Moral Violation and Honour 4

Further work, however, needs to be done to examine some unanswered questions. For example, the question of whether masculine and feminine honor represent gender-specific applications of moral codes could be examined more directly, by asking questions about behavior appropriate to men and women and its impact on the honor of another person who is male or female. Also, it remains to be seen what happens when different forms of honor are pitted against each other. Will all cultures still rank integrity as highly when, for example, being honest will damage the family reputation? Focusing on dilemmas rather than on situations where only one norm is active might increase the applicability of these results to actual moral behavior in difficult situations.

Integrity is most compatible with the view of an autonomous individual, whereas each of the other honor subtypes involves adherence to a social role, whether gender or family. Furthermore, the specific traits that underpin integrity—honesty and trustworthiness—are also related to fairness, which is a concern of autonomy ethics. For these reasons, integrity honor should show a connection to the autonomy moral code (Hypothesis S2).

Moral Violations and Honour - The Case of Honesty as a Moral Foundation 3

http://www.polipsych.com/2010/12/07/the-case-for-honesty-as-a-moral-foundation/

The Case for Honesty as a Moral Foundation

I was immediately attracted to Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) due to the utility of breaking down partisan and policy differences into questions of what one values.  The idea that different people believe in different moral principles is one of those obvious ideas that is yet still under appreciated in every day life, where we attribute differences to ignorance, stupidity, or evil, rather than to underlying value differences.

However, I have never been convinced that there are specifically five foundations or even that the idea of thinking of moral concerns as categorically ‘foundational’ is better than thinking of them in some other less categorical way.  Fortunately, those that originally conceived of Moral Foundations Theory do not require such homogenous thinking and even welcome the idea that the five foundation model is likely to undergo changes.  I have outlined a few changes I would make previously, as well as the criteria that one might use to posit a new moral category.  Even if one does not believe in the categorical distinction that some moral concerns are ‘foundations’, while others are not, it would seem clear that some moral concerns are more common, distinct, and important.  I would now like to make that case for honesty.

Honesty is common.

One of the distinctive traits of MFT is the evolutionary focus.  People moralize various things (e.g. eating pork or driving while using a cellphone) in various cultures, but the purpose is to identify those moral concerns that appear cross-culturally and have an innate quality.  Innate, in this instance, means “organized ahead of experience”, such that people can make intuitive judgments beyond their socialization.  Put more concretely, if concern about honesty is innate and universal, one might expect individuals to be able to intuitively signal and detect honesty in others, as this study, where participants are fairly successful in figuring out who will cooperate or cheat, shows.  The idea that concern about honesty is universal enough that one might posit an evolutionary story is almost self-evident, but this paper provides evolutionary models about how honesty might evolve.  If one subscribes to the evolution of groups that out-compete other groups, one can witness the evolution of honesty in modern society as nations that have low levels of corruption tend to have better economies than countries with high levels of corruption, mirroring the evolutionary processes theorized.

Honesty is distinct.

The same paper I cited above has some evidence for this, but from the perspective of Moral Foundations Theory, it would be useful to show that honesty is distinct from other moral concerns.  We asked users on YourMorals 4 questions about honesty (alpha=.69, .76 if we remove the relevance question) in addition to the standardMoral Foundations Questionnaire that measures the existing five foundational concerns.  Factor analyses tell the same story, but examining the correlations tells the story more simply.  Specifically, the highest correlation between endorsement of honesty and any other foundation is .31 (with Purity), while all other foundations have fairly high inter-correlations with other foundations (e.g. Purity/Authority/Ingroup inter-correlate >.5, Harm/Fairness inter-correlation = .57).  Concern about honesty is empirically distinct from other moral concerns.

Honesty is important.

The pragmatic utility of using the moral foundations to predict ideological differences is perhaps the primary contribution of MFT to date.  Are questions about honesty also pragmatically useful?

On a 7 point scale, those who are more conservative endorse questions about honesty more than those who are liberal, but the amount of variance in political attitudes predicted by endorsement of honesty is smaller, though significant, compared to other foundations (beta = .10 vs. other foundations which range from .12 (ingroup) to .33 (purity)).  However, if we look at economic conservatism, we do find that endorsing honesty does predict identification as being economically conservative (beta = .13) as well as authority, ingroup & purity concerns (betas = .10, .09, &.11).

