it out? I think this person is just trying to make himself/herself [his/her family] look good. Nobody [nobody’s family] is really like this.” In the neutral condition, the feedback was “Writing about our values is a difficult task. Most of the time, we hardly recognize what our [parents’] values are and how much they shape our ‘our parent’s] life [lives].”

⁶ However, see Rodriguez Mosquera et al. (2008) for the different types of insults that were identified in insults described in participants’ narratives; some focused on insults to competence, and others on interpersonal neglect.

⁷ The northern US participants rejected more offers than the Turkish participants overall, but this may be due to differences in income, cost of living, or other factors. Consequently, Gunsoy and colleagues focused on within-culture differences across conditions rather than cross-cultural differences.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by two National Science Foundation Grants, Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, #1451540 and #0646360 awarded to the authors and an Invitational Fellowship awarded to the first author by the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science [JSPS/OF357].