Please Call Me "You" Rather Than 'you': Culture of Honor and the Significant Consequences of Subtle Insults

Culture of Honor is a significant and fruitful field for examining the cultural characteristics of some areas of the world like Mediterranean region. It is certain that the Culture of Honor in social psychology requires more studies to expand and deepen this important and relatively new field, and the related studies in Turkey have great potential to provide such findings. Regarding the honor cultures, insult is a significant issue, and violent response to insult is one of the decisive properties of the Culture of Honor. However, this conclusion mainly results from the studies where insult is obvious and direct. In this study, it is hypothesized that if insult is very critical in honor cultures then it can also be detected in situations where insult is even subtle, and after perceiving the insult corresponding reactions are given. For that purpose, two real-life short videos of a popular international TV show (i.e., Turkish version of the show) depicting a small conversation between a performer and the judges of the show were watched by the participants of this study. After each video, participants were asked to answer some open-ended and closed-ended questions. It was revealed that even subtle insults (i.e., word choice: usage of informal “you” -“sen” in Turkish- rather than formal “You” -“siz” in Turkish- by the performer towards each judge member) were generally perceived as great insult and reacted by anger and the desire of retaliation by the majority of the participants. The findings also match with the related findings of the previous qualitative studies (i.e., field and focus group studies) conducted in Turkey by the same researcher, which will also be mentioned during the presentation. The results of the study and suggestions for the future studies about the Culture of Honor will be discussed on the basis of the literature.