I looked at some political attitude variables and the predictive power of endorsing honesty was not impressive.  However, endorsement of honesty is a strong negative predictor (in a regression equation, including the other five foundations) of psychopathy (beta = -.23) and utilitarianism (beta = -.26, e.g. willingness to sacrifice one life to save five others).  Measurement of endorsement of honesty may have important pragmatic utility, but not for political outcomes.

- Ravi Iyer

Moral Violation and Honour 2

More specifically, in Hindu and Persian cultures, the particular term ‘‘izzat’’
(meaning honor, reputation, dignity, and respect, etc.) guides social relationships
and interaction between individuals (Encarta, 2009). Izzat is a multidimensional
construct that can be experienced in different types of relationships at various
contextual levels: society and culture (macro-level), intergroup boundary and
court proceeding (exo-level), community and family (meso-level), and intrapersonal
and interpersonal relationships (micro-level). It embodies moral principle of
honoring one’s existence and relationship with others via behaviors or actions
such as harmonizing personal goal/s especially with one’s family and extended
family.
Specifically, Roy (1999) notes that ‘‘a family’s izzat must be preserved at all
costs and increased whenever possible. And if the honour of the family’s women is
lost, so also is the family’s entire public position’’ (p. 427). Unlike male honor
(dynamic), female honor is often viewed as a static attribute and ‘‘once it is lost is
lost forever’’ (Payton, 2011, p. 69). Miss Banaz Mahmod became a victim of the
loss of this sense of static honor. The story also reflects the dark side of ‘‘face honor
and face restoration’’ strategy.
The concept of izzat corresponds with the term ‘‘communal face concern’’
mentioned in the conflict Face Negotiation Theory (FNT; Ting-Toomey, 1988, 2005;
Ting-Toomey & Kurogi, 1998). At this level, people in a conflict situation are
concerned about saving-face and face restoration with the extended family and
the larger ingroup community. FNT theoretically assumes among other things
that (1) ‘‘people in all cultures try to maintain and negotiate face in all
communication situations,’’ (2) ‘‘the concept of face is especially problematic in
emotionally vulnerable situations (such as embarrassment, request or conflict
situations) when the situated identities of the communicators are called into
question,’’ and (3) ‘‘the cultural variability dimensions, in conjunction with
individual (e.g., self-construal), relational (e.g., intimacy, status, ingroup/outgroup),
and situational (e.g., topical salience) factors influence the use of particular facework
behaviors in particular cultural scenes’’ (Ting-Toomey, 2005, p. 73). Different face
needs and face wants, namely: autonomy, inclusion/fellowship, status, reliability,
competence, and moral face also directly or indirectly influence individual’s facework
strategies.
Individuals who have greater face needs for communal inclusion, status, and moral
face are likely to seek social approval, reputation, and respect and honor from others
as compared to those who have personal autonomy face needs. Honor killings are the
extreme manifestations of these communal face desires, and facework strategies
are often needed to recoup damaged family shame and community honor. Given
the general and contextual benefits of multilevel theorizing (see Oetzel, Dhar, &
Kirschbaum, 2007), the SEP is discussed first and then applied to the case of killing
Miss Banaz Mahmod in the name of honor in the UK.


Dorjee, T., Baig, N., & Ting-Toomey, S. (2013). A social ecological perspective on understanding “honor killing”: An intercultural moral dilemma. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 42(1), 1-21.

