Understanding (un)willingness to coordinate with others, to compromise when faced with choices, or to apologize for transgressions is crucial as these behaviours can act as strong facilitators or inhibitors of important interpersonal processes such as negotiations, conflict management, and coalition building.
These behaviours occupy a significant role in how individuals from different cultural backgrounds in political, military, social, organizational, and community contexts work together to solve disputes or address joint challenges. Yet, we know little about what these behaviours mean in different cultural groups and how they are approached.
HONORLOGIC is investigating these social behaviours, which are fundamental to the tension between self-interest and collective welfare across a range of cultural groups. We are examining co-ordinating, compromising and apologizing as behaviours that may potentially imply weakness in certain contexts in relation to individual- and cultural-level honour endorsement.
Specifically, our research question is as follows:
How do cultural groups that promote honour as a core cultural value approach co-ordinating with others, reaching compromise, and offering apologies?
Project Goal
In HONORLOGIC we aim to initiate a step-change in our understanding of cultural variation in these important domains of social behaviour by providing unique, multimethod, comparative and converging evidence from a wide range of cultural groups that promote honour as a core cultural value.
Project Sites
Quantitative Data for Work Package 4 has been collected by HONORLOGIC team members in Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Spain and Turkey, as well as in Japan, Korea, the UK and the US to provide a broader comparative perspective.
Work Package 1: The Cultural Logic of Honour and Co-ordination
WP1 focuses on the role of honour in efficient co-ordination. Using co-ordination games routinely employed by economists to examine aspects of human co-ordination (see Cooper, 1999), we will test the role of honour in the extent to which individuals show willingness to co-ordinate to reach efficient outcomes and how they predict other individuals’ co-ordination behaviour.
Work Package 2: The Cultural Logic of Honour and Reaching Compromise in Decision-making
WP2 examines cultural group differences and similarities, and the role of honour in reaching a compromise. Using decision games and vignettes adopted from the behavioural economics and social psychological literature that involve making individual or joint decisions when presented with choice sets, we will examine how reaching a compromise reflects on one’s social image and how this results in choices made in situations where compromise is an option.
Work Package 3: The Cultural Logic of Honour and Offering Apologies for Interpersonal Transgressions
WP3 studies the offering of apologies for interpersonal transgressions as a potentially honour-damaging act. Using large-scale online data collection, we will examine how apologizing reflects on social image and the extent to which this social behaviour is endorsed by members of different cultural groups.
Work Package 4: Examining Group Differences in Social Orientation and Cognitive Style
WP4 examines social orientation and cognitive style among members of different honour cultures, and asks how similar or different they are to cultural groups that form the majority of the evidence base in cultural psychology. Using tasks designed to assess social orientation and cognitive style, we will identify aspects of social orientation and cognitive style that show a different pattern in cultural groups that promote a cultural logic of honour compared to other cultural groups.