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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".