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MUBEEN RAJHU pleaded with his sister, Tasleem, to end her relationship with a Christian man because it brought shame on the family. Then he put a bullet in her head. “I had to do it,” Rajhu earlier this year. “There was no choice.” Many of his neighbours in Lahore, Pakistan, agreed: Rajhu deserved praise for doing the right thing, they insisted.

Most of us cannot fathom the kind of thinking that condones “honour” killings, when fathers and brothers murder loved ones, typically women, in the name of reputation. We tend to associate this strict code of honour with countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia, and with extreme religious beliefs. But thinks it is more familiar than you might think.

Brown, a social psychologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, studies “honour cultures” – ones characterised by a deep concern for reputation and a sense of being duty-bound to retaliate against anything perceived as a slight. His research in the US south shows that it is alive and well among millions of people there, and potentially in other Western countries too. He also argues that honour culture is an important cause of all kinds of problems, from elevated murder rates to a reluctance to address mental health issues. Can he be right?

Insult to injury

Anthropologists and social scientists distinguish between what are sometimes called dignity cultures and honour cultures. Dignity cultures value people simply by dint of being human. Here, people seldom turn violent at the first hint of a challenge to their reputation, instead ignoring it or perhaps seeking redress in the courts.

In honour cultures, on the other hand, your value rests on your reputation, the impulse to defend it is heightened and individuals are expected to avenge insults themselves. There are plenty of historical precedents: think of the duelling tradition in the Old West or in Europe, from the chivalrous knights of medieval times right up until the 18th century.

Honour cultures are also characterised by contrasting gender expectations. For women, the key requirements are to be faithful and protect one’s virtue. Men should be strong, self-reliant and intolerant of disrespect. They must earn this reputation, and then defend it – even if that requires violence.

One of the clearest signs of an honour culture, then, is that people are likely to react violently to insults. A landmark social psychology study carried out two decades ago revealed this as an intriguing point of difference between the north of the US and the south – defined by the US Census Bureau as the 16 states from Texas to Delaware, including the eastern seaboard, below the Mason-Dixon line. When at the University of Michigan and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign assessed how male college students responded to annoyances and insults, such as being bumped into and called an “asshole”, they found that .

Nisbett also found that “felony” homicides – killings committed during another crime – are equally common in the north and south, whereas – killings that follow a disagreement or insult – are significantly more common in the south. In both cases, this clear geographical difference held only for white people.

Brown, who was himself born and raised in Alabama, had suspected that these attitudes might be rooted in religious fervour. The south is known as the “Bible Belt”, after all, and countries with much stricter honour cultures, such as Pakistan, are highly religious. However, repeated studies both in the US and elsewhere have found .

Instead, honour cultures seem to develop wherever there is severe economic insecurity and a degree of lawlessness. “When these factors come together, we believe honour culture is a sort of natural byproduct, because reputation is a way you protect yourself when no one else is coming to your aid,” says Brown.

“States that most strongly endorse honour ideology have higher suicide rates“

So why is honour culture more prevalent in the US south, and particularly among whites? In his new book, , Brown argues that the underlying ideology arrived in the early to mid-16th century, brought by Scots migrating via Northern Ireland. Many of these Ulster Scots were herders, and having first settled the Appalachians, they then moved south and west, where the . Here, the argument goes, the chronic threat of livestock theft meant that a culture of honour-based violence conferred an economic advantage. Over the centuries, the attitudes these migrants brought have been diluted, but still they persist – and for Brown, at least, they have a big impact on people’s behaviour.

Brown has led several studies of how honour ideology manifests itself, in each case attempting to strip out the effects of poverty and other factors that could skew the results. In one, he and his team looked at US school shootings and found – defined by researchers as those ranking in the top half for endorsement of honour-based values (see “League of honour“) – than non-honour states. Honour states generally have laxer gun control laws, but the researchers adjusted for this. Besides, says Brown, those laws reflect honour ideology, which considers that individuals have a right – even a duty – to defend themselves and their reputation.

“It pays to be well mannered in a society where an insult could cost you a beating“

Given the gender divide in honour cultures, you might expect higher levels of violence against women in them than in other societies. Sure enough, rapes are significantly more common in honour states – but, again, only for white perpetrators. Likewise, the rates of domestic homicide among whites are 62 per cent higher in honour states than elsewhere, Brown and his colleagues have found in research they hope to publish soon. There’s no study yet linking a man’s level of endorsement of honour-related values to his likelihood of committing rape or murdering his wife. But men who score higher on ratings of honour ideology than other men are and display stronger beliefs that men should have power over women.

