Culture of Honor and Ideologically-Motivated Violence: Two Virtual Reality Experiments

• In Event: Before the Attack: Theoretical and Empirical work on Terrorism and Hate Crime

Abstract

Nisbett and Cohen’s (1996) culture of honor (COH) theory, a perspective based on the premise of a white Southern male subculture, has recently been extended to the context of targeted violence (Barnes, Brown, Osterman 2012; Tschantret, 2019). A related trajectory of research has suggested that this type of subculture may be especially relevant to explaining the etiology of racially or ethnically motivated (REVE) and anti-government/anti-authority (AGAAVE) violent extremists (Mills et al., 2020). Nonetheless, the majority of existing studies have examined the theory using macro-level indicators (Corcoran & Stark, 2018; Gul, Cross, Uskul, 2020) and the few important individual-level exceptions (Barnes et al., 2012; Bjarnegard, Broneus, Melander, 2017; Leung & Cohen, 2011) still have yet to replicate the original “experimental ethnography.” With all this in mind, we inquire, Does the COH explain support for ideologically-motivated violence? We explore this question through two randomized experiments using virtual reality technology: (1) a partial replication of Cohen and colleagues’ (1996) original “bump” and “chicken” experiments, and (2) an extension of Barnes et al.’s (2012) Statue of Liberty vignette. Initial findings will be presented.

Author

• Jennifer Varriale Carson, University of Central Missouri