New findings suggest that, like men, women may react with aggression when defending their honor. However, this aggression appears to be relational in nature — such as spreading rumors about another person — rather than physical. The study findings were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Much research has explored how men in honor cultures tend to use physical aggression when defending their reputation. For example, in the Southern United States, acts of aggression and even violence are often condoned so long as a man is defending his honor or protecting his family and property.
It is generally believed that women in honor cultures are less sensitive to maintaining their reputation and less prone to aggression. However, much of the related research has focused on men’s aggression, leaving a gap when it comes to women’s behavior in response to honor threats.
“Prior work on cultures of honor had focused heavily on attitudes and behavior of men, and suggested that most aggressive reputation defense was perpetrated by men to protect their masculine identities,” said study author Stephen Foster, an assistant professor of social psychology at Penn State York.
“However, discussions with women born and raised in the southern United States led us to believe that honor-endorsing women also cared about their personal reputations and would engage in unique forms of aggression to maintain a reputation of strength, loyalty, and sexual purity (aspects seen as important to femininity in cultures of honor). We felt that incorporating relationally-aggressive outcomes in our studies would show that these women could engage in aggression without directly violating traditional femininity norms that (generally speaking) do not permit outright physical aggression behaviors for women (although we did find that there are instances where honor-endorsing women do see physical aggression as warranted).”
Foster and his colleagues conducted a series of studies to explore whether women may similarly endorse aggression in defense of their reputation, but in a different way. The researchers proposed that women in honor cultures may show stronger endorsement of relational forms of aggression, like gossiping or socially excluding others.
In a first study, 218 women from a university in the Southern U.S. completed a survey. The questionnaire assessed the extent that they endorsed feminine aspects of honor with items like, “A respectable woman knows that what she does reflects on her family name.” The survey also included measures of reactive relational aggression, proactive relational aggression, and physical aggression.
The results revealed that women who more strongly endorsed feminine honor reported higher reactive relational aggression, such as excluding someone who had previously left them out of an event. They did not, however, report higher proactive relational aggression, like acting coldly toward someone to get something they want. Finally, higher endorsement of feminine honor predicted lower physical aggression, possibly suggesting that feminine honor norms discourage the use of physical aggression.
A second study among a sample of 418 women from the Southern U.S. offered evidence for the purpose behind relational aggression. Women who strongly endorsed feminine honor but did not feel that they met these honor norms had the highest levels of reactive relational aggression. This suggests that relational aggression serves as a means of restoring honor when an honor-endorsing woman feels she is not measuring up to the standards of an honorable woman.
A final study measured relational aggression more directly. A total of 177 Southern U.S. men and women read three vignettes that each described a woman performing an act of aggression in response to a reputation threat. These aggressive acts were gossiping/spreading rumors, social exclusion, and slapping another woman. Participants were then asked to rate their support for the behavior of the woman in the scenario. Both men and women with higher feminine honor endorsement showed increased support for the two acts of relational aggression (gossiping/spreading rumors and social exclusion) but not for the act of physical aggression (slapping).
This pattern of findings suggests that women, like men, mainly use aggression in a reactive manner, as a response to an honor threat. This is in contrast to proactive, unprovoked aggression. It also suggests that while both honor-endorsing men and honor-endorsing women act aggressively to defend their honor, feminine honor is associated with a different type of aggression than male honor.
“I would say this work validates what a lot of folks have experienced in their own lives in a few ways,” Foster told PsyPost. “First, it shows that women do not construct their self-concept solely as a reflection of the men in their lives, but instead value their own personal reputation and social standing and will defend it as they view necessary. Second, it shows that honor-oriented aggression is not an exclusively male behavior, as many of the contexts we examined involved women interacting with other women. We think this has implications for the role women may play when they perceive other women as violating certain feminine honor norms.”
The authors note that their studies were centered around honor cultures in the Southern United States, and future research will be needed to see if the findings extend to other honor cultures (e.g., Latin America, the Middle East).
“These were individual-difference studies, and we would really like to examine these outcomes in a true cross-cultural design (such as comparing the northern United States, a non-honor region, and a place like Turkey, an honor-region) — this would help to give us more information as to how coexisting cultural norms, like the broad collectivist context in Turkey, might impact engagement in relationally-aggressive behavior for women,” Foster explained. “We also would like to examine how this impacts romantic relationships. For example, do honor-endorsing women activate these aggressive cognitive scripts to engage with their romantic partners? Work is ongoing to help figure out the answers to these types of questions.”
“While we began this work looking at feminine honor and health outcomes, we feel more work needs to be done in terms of how feminine honor concerns may shift the way individuals think about and engage with others on a regular basis,” Foster added. “We hope our work can help illuminate the actual lived experiences of women in cultures of honor, instead of relying on assumptions about honor-endorsing women which may be outdated at this point.”
The study, “Honor-endorsing women and relational aggression: Evidence for the presence of feminine aggression norms in southern U.S. women”, was authored by Stephen Foster, Jarrod E. Bock, Mauricio Carvallo, Callie L. Pollet, and William Stern.
