Cultures of honor facilitate certain forms of interpersonal violence. The authors suggest that these cultures might also promote values and expectations that could heighten suicide risk, such as strict gender-role standards and hypersensitivity to reputational threats, which could lead people living in such cultures to consider death as an option when failure occurs or reputation is threatened sufficiently. Study 1 shows that, controlling for a host of statewide covariates, honor states in the United States have significantly higher male and female suicide rates than do nonhonor states, particularly in nonmetropolitan areas among Whites. Study 2 shows that statewide levels of antidepressant prescriptions (an indicator of mental health resource utilization) are lower in honor states, whereas levels of major depression are higher, and statewide levels of depression are associated with suicide rates only among honor states. Finally, Study 3 shows that individual endorsement of honor ideology is positively associated with depression.

ABSTRACT-We investigated the hypothesis that a sociocultural variable known as the culture of honor would be uniquely predictive of school-violence indicators. Controlling for demographic characteristics associated in previous studies with violent crime among adults, we found that high-school students in culture-of-honor states were significantly more likely than high-school students in nonculture-of-honor states to report having brought a weapon to school in the past month. Using data aggregated over a 20-year period, we also found that culture-of-honor states had more than twice as many school shootings per capita as non-culture-of-honor states. The data revealed important differences between school violence and general patterns of homicide and are consistent with the view that many acts of school violence reflect retaliatory aggression springing from intensely experienced social-identity threats.

Using both college students and a national sample of adults, the authors report evidence linking the ideology of masculine honor in the U.S. with militant responses to terrorism. In Study 1, individuals' honor ideology endorsement predicted, among other outcomes, open-ended hostile responses to a fictitious attack on the Statue of Liberty and support for the use of extreme counterterrorism measures (e.g., severe interrogations), controlling for right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and other covariates. In Study 2, the authors used a regional classification to distinguish honor state respondents from nonhonor state respondents, as has traditionally been done in the literature, and showed that students attending a southwestern university desired the death of the terrorists responsible for 9/11 more than did their northern counterparts. These studies are the first to show that masculine honor ideology in the U.S. has implications for the intergroup phenomenon of people's responses to terrorism.

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