by Adam Alter
Artworks are also enlightening because they reflect a culture’s ideals and preoccupations. East Asian artists have long celebrated noble warriors who die in the name of honor, a concept that doesn’t feature in Western artworks. Japanese masterpieces, for example, depict samurai warriors who failed to uphold their honor committing seppuku, an act of ritual suicide. The concept of honor isn’t entirely absent from U.S. culture, though, and certain regions of the United States emphasize honor more than others. In those regions, homicide, though universally condemned in abstraction, is more likely to be excused in practice when the killer’s honor, or the honor of a loved one, is threatened.
Imagine, for example, that you own a business, and you’re looking to hire a new employee. Letters of interest pour in from dozens of well-qualified applicants, but one letter stands out from the rest. The applicant is a hardworking twenty-seven-year-old man who seems to be a good fit for the job, but he discloses an event from his past that causes you some concern:
There is one thing I must explain, because I feel I must be honest and I want no misunderstandings. I have been convicted of a felony, namely manslaughter. You will probably want an explanation for this before you send me an application, so I will provide it. I got into a fight with someone who was having an affair with my fiancée. I lived in a small town, and one night this person confronted me in front of my friends at the bar. He told everyone that he and my fiancée were sleeping together. He laughed at me to my face and asked me to step outside if I was man enough. I was young and didn’t want to back down from a challenge in front of everyone. As we went into the alley, he started to attack me. He knocked me down, and he picked up a bottle. I could have run away and the judge said I should have, but my pride wouldn’t let me. Instead, I picked up a pipe that was lying in the alley and hit him with it. I didn’t mean to kill him, but he died a few hours later at the hospital. I realize that what I did was wrong.
How do you respond? Do the circumstances that the applicant describes mitigate the severity of his actions, or are they irrelevant to your assessment of his culpability? Does he deserve to apply for the job, or would you refuse to consider him for the position?
In the mid-1990s social psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen delivered hundreds of bogus applications with precisely this paragraph to chain stores scattered across the United States. The stores were loosely divided among three distinct regions: southern states (e.g., Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi); western states (e.g., Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming); and northern states (e.g., New York, Massachusetts, and Michigan). With a basic understanding of U.S. culture—and a history of watching U.S. TV shows—you’ll recognize that those regions have distinct cultural mores.
Over the months, responses poured in from the chain stores, and they followed an interesting pattern. Compared with northern stores, those in the south and west were somewhat more willing to offer jobs to the contrite applicant, and the tone of their letters was more conciliatory and flexible. Many of them referred to the applicant’s conduct with understanding and empathy, whereas stores in the north either tended to ignore his conduct or referred to it disapprovingly. One particularly understanding letter from a southern store owner vividly illustrates the sort of thinking inspired by the culture of honor:
As for your problem of the past, anyone could probably be in the situation you were in. It was just an unfortunate incident that shouldn’t be held against you. Your honesty shows that you are sincere . . . I wish you the best of luck for your future. You have a positive attitude and a willingness to work. Those are qualities that businesses look for in an employee. Once you get settled, if you are near here, please stop in and see us.
The south and west are associated with entrenched family rivalries, spaghetti westerns, and a general emphasis on traditional gender roles. Southern and western men are more likely to be excused if they respond violently to the sorts of events described in the researchers’ job letter. This so-called culture of honor is absent from northern states, where men aren’t laden with the same cultural expectation. Northern men have the option of avoiding violence without compromising their integrity.
You might wonder, at this point, whether Southerners and Westerners are just more accepting of violence; perhaps their responses have nothing to do with the culture of honor or the nature of the crime. The researchers were concerned about that, too, so they sent out another series of letters in which the applicant admitted to stealing cars in his youth to support his family. Again, he expressed remorse and the desire to move on with his life. For that crime, which had nothing to do with honor or face-saving behavior, stores from all three regions responded with the same degree of tolerance.
The same patterns emerged in a second study, when Nisbett and Cohen offered to pay college newspaper interns to write a story about a violent incident. According to the background fact sheet, a young white male named Victor Jensen stabbed a second young white male who ridiculed him at a party and called his sister and mother “sluts.” When the interns at universities in the south and west wrote about the incident, they were more likely to justify Jensen’s behavior, and temper their blame by mentioning that Jensen was provoked to respond violently. The interns at northern universities were less forgiving, construing Jensen’s behavior as recklessly impulsive rather than the natural response to a brazen attack on his honor.
As young southern and western males mature, they learn to perceive personal threats through a magnifying lens. Incidents that might otherwise provoke puzzled amusement take on a life of their own, demanding equivalent or escalated responses. These responses reflect a deeply entrenched culture of honor that traces its origins to early settlement, as far back as the seventeenth century.
