Are Mediterranean Societies “Cultures of Honor?”: Prevalence and Implications of a Cultural Logic of Honor Across Three World Regions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mediterranean societies are often labeled as “honor cultures,” in contrast with presumed “dignity” and “face” cultures of Anglo-Western and East Asian societies. We measured these cultural logics in two large-scale surveys (Studies 1 & 3: N = 2,942 students from 11 societies; Study 2: N = 5,471 adults from 14 societies). Middle Eastern and North African groups perceived honor values as the most normative in their societies, followed by Southeast European, and then Latin-European groups (who were comparable to Anglo-Western and East-Asian groups). East-Asian and Anglo-Western groups, respectively, perceived face and dignity values as most normative. Culture-level variation in perceived normative honor values, but not personal values, accounted for previously reported differences between Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean samples in several (but not all) measures of social cognitive tendencies. We conclude that a cultural logic of honor plays a role in Mediterranean societies, but labeling these societies as “honor cultures” is oversimplistic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".