Views on Honour

Honour is a concern for reputation which includes fitting in with
- gender norms
- moral norms
- social conventions (legitimate social sanctions e.g., violating traffic laws or not paying taxes)
and it extends to one's family, friends and immediate social groups. For a person to have honour, he/she must be bestowed honour by others, and so he/she must show/prove others that he/she behaves in line with gender norms, moral norms and other social conventions.

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The key element of cultures of honour that people are concerned with reputation have evolved in places where 1) a man’s resources can be thieved by other men, 2) the governing body is weak and thus cannot punish theft (historically, the herding culture operating outside of formal government). 

According the Nisbett and colleagues (e.g., Nisbett & Cohen, 1996), a system of order that commonly develops under these circumstances is the unwritten "rule of retaliation".

This is a nice sentence that I like:

I argue that current models or the development and maintenance of cultures of honor and violence can be informed by an evolutionary psychological perspective.

References

Shackelford, T. (2005). An evolutionary psychological perspective on cultures of honour. Evolutionary Psychology, 3, 381-391.

There is a nice review of previous empirical work.

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"A culture of honor might describe the collective lowering of individual men's responding to insults with violence "

The author also associates the reason for why a culture of honor continues in the south may be related to 1) a culture of honor might be the output of psychological processes that evolved in response to the adaptive problem of mate retention.

Therefore, it may be interesting to see if wife infidelity is higher in the south than the north of US. Regional differences in recent wifely infidelity rates might help to account for the persistence of the southern culture of honor to the present.