From the perspective of fundamental motives framework (Kenrick, Neuberg, Griskevicius, Becker, & Shaller, 2010), the variations in cognitive and behavioral reactions of people from honor vs. dignity cultures can be explained based on goal conflicts.
Imagine that, a man is seeking to find a long-term partner/girlfriend and he is dating women. Imagine, that this man is in a first date with an attractive woman that he finds, and the two of them are dining in a restaurant/cafe. His mating motives are currently activated and his goal is to attract the woman and convince her to be with him (for one-night or longer). While they are having their nice, romantic time, and all is going well, suddenly a good-looking well-dressed man approaches to their table and calling the woman how beautiful she looks, gives her a friendly hug and a kiss, and says how great it is to see her a day in a row, and reminds her about a party he is having at his place next saturday and tells her to not forget to come. After the man leaves, the woman says that this was her ex-boyfriend who is now a friend (from the perspective of the man, this is potentially a jealousy-evoking situation, activating male-male competition for access to mates, but it is an ambiguous situation and thus can be read in different ways, e.g., the friendly male can be gay or long-term friend of the woman who is married, etc.).
In honor cultures, sexuality for women is more precarious, it takes more to raise trust in a man, so the woman needs to show hard-to-fake loyalty signals in order to increase her chances in dating the man. For the man, it is not easy to trust the new date by default, and this can be perceived as an uncomfortable, frustrating, jealousy-raising, manhood-threatening situation.
In honor cultures, trust needs to be earned by hard-to-fake loyalty signals, and costly altruism. More so than in dignity cultures, since there is more emphasis in reputations of the people before cooperating with them.
Based on this reasoning, I would expect that men from Turkey would react to this situation with increased negative-emotions such as jealousy, discomfort, frustration, anxiety, shame, humiliation than men from Northern US. Men from Turkey would perceive the woman to be slut, promiscuous (kasar), sexually-permissive, disloyal, sexually-unrestricted, and more likely to lose interest in dating her or seeing her as a "long-term mate", though he may still be interested in her as a "short-term mate". Although remember, that the man's initial goal was to find a partner for long-term relationship. We would expect these differences also in a dignity culture, but to a lesser extent, and we expect that the differences in the DVs between honor and dignity culture men would be significantly different.
This is one type of manipulation that shows that the goal of long-term mate seeking has been compromised by an ambiguous social information that signaled that the woman is sexually-permissive in an honor culture.
A threat to reputation based on what is more likely to be more important in an honor culture should work. The idea is to show that different kinds of threats to reputation should be more likely to divert the initial goal or lessen the interest in the goal for people from honor cultures than from dignity cultures.
This scenario however needs a control condition, where the ambiguity of the social interaction will signal a non-honor related quality about the woman - such as her being lazy or socially/intellectually incompetent (which should perhaps compromise men from dignity culture's initial goal of seeking a long-term mate).
You can think of an exaggerated illogical sudden act of crimes of passion -- killing someone you love/obsessed with (cost of losing your love due to your honor-panic attack).
I think by accident I got too carried away, but I found one informative review piece on fundamental motives and goals.
Fundamental motives are universal (including forming and maintaining affiliation, self-protection, acquiring status, mate acquisition, mate retention, child rearing, and avoiding disease).
Research on cultural evolution suggest that the function of social norms, values and practices are to harness, extend or suppress our evolved psychological mechanisms, i.e., these fundamental motives (e.g., the spread of normative monogamous marriage provides an example of an institution that harnesses various evolved mechanisms to increase paternal investment, household relatedness and infant/child survival while reducing male-male competition.)
Now, we know from culture of honor research that in those cultures, traditional manhood, female purity, reciprocity, hospitality norms are stronger, and reputation depends on these qualities more than in dignity cultures, which have norms about integrity, honesty, fairness that are equally strong in honor cultures too (and other cultures that aren't classified). These norms as well work to harness, extend or suppress our evolved fundamental motives. Norm of female sexual purity may be there to enhance the motive of avoiding diseases, or suppress male-male competition, reciprocity and hospitality to enhance the motive of forming and maintaining affiliations, and traditional manhood norms may be there to enhance the motive of self-protection, and both be there to suppress aggression and violence.
Thus, some motives are strongly activated in some cultures than others, and these may be the reason for variance in the strength/importance of social norms across societies. Ecological factors such as high levels of violence, threat, and infectious diseases, and low state control are examples.
Different motives/goals can be activated in different contexts, and may conflict. For instance, if people in one society are especially interested and motivated to self-protect and acquire status, due to the ecological/environmental conditions which afford great benefits for having these motivations, than threats that hinder people from achieving these motives can have serious consequences. For instance, if a man's reputation for qualities which signal one's toughness, trustworthiness, competence and morality is threatened than people can compromise their goal of finding a mate, if the potential mate threatens these fundamental motives. In honor cultures, self-protection, acquiring status and affiliation may be strongly activated motives - due to insufficient law enforcement and high rates of threats/violence - and therefore men may be more quickly to call it quits if his potential mate threatens his reputation for honor. But in honor cultures, reputation for honor is less important, thus the goal/motive of acquiring a mate may be less likely to be compromised based on signals of her promiscuity and sexual-permissiveness.
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IDEA 2:
Think of the article by Vonasch, Reynolds, Winegard & Baumeister (2017). Death Before Dishonor- Incurring Costs to Protect Moral Reputation.
Threaten reputation based on honest/false accusation as the lab is already doing in Turkey and US (should be something that is equally reputation-threatenning in both Turkey and the US - measure how reputation damaging accusation of dishonesty in the survey).
Ok, so instead of the costs that people do to avoid reputation damage (e.g., amputing a hand, wanted to die), we can examine whether people become more motivated to give up another important goal such as mate acquision, when their reputation gets seriously damaged.
Once their reputation is threatened, participants would feel more shame and humiliation, and their interest in going out to public and interest in socializing in public places may decrease (due to withdrawal-motivation).
1) Induce romantic/mating motives to participants (I think should do this for all participants)
2a) Reputation threat - based on accusation of dishonesty threat (vs. control no reputation threat condition) (IV: reputation threat vs. no threat), that all campus will know
2b) Reputation threat - based on family/feminine/manhood honor threat (vs. control no reputation threat condition) (IV: reputation threat vs. no threat) that all campus will know
3) DVs (time or order of behavior): Give two choices for task:
-- opportunity to show that one is honest (3a) or feminine/masculine/family (3b) = a behavior that shows motivation for reputation affirmation
-- meeting the attractive person in public for coffee = a behavior that shows mating motives
4) Culture: honor vs. non-honor (Turkey vs. Northern US)
PREDICTIONS: Turkish participants whose reputations are threatened (vs. not threatened) will spend more time doing the task of affirming their reputations than North American participants, show less interest in meeting/socializing with the attractive person in public, react with more shame and humiliation to the reputation threat than North American participants -- but it is expected that the cultural difference should appear when family/feminine reputation are threatened, not with honesty or manhood reputation threats, which may reveal identical findings for both Turkish and American participants.
The take-home message of this research would be that in a culture where upholding reputations are much more important, when participants' reputations are damaged, they are going to give up pursuing their other important goals of mating, and spend more time in repairing their damaged reputation. But in other cultures, people may not be as strongly compelled to spend time to repair their damaged reputations when their initial important goal was to acquire a mate.
These would then show how for Turkish people, affirming reputations are just more important, and they do so, even if it leads to them give up their other important motives.