Moral violations and Honour 1

Virtuous Violence

GYW assert that aversion to harm is a core aspect
of the cognitive template for moral judgment. The
notion that moral judgments are geared toward the
avoidance of harm is found in most prominent theories
of moral judgment (Haidt, 2007; Hauser, 2006;
Mikhail, 2007; Turiel, 1983). Within these theories,
support for violence can only be interpreted as a moral
violation, an error in moral performance, the influence
of a competing moral foundation, or a necessary evil
toward bringing about a greater good. In contrast, Rai
and Fiske (2011) argued that people often judge—and
feel—that it is good to do violence to others: People
believe that in many cases hurting or killing others is
not simply justifiable, it is absolutely, fundamentally
virtuous. People feel that violence is moral when the
violence sustains an important social relationship.
And in virtually every culture, cultural norms obligate
everyone to hurt or kill certain others when the
violence is necessary to protect crucial relationships.
In short, in many situations, people regard pain and
death as good, and indeed morally necessary.
It should go without saying that we offer
this as a descriptive scientific theory of virtuous
violence—obviously we are not making a prescriptive
recommendation for violence. We ourselves abhor all
violence; butmost people inmost cultures regardmuch
violence as morally good. Examples include killing in
wartime, torture, vengeance, honor-related violence,
lover’s quarrels, violent punishment of disobedience,
retributive justice, circumcision and excision, initiation
rites, self-flagellation, suicides motivated by shame or
guilt, violence committed under orders, execution, ethnic
cleansing, hate crimes, drone assassinations, human
sacrifice, headhunting, and violence committed by
gods and heroes. Acts of morally motivated violence
are not merely tolerated; they have often been celebrated
as spectacle, such as in the picnics at hangings
during the 18th and 19th centuries. Sometimes the people
involved perceive the harm they inflict as an unfortunate
but necessary means to an overriding end, but often
they perceive the harm as an intrinsically good end
in itself. Virtuous violence can be morally satisfying.
None of this is to say that committing violence
comes easy. Like many moral acts, committing violence
toward another human being can be difficult,
requiring training, social support and modeling, effort,
practice, and experience before it becomes second nature.
As with many difficult moral practices other than
committing violence, people often resist or fail to do
what is morally required of them, even when they have
no doubt about whether they should do it. When people
do commit moral violence to others, they often feel
guilt, shame, remorse, sadness, nausea, or horror because
of antiviolence motives that operate alongside
the moral violence motives. But the fact that people
have competing motives to refrain from violence, yet
often overcome those motives to achieve virtuous violence,
does not make their violence any the less moral.
It just means that humans are complex creatures, with
many motives pushing in different directions.
One potential argument against our proposed conceptualization
Of importance, Relationship Regulation Theory suggests
that the extent to which a character trait is moralized
will depend on the relationship within which it is
considered. For example, judging someone to be indecisive
or unintelligent will take on more moral weight
when the person being judged is a leader in a hierarchy.
How might we test the social-relational hypothesis
of intention, character, and moral judgment? One
approach would be to examine whether the difference
between moral judgments of intentional and accidental
moral violations can be predicted based on the judgment
of the relationship value of the actor. For example,
Young and Saxe (2011) have already demonstrated
that intention plays less of a role in purity violations,
such as incest, than in harm violations, such
as feeding peanuts to someone with a peanut allergy.
We hypothesize that whereas Young and Saxe found
that disgust, experienced emotion, perceived control,
perceived knowledge, and perceived intent failed to account
for differences in the role of intention in moral
judgments of harm versus purity violations, differences
in the extent to which participants view the relevant
social relationship as irreparable will predict these differences.
Thus, accidentally feeding peanuts to your
cousin who has a peanut allergy does not necessarily
ruin the relationship, whereas accidentally having incestual
sex with her does. Another approach would be
to investigate the role of relationship value directly.
Will the difference in moral judgments of intentional
versus accidental actions be reduced in cases where the
value of the existing relationship is lower, such as when
dealing with undesirable strangers low in warmth and
competence (Harris&Fiske, 2006) or people who cannot
stop themselves from committing the same transgression
in the future? In the context of intoxication,
will stronger beliefs that alcohol reveals true character
predict more severe judgment of accidental violations?
Finally, will priming different relational models (e.g.,
authority ranking vs. market pricing) lead to different
valuation of character traits (e.g. decisiveness vs.
frugality)?

Gray, K., Young, L., & Waytz, A. (2012). Mind perception is the essence of morality. Psychological Inquiry, 23(2), 101-124.

honour, public reputation and compliance with group norms

http://yannigroth.com/2014/05/24/a-new-cultural-construct-tightness-looseness-of-societies/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tightness-and-looseness-a-new-way-to-understand-differences-across-the-50-united-states/

"collectivist cultures revolve around face, honour and public reputation"

people "often rely on social coercion via threats and rewards to one's public reputation to ensure compliance with group norms" (Ahuvia, 2002)

When Sexist Attitudes Serve A Reputation Function: Perspectives from Honour Cultures

Kent Graduate Festival

3 min Presentation title:

When Sexist Attitudes Serve A Reputation Function: Perspectives from Honour Cultures

Poster Presentation:

Cultural Honour Beliefs and Judgments of Gender Norm Violators

DISSERTATION - SIMILAR IDEA ABOUT HONOUR'S SUBTLE CONSEQUENCES!

