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Honor and Violence

An Account of Feuds, Duels, and Honor Killings

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Abstract

We present a theory of honor violence as a form of costly signaling. Two types of honor violence are identified: revenge and purification. Both types are amenable to a signaling analysis whereby the violent behavior is a signal that can be used by out-groups to draw inferences about the nature of the signaling group, thereby helping to solve perennial problems of social cooperation: deterrence and assurance. The analysis shows that apparently gratuitous acts of violence can be part of a system of norms that are Pareto superior to alternatives without such signals. For societies that lack mechanisms of governance to deter aggression or to enforce contracts, norms of honor can be a rational means of achieving these functions. The theory also suggests that cultures can become trapped in inefficient equilibria owing to path-dependent phenomena. In other words, costly signals of honor may continue to be sent even when they are no longer providing useful information.

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Notes

  1. In honor societies, mad dogs are as dangerous as cowards, if not more so. Many of the norms regulating prison gangs, for instance, are related to preventing unauthorized violence between and within the different gangs. As David Skarbek (2014) shows in great detail in his study of the norms of American prison gangs, rules regulating violence are often highly specific about who may use violence on whom and under what circumstances. As Skarbek (2014:86) notes, in prisons, the gang “must authorize the use of violence because spontaneous, unplanned violence causes problems for other inmates.”

  2. In some sense, the model we used to illuminate revenge-type violence involves signaling also, but game-theorists refer to such phenomena as involving reputation, rather than signaling: the “message” is intrinsic to the very behavior.

  3. Other signaling equilibria are possible in situations in which both high- and low-quality types stand to make identical gains, but high-quality types can signal at lower marginal cost (Grafen 1990; Spence 1973) or even at zero cost (Gintis et al. 2001; Lachmann et al. 2001).

  4. Such organizations also provide opportunities for gratifying mutual recognition and conferral of esteem (Brennan and Pettit 2006, chap. 11 §1).

  5. This is another example of the “community responsibility” system of reputation management that we see in prison gangs and medieval traders (Greif 2006; Skarbek 2014:75–77).

  6. Mackie’s account, while ground-breaking and highly influential, is not uncontroversial. See especially Efferson et al. (2015), Ross et al. (2016), and Howard and Gibson (2017) for recent work on this topic.

  7. Social norms, in this way, can often be fragile—when they change, they change quickly (Bicchieri 2006:181,197; Thrasher and Vallier 2015).

  8. Paralleling our model of honor killing, Rai and Sengupta (2013) provide a costly signaling model of premarital confinement in which women are supposed to have an underlying trait of “docility,” and the marginal cost to parents of confining a docile child is lower than the cost of confining a non-docile child. Thus, confinement itself is taken to be a credible signal of docility, which husbands in turn take as desirable in itself or indicative of the cost of future fertility controls.

  9. In typical cases, the groom’s family won’t just be concerned with the chastity of the prospective bride, but of the entire extended family. For ease of presentation, we omit this complication below.

  10. This suggests a possible avenue for policy interventions: in some societies, such as Turkey, so-called virginity testing is widely reported (Parla 2001; Pelin 1999). Stronger privacy rights, or otherwise making such practices more difficult, may make honor violence less worthwhile as a signal.

  11. It must be conceded, however, that it is not clear what form typical honor violence takes, and hence what exactly the distribution of behavior is that demands explanation. Other sorts of honor violence may serve a similar role but are reported less readily, such as physical mutilation and incapacitation (Niaz 2003). Also, families may attempt to conceal a child’s transgression, rather than publicly punish it.

  12. Kim Sterelny (2007) argues that marriage practices are in general much less likely to be subject to adaptive cultural group selection because there is limited opportunity to experiment with different marital norms within a human lifespan, and marriage practices are not modular: they are embedded in larger networks of social practices. The larger complex may be subject to adaptive pressures, but not the component parts.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Keith Hankins, Cristina Bicchieri, Lata Gangadharan, Jerry Gaus, Shaun Nichols, David Skarbek, Lijia Tan, Kevin Zollman, Frank Calegari, Birendra Rai, Klaus Abbink, and audiences at the University of Arizona, Australian National University, and Monash University for suggestions and comments. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council, DP150100242 (TH) and DP170102834 (TH and JT).

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  1. Philosophy Department & The Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy, Chapman University, Becket Building, One University Drive, Orange, CA, 92866, USA

    John Thrasher

  2. Philosophy Department, Monash University, 20 Chancellors Walk, Menzies Building, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Toby Handfield

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Correspondence to John Thrasher.

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Thrasher, J., Handfield, T. Honor and Violence. Hum Nat 29, 371–389 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-018-9324-4

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