Costly Morality Theory of Honor: An Evolutionary,Culture-as-Situated-Cognition Perspective

Abstract

Honor is universally comprehensible, varies regionally in frequency, chronicity, and intensity, and looks different at each time and place. We use culture-as-situated-cognition theory (CSCT), an integrating situated social cognition account of culture, to understand why. Human culture addresses recurrent problems; how frequently, chronically, and intensely each comes to mind depends on their ecological niche; the practices addressing them vary in time and place. We articulate the costly morality theory of honor (CMTH) within CSCT to distinguish honor from related constructs by theorizing two axes (morality-immorality and costly-cost-free) at each of CSCT’s three levels. In our formulation, honor is costly morality, resolving the recurrent problem of regulating relationships through costly signals of trustworthiness (human-universal). Societies embedded in harsher ecological niches require more cost to find a signal to be honest and focus on particular relational aspects of morality (niche-linked). Honor specifies how to be a person in the world (time-and-place-specific).

Public Abstract

People have an everyday understanding of honor, what it is, and who has it, but what they mean can be hard to put into words, and what actions in service of honor look like vary across times and societies. We build on culture-as-situated-cognition theory, which accounts for honor’s importance in human culture, its variable centrality across societies, and differing specific norms and practices connected to it within societies, to posit that honor entails moral action, a duty of care, that is costly to the actor. We apply our honor-as-costly-morality theory to distinguish honor from related ideas in the hope that our framework helps people better understand and communicate across time-and-place divides, even while disagreeing on to whom and in what way the duty of care extends.