Show no weakness

There has also been precious little work on the persistence of honour culture in modern Western societies outside the US south. We know it is found in gang cultures everywhere, for example, and it may exist beyond gangs in parts of Europe. But it has yet to be studied extensively in such places.

In the US, honour ideology is strong in the growing Latino population too, and their particular take on it may prove to be influential over the next 50 years, Brown predicts. But, for now, he argues that his work reveals what many might see as a surprising influence on life today in white communities across the south.

Brown has recently investigated the connection between honour culture and mental health. A showed that people who strongly endorse honour-related values are especially concerned that seeking help for mental health problems would indicate weakness and harm their reputations. This makes a skewed sort of sense. In an honour culture, “if you need help, that suggests you are mentally fragile and weak”, says Brown. “But going to get help would be a second blow: ‘Not only do I have a need, but I can’t handle that need on my own.’ ” Such results chime with : that honour states not only have higher levels of depression and lower use of antidepressants than other states, but also have higher suicide rates, even after controlling for other relevant factors.

So far, so bleak. But the influence of honour culture isn’t entirely negative. The premium placed on loyalty might explain why soldiers from southern states fighting in the second world war were more likely than those from the north to win the Congressional Medal of Honour, typically given to those who died trying to save their comrades. “That’s not just saying: ‘We care about loyalty’,” says Brown. “It’s demonstrating it in the ultimate way.”

For Cohen and Nisbett, honour culture also helps to account for the famous politeness of southerners. After all, it pays to be well mannered in a society where an insult could cost you a beating. But that only holds up to a point. In one , Cohen and colleagues brought northerners and southerners together for a simulated art therapy session, during which they were constantly pestered by someone they thought was another volunteer but was actually a researcher. “The northerners consistently showed their annoyance and then plateaued in their anger,” says Cohen. “Southerners, on the other hand, were polite, polite, polite – and then you got a big explosion.”

He thinks this style of interaction contributes to violence in honour cultures because it prevents people from openly telling others that they are crossing the line. Children grow up learning to behave like this, which might explain the persistence of higher rates of adult violence centuries after the arrival of the Ulster Scots, according to Cohen. Another explanation for the persistence of honour cultures could be the way that . “What it means to be masculine or feminine has real staying power and persists long after the conditions that might have produced those ideals and values have dissipated,” says Brown.

Today, the US is far from lawless, but economic uncertainty lingers for many. Brown thinks this could help explain support for Donald Trump, (above) whose presidential campaign rhetoric played heavily on the idea that the nation’s reputation has crashed. Brown’s research indicates that honour-oriented people tend to be by immigrants.

What’s more, in unpublished work, he and colleagues looked for evidence of honour ideology in the language used by candidates in recent presidential elections, and found it to be prevalent in the rhetoric of several Republican hopefuls. “Some sell it better than others, and I think Trump sold it pretty well,” says Brown. “He talks a lot about respect.” Take his comment, made in June 2015 when he announced his candidacy, about Mexicans “laughing at us”, says Brown. “To somebody who is steeped in the ideology of honour, very few things are more repugnant than being laughed at, whether that’s personally or as a family, community or nation.”

Of course, no one thinks honour culture is the only factor that can explain differences between the US north and south, least of all Brown. But if it has a big influence on behaviour, should we be looking to shape it to alleviate some of the problems it has been linked to? , a psychologist at Hillsdale College in Michigan, thinks not. “The alteration of a culture on social scientific grounds is not an activity I’d wish to associate with,” he says.

Although he has worked with Brown in the past, Barnes now has reservations about this research. It is difficult to support claims of cultural causation, he says, because even when researchers control for confounding factors, attributing behavioural differences to one construct requires a heavy burden of evidence. In this case, Barnes is not convinced that burden has been met. Take Cohen and Nisbett’s landmark study. “It is not too much to ask that the result of this experiment and others like it be replicated,” says Barnes. “To my knowledge, no such attempt has been made, and this makes me hesitant.”

Barnes also thinks that the methods of social psychology tend to oversimplify reality. In that sense, his reservations don’t apply exclusively to research into honour culture.

For his part, Brown is well aware of the pitfalls of attempting to reduce the workings of human societies, in all their glorious messiness, to simple answers. Even so, he and Barnes agree that allying such research with lessons from history and experience can improve our understanding of how culture influences thinking and behaviour.

And although he does try to teach his sons to avoid taking offence too readily, Brown seeks only to understand this aspect of southern culture, not to change it. “These are my people. It’s part of my cultural heritage,” he says. “I’m an insider saying: ‘Let’s be honest about our culture. Let’s turn over the rock and see what’s on the underside.'”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Reputation is everything”