Honor Culture in Brazil: Assessimg Intra-Cultural Variation

Abstract

Sociologists and social psychologists often approach honor as a cultural trait belonging to specific countries and communities. An honor culture is defined as a society in which social status is defined by willingness of individuals to use force to defend one’s reputation (Black, 2011; Cooney, 2014). Studies in the past have compared countries in order to establish which cultures can be considered as belonging to an honor culture (Vandello & Cohen, 2003); yet, they ignored the intra-cultural variability within countries. The purpose of this study was to systematically analyze Brazil, an honor culture, for intra-cultural variability in honor attitudes and values. To do so, we used data from the Latin American Public Opinion Survey and aggregate individual responses regarding honor concerns into regional data to create an Honor Index for the municipalities represented in the survey. Next, we compared the average responses of each municipality to demographic data and material conditions, such as the average education, violence, urbanization and trust in law enforcement of each municipality, thus analyzing variability of the presence of this type of culture across different regions.