Some forms of overt retaliation, such as sabotage,
assault, and theft, however, are low-base-rate phenomena
that are difficult to study. Moreover, focusing
only on overt forms of getting even can overlook
other retaliatory behavior that also interferes with
an organization's functioning. Before resorting to
overt retaliation, disgruntled employees might engage
in more covert retaliation, such as the withdraw^
al of citizenship behaviors, psychological
withdrawal, and resistance (e.g., Jermier, Knights,
& Nord, 1994). Thus, overt retaliation might represent
merely the "tip of the iceberg," the most
prominent of a constellation of forms of aggression
(Baron & Neuman, 1996).

Skarlicki, D. P., & Folger, R. (1997). Retaliation in the workplace: The roles of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. Journal of applied Psychology, 82(3), 434.

Attitudes about honour killing among men and women--perspective from Islamabad.

Abstract
BACKGROUND:
The concept of honour has cultural, social and moral underpinnings that determine its expression and perseveration. Women are viewed as the bearers of family honour with chastity equated with abstinence from premarital or extramarital relationships and obeying norms determined and dictated by traditions and societies. The objective of this study was to determine the opinions of men and women pertaining to killing in the name of and saving one's honour.
METHODS:
A cross-sectional survey with convenience sampling was conducted among the 18 years and older (range 18-71) men and women. Respondents were approached in markets, bus-stops, hospitals, and various other public places in Islamabad from April 12th to June 27th 2006. A structured, interviewer-administered, and pretested questionnaire was used with both open and close-ended questions on demographics and attitudes about honour killing based on a vignette that was slowly read out in Urdu, in a neutral and judgment-free tone of voice to potential respondents. Responses to close-ended questions based on the vignette provided, and pattern among men and women were compared using Pearson Chi-square test to determine associations between the dichotomous variables and gender, while responses to one open-ended question were summarised based on the observed similarities and bivariate associations with gender were determined.
RESULTS:
We approached 630 conveniently selected individuals at various public places in the city of Islamabad. Six hundred and one agreed to participate and completed the questionnaire, i.e., the response rate was 95.4%. Three hundred and seven respondents were male (51.1%), and 294 (48.9%) were females. Three hundred forty-three 343 (57.1%) respondents believed that the man in the vignette did the right thing by killing his wife upon finding her in bed with another man. Divorcing one's wife rather than resorting to killings, after having found her with another man was approved by 220 (36.6%) respondents, while the rest answered as 'don't know'.
CONCLUSION:
Majority of men as well as women considered it justifiable and acceptable to kill one's wife as a mean to save one's honour. The most significant finding was the fact that overwhelming number of men and women did not believe in either forgiveness or divorcing one's wife who has engaged in extramarital sexual relationship.

Sexism and Machismo: the Attitude to Women in Latin America

http://floratheexplorer.com/sexism-machismo-and-the-latin-attitude-to-women/

Exploratory Factor Analysis with Principle Axis Factoring

Honor-related values. We used four scales to assess participants’ endorsement of the
different aspects of honor culture: honor-related violence (HRV; Henry, 2009), honor ideology
of manhood (HIM; Barnes, Brown, & Osterman, 2012), honor ideology of womanhood (HIW;
Barnes, Brown, Lenes, Bosson, & Carvallo, 2014), and the honor concerns scale (HCS; Ijzerman
et al., 2007). Because correlations between scales were substantial (ranging from .21 to .68), to
avoid redundancy we ran an exploratory factor analysis (EFA), with principal axis factoring and
oblimin rotation, to determine their latent structure. Based on Costello and Osborne’s (2005)
recommendation, items were retained if they had loadings greater than |.32| and discarded if they
loaded higher than |.32| on two factors.


Costello, A. B. & Osborne, J. W. (2005). Best practices in exploratory factor analysis: Four
recommendations for getting the most from your analysis. Practical Assessment,
Research & Evaluation, 10, 1-9.

Quote to include in my dissertation!

