ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 20, 1996 TAG: 9604220039
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: HOLLY YEAGER HEARST NEWSPAPERS
A HERDSMEN HERITAGE in tough lands has created a ``culture of honor'' in which insults and threats to belongings are not abided, two psychologists contend.
Two psychology professors say they have scientific evidence that Southerners are more prone to violence than Northerners.
Using crime statistics, opinion polls and their own experiments, Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen argue in a new book that the South's ``culture of honor'' is still alive and well - and responsible for higher murder rates in the region.
Surprisingly, some Southern scholars agree with their findings.
Nisbett said this week, ``Southerners believe that violence is appropriate for purposes of self-protection and ... in response to an insult.'' He and Cohen trace that attitude to immigrants from ``the fringes of Britain'' - especially Scotland and Ireland - who settled the region from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries.
Today's alleged proclivity to violence ``stems from the fact that much of the South was a lawless frontier region settled by people whose economy was originally based on herding,'' the authors conclude in their book, ``Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South.''
Nisbett, who teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, spent the first 17 years of his life in El Paso, Texas. He has also lived in New York, Boston and New Haven, Conn. Cohen, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana, is a lifelong Northerner, born and raised in Ann Arbor.
``Herding people, all over the world, are tough guys,'' Nisbett said. ``They're tough guys for a very good reason: Somebody can take their wealth in an instant.'' The result is a culture in which a reputation for strength is king, and threats to that macho image are not tolerated, he added.
In the more densely populated North, farmers and city dwellers could rely on sheriffs and police to help enforce laws and protect property. But Southerners and other people on the frontier often had to create their own system of law and order to protect themselves, Nisbett and Cohen argue in the book.
``The means for doing this is the rule of retaliation: If you cross me, I will punish you,'' they write.
Texas Christian University historian Grady McWiney described similar Southern societal ties to parts of Britain in his 1988 book, ``Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South.''
McWiney wrote that Southern attitudes on protecting one's turf can be traced to the more hotheaded people of Scotland and Ireland who came to the region. They were far different from the more staid English who immigrated to the North, he said.
John Shelton Reed, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, said the Nisbett-Cohen book reaches many of the same conclusions as work he has done showing that Southerners often think it is appropriate to use violence in certain situations when Northerners don't.
Their findings shift ``the burden of proof to someone who wants to argue there is not a regional cultural difference here,'' said Reed, who is also editor of Southern Cultures magazine.
The central role of honor - and the violence it can lead to - are evident in many aspects of life in the South, including literature and country music lyrics, Reed said.
``I think that the kinds of violence that we [Southerners] specialize in and seem to condone ... are consistent with this view of Southern culture,'' he added. He referred specifically to murders and assaults among people who know each other that begin as, say, lovers' spats and barroom brawls.
Federal crime statistics show that murders stemming from other serious crimes, such as robberies and rapes, usually involve strangers and are equally common across the country.
Nisbett and Cohen say they did not include blacks in their study because homicide rates for blacks are unrelated to region. They note that the migration of blacks to Northern cities is a relatively recent phenomenon and say that the historical regional differences in whites' attitudes regarding violence don't apply to blacks.
The attitudinal differences between Northern and Southern whites are most dramatic in smaller cities and rural areas, they say. In larger cities, ties to the land are less important and homogenizing influences have a greater impact.
In small towns, the authors - using FBI data collected from 1976 to 1983 - found that white male homicide rates were three times higher in the South than in the North. In rural areas, the rates were four times higher in the South; in towns with 50,000 to 200,000 people, the rates in the South were twice as high.
The authors discount the effects of the South's warmer temperatures, higher poverty rates and tradition of slavery, which have in the past been used to explain the higher level of violence in the region.
Instead, they argue, the key factor in the region's high murder rates is the traditional herding mentality.
They point to surveys showing that Southerners are more likely than Northerners to approve the use of violence to respond to an insult or protect personal property. For example, 18 percent of Northerners - but 36 percent of Southerners - said a man has the right to kill someone in order to defend his home.
Nisbett and Cohen also cite experiments they conducted using male students at the University of Michigan. One test showed that when white men from the South were insulted, their testosterone levels rose an average of 12 percent. But among white men from the North, the hormone levels rose, on average, 6 percent following an insult.
In another test, Southerners confronted with a male student challenging them for space in a narrow hallway were more aggressive and turned aside only to avoid a collision, while Northerners were quick to move out of the way.
``Southerners who have been insulted believe bystanders would think they were not tough or masculine if they didn't respond,'' said Nisbett. ``Northerners don't respond that way.''
Reed said he and his colleagues who study the South aren't surprised by the findings. ``What we're looking at in the experiments are indications of honor,'' he said. ``They're the kinds of things that would have produced a duel once upon a time.''
But Reed said jokingly that the results leave Southern scholars with a major question: ``Why are Northern men such wimps?''
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