Why honor causes all of society’s problems

Pacific Standard:

Glance at a list of critically acclaimed television shows and you’ll see stories driven by characters who overreact to perceived signs of disrespect. Walter White doesn’t care that people are fond of him; he wants to feel what it’s like to be feared. In Fargo, Lester Nygaard’s undoing begins when he takes his newfound refusal to not let others push him around too far. And in Game of Thrones, seemingly every character oscillates between calmness and boredom when encountering a “here’s why I hate you” soliloquy, then concludes that murder is the only acceptable option when that hatred morphs into a public attack on their honor or status.

The power afforded to “disrespect” serves as a creative lever for generating conflict, but it’s also an instance where art successfully imitates life. In a new study, Amber DeBono of Winston-Salem State examined how aggression is influenced by two distinct aspects of social rejection — dislike (“you’re not nice”) and disrespect (“you’re an idiot”). In one experiment, participants read feedback that made them feel one of four combinations of liking and respect (e.g. liked and respected, liked and disrespected, etc.). Afterward, they decided how long the feedback-giver had to spend doing an undesirable task, with the number of minutes serving as a measure of aggression. DeBono found that feeling disrespected was a much stronger predictor of aggression than feeling disliked.

Read the whole story: Pacific Standard