Kim, Cohen, Au (2010)

"The sense that one's worth is not a stable characteristic leads to the rationale that to be viewed as an honourable member of a society, continued active maintenance of one's reputation is essential. This includes engaging in behavior that adheres to cultural mandates as well as engaging in defensive behavior to ward off potential threats to one's honour"

---------------------------------------------

Specifically in honor cultures, shame signals teh loss of one's honor, and thus that one had been humiliated in the eyes of others (Cohen, 2003). In collectivistic cultures, shame (and the fear of shame) deters individuals from engaging in socially inappropriate behavior (Leung & Cohen, 2011; cf. Singelis & Sharkey, 1995)

When a person engages in an egregious violation of social norms, members o collectivistic societies might be esp. understanding of a person, who experiences the culturally expected emotion shame entertains thoughts about suicide.

Control Fundamentalism, but not Religion, in your Honour Studies

Reviewer Comments:

p. 6, Line 36: The authors suggest that Allport and Ross's logic doesn't apply to sexism but I think it does when you consider that the more fundamentalist strains of religions generally focus on more "extrinsic" religiosity than "intrinsic" ones.  Also, while there are explicitly sexist scriptural elements in the world's major religions, there are also elements supporting gender equality---it is not necessarily religion, but rather how the scriptures are interpreted and which ones are emphasized. Fundamentalist religious variants interpret and emphasize scriptures in ways that support women's subordination. Burn & Busso point out that scriptural literalism mediates the relationship between religion and AS. A more nuanced discussion of religion (particularly Islam) and AS is needed. 

p. 8-10: I'm a bit uncomfortable with the presumption that Islam is necessarily sexist; like the world's other major religions, it varies—while many strains are, particularly the fundamentalist ones, it can be interpreted/practiced/revised in ways that don't require women's subordination. Religious fundamentalisms are committed to the authority of ancient scriptures and believe them to be infallible; hold religion to provide a total worldview inseparable from politics; idealize a past where gender spheres were separate; require women to be modest and subordinate and regulate their sexuality; reject norms of universal human rights and multiculturalism; and have an "us vs. them" mentality (Anwar, 1999; Furseth & Repstad, 2006; Hoffman & Bartkowski, 2008; Pollit, 2002).  These religions see men and women as essentially different.  They justify gender inequality as divinely mandated and use religious scriptures to support traditional views of gender roles (Daly, 1985; Glick, Lameiras, & Castro, 2002; Gross, 1996).  They often condemn and resist feminism.  Research confirms the idea that fundamentalism is a stronger predictor than religiosity in discriminatory attitudes toward women (Hunsberger, Owusu, & Duck, 1999; Kirkpatrick, 1993; Mangis, 1995).

MTurk Attention Check based on the time spent on the survey

We obtained two samples via the online crowdsourcing marketplace, Amazon
Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The first round of data collection occurred in the fall of 2013 (n =
215) and the second in spring of 2014 (n = 606); both included U.S. individuals only.
Participants in 2013 received $0.20 for participating in a 5-10 minute survey and participants in
2014 received $1.50 for participating in a 25-minute survey, which included additional measures
in addition to those used in 2013. Twenty-three individuals participated in both rounds of data
collection; thus, their later entry was removed. Seven participants (3.2% of 215) of 2013 who
worked on the study for less than 90 seconds (average time taken was 195.44 seconds SD =
108.98) were excluded as inattention to research materials might undermine data quality (Rogge
& Maniaci, 2014). Similarly, thirteen participants (2.2% of 583) of 2014 who worked on the
study for less than three minutes (n = 6) and more than 40 minutes (n = 7) were excluded
(average time taken was 804.82 seconds SD = 422.65, or approximately 13 minutes). We then
removed an additional 37 individuals who failed the manipulation check. In total we excluded 57
participants (7.1%) of the overall sample. Note that 35% of all participants who fell outside of
the reasonable time window failed the manipulation check, whereas this was only the case for
4.8% of participants who completed the study within the expected time.



Maniaci, M. R., & Rogge, R. D. (2014). Caring about carelessness: Participant inattention and its effects on research. Journal of Research in Personality, 48, 61-83.

VERY IMPORTANT CITATION - FROM GUERRA, GINER-SORALLA (2013)

According to Blincoe and Harris (2011), we perceive the social image we have in other people’s eyes through their behavioral conduct of respect or disrespect towards us. In general, these behavioral expressions are associated not only to our sense of inclusion in a social group, but also to the status we have in this group. These perceptions could be related to our own behavior, to the behavior of the members of our closest social groups (e.g., family), or they could be associated to gender roles. These authors suggest that gender is closely associated to “inclusion and status concerns through socially