Dataset Information

Judgments of marital rape as a function of honor culture, masculine reputation threat, and observer gender: A cross-cultural comparison between Turkey, Germany, and the UK.

ABSTRACT: Previous research has shown that there is higher tolerance of violence against women in cultures with salient gender-specific honor norms, especially when the violence occurs in intimate relationships and in response to threat to male honor. The present cross-cultural study (N?=?398) extended these findings to sexual aggression (i.e., marital rape) by comparing participants from a culture that emphasizes honor (Turkey) and participants from cultures without strong honor traditions (Germany and Britain). Turkish participants blamed the victim and exonerated the perpetrator more than did German and British participants. In all cultural groups, participants blamed the victim and exonerated the perpetrator more when the husband's reputation was threatened than in the absence of such threat, and in all cultural groups, men blamed the victim and exonerated the perpetrator more than women. Yet, the effect of masculine reputation threat and this pattern of gender differences were somewhat more pronounced among Turkish than German or British participants. Results exploring the predictive role of honor norms at the individual level beyond rape myth acceptance and traditional gender role attitudes revealed that honor norms were the primary predictor of rape perceptions and blame attributions in Turkey (an honor culture), but not in Germany and Britain (dignity cultures) where rape myth acceptance was the strongest predictor. These results provide insights into the cultural factors influencing marital rape judgments in ways that may undermine victim's well-being and fair handling of rape cases, and highlight the domains most urgently in need of potential intervention.

SUBMITTER: Gul P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7318317 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Judgments of marital rape as a function of honor culture, masculine reputation threat, and observer gender: A cross-cultural comparison between Turkey, Germany, and the UK.

Gul Pelin P Schuster Isabell I

Aggressive behavior 20200429 4

Previous research has shown that there is higher tolerance of violence against women in cultures with salient gender-specific honor norms, especially when the violence occurs in intimate relationships and in response to threat to male honor. The present cross-cultural study (N = 398) extended these findings to sexual aggression (i.e., marital rape) by comparing participants from a culture that emphasizes honor (Turkey) and participants from cultures without strong honor traditions (Germany and B ...[more]

PMID: 32350879

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Project description:Honor values articulate gender roles, the importance of reputation in maintaining one's place in society, and maintaining respect for the groups one belongs to. In that sense honor provides a template for organizing social interactions and hence may be functional even among people and societies that do not report valuing and endorsing honor. We test the prediction that honor influences judgment and attention when activated in two experiments (N = 538). Using a culture-as-situated cognition perspective, we predicted that activating one aspect of honor would activate other aspects, even among individuals who do not much endorse honor values. We tested these predictions among European Americans, a group that is not typically associated with honor values. In each study, participants were randomly assigned to experimental or control groups, which differed in one way: the experimental group read statements about honor values as a first step and the control group did not. Participants then judged stick-figure pairs (judging which is male; Study 1, n = 130) or made lexical decisions (judging whether a letter-string formed a correctly spelled word; Study 2, n = 408). In Study 1, experimental group participants were more likely to choose the visually agentic figure as male. In Study 2, experimental group participants were more accurate at noticing that the letter-string formed a word if the word was an honor-relevant word (e.g., noble), but they did not differ from the control group if the word was irrelevant to honor (e.g., happy). Participants in both studies were just above the neutral point in their endorsement of honor values. Individual differences in honor values endorsement did not moderate the effects of activating an honor mindset. Though honor is often described as if it is located in space, we did not find clear effects of where our letter strings were located on the computer screen. Our findings suggest a new way to consider how honor functions, even in societies in which honor is not a highly endorsed value.

Project description:How humans react to threats is a topic of broad theoretical importance, and also relevant for understanding anxiety disorders. Many animal threat reactions exhibit a common structure, a finding supported by human evaluations of written threat scenarios that parallel patterns of rodent defensive behavior to actual threats. Yet the factors that underlie these shared behavioral patterns remain unclear. Dimensional accounts rooted in Darwin's conception of antithesis explain many defensive behaviors. Across species, it is also clear that defensive reactions depend on specific situational factors, a feature long emphasized by psychological appraisal theories. Our study sought to extend prior investigations of human judgments of threat to a broader set of threats, including natural disasters, threats from animals, and psychological (as opposed to physical) threats. Our goal was to test whether dimensional and specific patterns of threat evaluation replicate across different threat classes. 85 healthy adult subjects selected descriptions of defensive behaviors that indicated how they would react to 29 threatening scenarios. Scenarios differed with respect to ten factors, e.g., perceived dangerousness or escapability. Across scenarios, we correlated these factor ratings with the pattern of defensive behaviors subjects endorsed. A decision tree hierarchically organized these correlation patterns to successfully predict each scenario's most common reaction, both for the original sample of subjects and a separate replication group (n = 22). At the top of the decision tree, degree of dangerousness interacted with threat type (physical or psychological) to predict dimensional approach/avoidance behavior. Subordinate nodes represented specific defensive responses evoked by particular contexts. Our ecological approach emphasizes the interplay of situational factors in evoking a broad range of threat reactions. Future studies could test predictions made by our results to help understand pathological threat processing, such as seen in anxiety disorders, and could begin to test underlying neural mechanisms.

Dataset Information

Judgments of marital rape as a function of honor culture, masculine reputation threat, and observer gender: A cross-cultural comparison between Turkey, Germany, and the UK.

Publications

Judgments of marital rape as a function of honor culture, masculine reputation threat, and observer gender: A cross-cultural comparison between Turkey, Germany, and the UK.

Similar Datasets

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