Culture of Honour

In the brilliant 'Culture of Honor: The psychology of violence in the south' Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen integrate historical, survey, social policy, and experimental data to support an argument which sourced the cultural transmission of the greater violent response to insult in the southern states vs the northern states centrally to the economic value of sustaining ones reputation if one is a herder vs a crop farmer.

In a recent PNAS article the foundations of this argument are supported:

Ecocultural basis of cognition: Farmers and fishermen are more holistic than herders

It has been proposed that social interdependence fosters holistic cognition, that is, a tendency to attend to the broad perceptual and cognitive field, rather than to a focal object and its properties, and a tendency to reason in terms of relationships and similarities, rather than rules and categories. This hypothesis has been supported mostly by demonstrations showing that East Asians, who are relatively interdependent, reason and perceive in a more holistic fashion than do Westerners. We examined holistic cognitive tendencies in attention, categorization, and reasoning in three types of communities that belong to the same national, geographic, ethnic, and linguistic regions and yet vary in their degree of social interdependence: farming, fishing, and herding communities in Turkey's eastern Black Sea region. As predicted, members of farming and fishing communities, which emphasize harmonious social interdependence, exhibited greater holistic tendencies than members of herding communities, which emphasize individual decision making and foster social independence. Our findings have implications for how ecocultural factors may have lasting consequences on important aspects of cognition.

Ayse K. Uskul, Shinobu Kitayama, and Richard E. Nisbett (2008)