According to researchers, several factors explain why the culture of honor arose in some but not all regions of the United States. Northern states were largely settled by farmers who had the benefit of stronger legal systems from early settlement. Meanwhile, the south and west were inhabited by ranchers and herders to a greater extent, and their livelihood could be threatened at any moment by thieves and poachers. Crimes were difficult to punish in the expansive south and west, especially when they were first settled, so herders were forced to take matters into their own hands. Meanwhile, warmer weather and poverty only encouraged violence and vigilantism. Thus were born the violent retaliation and long-running family rivalries that characterize today’s culture of honor. Although some experts dispute this causal chain, there’s no doubt that settlers in the colonial south and west embraced dueling, the notion of gentlemanhood, and military law far more deeply than did their northern counterparts. As those practices were passed from generation to generation, the culture of honor gained a foothold that continues to distinguish violent retaliatory responses in the south and west from tamer responses in the north.
Although the concept of honor seems like a relic from a more traditional era, men who grow up in the culture of honor continue to respond differently from men who mature in other parts of the country. In a series of experiments, the same psychologists observed how southern and northern men responded to insults that potentially threatened their masculinity. In each experiment, the college-aged men were asked to walk from one college classroom to another via a long, narrow corridor. As they walked down the corridor, some of the men were forced to pass another male student walking in the opposite direction—a stooge planted by the experimenters. When they passed the stooge, he bumped them and muttered the word “asshole” under his breath. Other men who were taking part in the experiment walked down the corridor without incident as the student made way for them without speaking.
The insulted men were obviously surprised by the student’s hostility, but Southerners and Northerners responded very differently. When two nearby observers examined the men’s responses, they found that 85 percent of the students who grew up in the south were more angry than amused, whereas 65 percent of the stude
nts who grew up in the north were more amused than angry. When the students got to the room down the corridor, they were asked to complete a story in which a male had been insulted (not dissimilar to their own recent experience). Three-quarters of the Southerners completed the story by suggesting that the insulted man would respond with his own insults or violence, but only 41 percent of the Northerners suggested the same hostile outcome. In other studies, the experimenters measured the students’ hormonal responses, finding that the insulted Southerners experienced dramatic rises in cortisol and testosterone, hormones associated with stress and aggression, respectively.
Meanwhile, in a third experiment, the students were told to walk back down the same corridor. This time, they were forced to pass yet another male stooge who was tall (six foot three) and imposing (weighing 250 pounds). Observers carefully watched how the student responded to this simulated game of “chicken,” and found that all Northerners and Southerners who hadn’t been insulted gave the large male a wide berth of two or three feet. In contrast, the insulted Southerners refused to move until they were almost bowled over—they moved, on average, when the oncoming juggernaut was little more than a foot away. Later, insulted southern males also behaved more aggressively when dealing with a much smaller experimenter—a man who was five foot six and weighed 140 pounds—and responded to a questionnaire by admitting that they felt their manhood had been challenged. Whereas Northerners barely registered the insult, Southerners attempted to reassert their masculinity by responding with a constellation of aggressive behaviors.
Later studies suggested that the culture of honor leads to even graver ends, as Southerners are more likely to die young of accidental causes associated with risk-taking and machismo. Each culture has its own particular insecurities, so the insults that undermine a man’s honor in one culture are dismissed as glancing blows in another. The southern preoccupation with honor illustrates how ancient fears and insecurities later express themselves in vaguely related contexts, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years after those insecurities first emerged. These same fears come to shape how people in that culture experience physical and mental illness—and many of the symptoms that emerge affect just one small cultural enclave while sparing everyone who lives beyond the reach of those peculiar cultural anxieties.
Cultural Maladies
The insecurities that produce aggressive displays of masculinity in some cultures also inspire culture-specific maladies that affect isolated pockets of the population. Anorexia nervosa sufferers who restrict their eating and fear gaining weight are concentrated in the wealthiest regions of the world, where thinness is a compelling cultural ideal. The disorder is almost unheard-of in poorer countries, and it barely existed before the 1950s. Meanwhile, women in the Middle Ages suffered from nervosa’s medieval cousin, anorexia mirabilis. These women similarly refused food to the point of death, but they were motivated by religious rather than aesthetic ideals. In a culture where asceticism was the key to religious enlightenment, fasting was next to godliness.
As the two versions of anorexia show, culture-bound disorders reflect the deep-seated fears and concerns that plague a cultural group at a particular point in time. One of the most famous recent cases is the West African genital-shrinking epidemic known as koro. Between 1997 and 2003, a koro epidemic spread through six West African nations and generated dozens of news articles. One article in the Nigerian Vanguard described the ensuing alarm:
Panic has gripped residents of the Plateau State capital [Jos], following cases of disappearing organs ostensibly for ritual purposes. No fewer than six of such cases have been reported in the last one week in different parts of the state capital, involving males and females whose organs allegedly “disappeared” upon contact with organ snatchers. A middle-aged man was almost lynched yesterday along Rwang Pam Street, after he allegedly “stole” a man’s private part through “remote control.” The victim allegedly felt his organs shrink after speaking to the suspect, who reportedly asked for directions.
