HONORLOGIC · The Cultural Logic of Honor and Social Interaction: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Understanding (un)willingness to coordinate with others, to compromise when faced with different 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 and coalition building. These behaviors play a major role when individuals from different cultural backgrounds work together to solve disputes or address joint challenges. Yet, we know little about what these behaviors mean in different cultural groups or how they are approached. With HONORLOGIC, I aim to initiate a step-change in our understanding of cultural variation in these important domains of social behavior by providing unique, multimethod, comparative and converging evidence from a wide range of cultural groups. I will answer the question “How do cultural groups that promote honor as a core cultural value approach coordinating with others, reaching compromise, and offering apologies?” by integrating insights from social/cultural psychology, behavioral economics, and anthropology. I will 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 honor has been shown to play a defining role in individuals’ social worlds. I will also run the proposed studies in the US, the UK, Japan and Korea to provide a broader comparative perspective. HONORLOGIC will produce transformative evidence for theories of social interaction and decision making in psychology, economics, and evolutionary science by (a) producing innovative theory and data with an interdisciplinary and multi-method approach, (b) increasing the diversity of the existing evidence pool, (c) testing established theoretical assumptions in new cultural groups, and (d) contributing to capacity building in under-researched cultural groups in psychological research.