While delusions affect people from every imaginable culture, koro sufferers were experiencing a specific symptom that had rarely been seen in other parts of the world. Psychologists noted that two West African cultural beliefs may have contributed to the so-called penis-napping epidemic. The first was the tendency to attribute unexplained events to malevolent witchcraft. The same unexplained events in other parts of the world might prompt question marks and head scratching, but West Africans are relatively quick to blame unwanted events on supernatural intervention. The second belief was that witches and other supernatural beings would steal and eat a man’s penis or a woman’s womb, sometimes holding it hostage until a financial bribe was offered. When the afflicted patients were examined, however, their organs seemed to be intact, despite frantic claims that their genitals had disappeared entirely. In the end, doctors explained that koro sufferers were enmeshed in a bout of mass hysteria, converting a frenzy of anxiety into the earnest delusion that their genitals were disappearing before their eyes. Of course, in another culture—one less fixated on the fear of genital shrinkage—these delusions would have been quite different, reflecting that culture’s own specific fears and preoccupations.
Culture-specific maladies abound, and each reflects the conditions that define the lives of its sufferers. A relatively new set of phobias has emerged in East Asia, where the demands of social etiquette are sometimes overwhelming and inflexible. Sufferers of jiko-shisen-kyofu are deeply afraid that their own glances will displease or offend others, while sekimen-kyofu sufferers fear the consequences of blushing in public. Both phobias are unique to East Asia, since blushing and lingering glances are mere peccadilloes in the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, Newfoundlanders who awaken paralyzed in the night are said to experience old hag syndrome, since they imagine that a large disembodied woman is sitting on their chests. The hag, a malevolent mythical woman, occupies an important place in Newfoundland folklore, so locals sometimes conjure her image during episodes of sleep paralysis. People experience sleep paralysis elsewhere in the world, but they explain and understand the sensation very differently. In all, twenty-five such culture-bound syndromes appear in the official diagnostic and statistical manual of the American Psychiatric Association (the DSM), and the list is likely to grow when the association releases its next edition of the manual in 2013.
When the American Psychiatric Association talks about culture-specific maladies, what does it mean by culture? National identities impart culture—as in the case of the East Asian phobias—but culture also comes from smaller geographic regions, sports teams, and friendship circles. The people who occupy those groups share a common set of beliefs about the world, and those beliefs color their values, hopes, and anxieties. Humans the world over have the same basic biological makeup—the same brains, eyes, and ears—but the way we experience the world varies dramatically. In the case of culturally bound maladies, cultural beliefs prepare people to experience a particular constellation of symptoms. While West Africans believed their genitalia were being “snatched” in the late 1990s, anxious East Asians were more likely to fear the prospect of violating deeply held politeness norms. Although both groups experienced completely different symptoms, those symptoms made perfect sense in each context.
The cultural differences described in this chapter—from how we see the world to our peculiar culture-bound maladies—seem to imply that culture is immutable; that once you’re immersed in one culture your thinking will be bound forever by that culture’s norms and mores. Historically that may have been true, because people lived in isolated communities that rarely interacted with other communities nearby. Today, of course, the world is a very different place, with billions of people migrating within and across the world’s two hundred countries.
Biculturalism: Immersion in Two Different Cultures
The U.S. Census, which counts and categorizes the country’s population every ten years, is far mor
e sensitive to the possibility that people identify with multiple cultures than it was just twenty years ago. In the 1990 census, respondents were forced to identify with a single ethnic group, while in 2000 and 2010 respondents could associate themselves with more than one ethnic group. Indeed, over 6 percent of the population—more than two million people—identified with two or more ethnic or racial groups in 2010.
Bicultural people—those who have lived for extended periods in two cultures—experience the world very differently from monocultural people, who have only lived in one culture. In an interview, Andrew Lam, a Vietnamese American writer, described the experience of identifying with two very different cultures. Lam’s father was a general in South Vietnam, and he ensured that his family escaped to the United States when the Vietnam War began to escalate. (The general joined the rest of his family after the South Vietnamese army surrendered.) Lam vividly remembered his first American meal, a ham sandwich and a glass of milk, and the experience of shivering during the Southern California winter—a mild winter by American standards, but far colder than the always balmy tropical climate Lam enjoyed as a child. These superficial differences are matched by deeper cultural differences. Whereas Americans prize verbal affection—the phrase “I love you” holds a special place in familial and romantic relationships—Vietnamese tend to demonstrate their love through gestures. Lam’s mother would cook his favorite meal when he visited, and he would finish the entire meal to show his appreciation. Lam’s father was taciturn and only once told his son how proud he was, when Andrew won a prestigious journalism award. Lam also described the shock of moving from a collectivistic culture, where the good of the community is paramount, to an individualistic culture where he had to learn self-focused phrases like “follow your dream” and “look out for number one.”