Observing the S outhern US Culture of Honor Using Large-Scale Social Media Analysis (2024)

Abstract: A culture of honor refers to a social system where individuals’ status, reputation, and esteem play a central role in governing interpersonal relations. Past works have associated this concept with the United States (US) South and related with it various traits such as higher sensitivity to insult, a higher value on reputation, and a tendency to react violently to insults. In this paper, we hypothesize and confirm that internet users from the US South, where a culture of honor is more prevalent, are more likely to display a trait predicted by their belonging to a culture of honor. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that US Southerners are more likely to retaliate to personal attacks by personally attacking back. We leverage OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 API to both geolocate internet users and to automatically detect whether users are insulting each other. We validate the use of GPT-3.5 by measuring its performance on manually-labeled subsets of the data. Our work demonstrates the potential of formulating a hypothesis based on a conceptual framework, operationalizing it in a way that is amenable to large-scale LLM-aided analysis, manually validating the use of the LLM, and drawing a conclusion.

## introduction a culture of honor refers to a social system where individuals' status, reputation, and esteem play a central role in governing interpersonal relations. in such cultures, maintaining and defending one's honor and that of one's family or group is of paramount importance. a perceived slight, insult, or challenge to one's honor often necessitates a response, which could range from verbal defense to physical retaliation, to restore the lost esteem and reputation. these cultures are sometimes theorized as emerging in societies where centralized authority is weak or absent, and where individuals must rely on their reputation and the fear of retaliation to deter aggression or mistreatment by others. we hypothesize and confirm that internet users who belong to a region where a culture of honor is more prevalent would be more likely to display traits predicted by their belonging to a culture of honor. specifically, we test the hypothesis that us southerners are more likely to retaliate to personal attacks by attacking their attacker back. to analyze data at scale, we leverage openai's api for gpt-3.5 @xcite to both geolocate internet users and to automatically detect whether users are insulting each other. the concept of honor has been explored in social psychology, philosophy, and literature, with authors often developing a nuanced and intricate conceptual framework. the concept has been empirically validated, notably by @xcite , on small samples. however, large-scale empirical analysis of the concept of honor has been very expensive until very recently. we show that llms, and specifically gpt-3.5, can be used to address this. in this work, we explore a specific prediction made by the conceptual framework of the culture of honor (and the claim that the us south is such a culture). we emphasize connecting the conceptual framework of culture of honor to testable empirical hypotheses. we propose further testable hypotheses arising from philosophical and descriptive work on culture of honor that are also testable by leveraging llms to label data while validating the outputs of the llms. ## related works nisbett and cohen (1996) pioneered the concept of a culture of honor as it pertains to the us south, identifying traits such as a higher sensitivity to insult, a higher value on reputation, and a tendency to react violently to insults. to further support their hypothesis, nisbett and cohen (1996) have conducted both observational and empirical studies on groups of northern and southern college students. in a series of experiments, the subjects were put into a situation where one would feel "diminished." then, the researchers examined whether the subjects would "take @xcite aggressive action to compensate for the diminishment they experience." the results conclusively demonstrated that people in the southern us tend to exhibit the traits associated with cultures of honor than their northern counterparts. taking inspiration from their previous work, our study extends @xcite 's work in the online domain. the concept of honor has been explored since ancient times, e.g., in the bible and by sophocles in, e.g., antigone 1 . more recently, @xcite and @xcite connected the ancient concept, nisbett and cohen (1996)'s work, and modern philosophy. we draw on more recent philosophical work to make concrete predictions about internet denizens who belong to cultures of honor. ## methodology we obtain data on internet user conversations and fine-tune gpt-3.5 models to assign users to the corresponding us regions (south, non-south, or n/a) as well as to label each part of the conversation as whether or not it constitutes a personal attack. we then analyze the data to compare the rate at which southern and non-southern users retaliate when personally attacked by personally attacking back. the subreddit-changemyview dataset from convokit @xcite was considered for our analysis. while we also analyzed other datasets in convokitreddit-corpus-small, wikiconv @xcite (from 2015 to 2018, inclusive), and wiki-corpus (danescu-niculescu-mizil et al., 2012) -we were able to obtain data of interactions involving personal attacks with sufficient statistical power in the subreddit-changemyview dataset only. we attempted to locate the users by fetching the self-declared locations from user profiles with the matching usernames on the social media platform x, formerly known as twitter. note that not all selfdeclared locations could be associated with a us region because some locations are not in the united states or do not specify a us region (e.g. "moon," "united states," or "barcelona, spain"). for the subreddit-changemyview dataset, the number of speakers for which we were able to associate a location and the number of speakers for which we were able to associate a us region are tabulated in in order to obtain the location-us region pairs for fine-tuning and validating our geolocation model, samples of the collected locations were manually labeled by a human annotator and divided into training and validation sets (both of size 100). for the personal attack classifier, we used a prelabeled dataset of personal attacks @xcite . the dataset zhang et al. was heavily unbalanced with 2094 positive and 27927 (3833 of which are section headers) negative labels. 2094 non-section header negative entries were randomly selected and merged with the positively labeled entries. then, they were evenly divided into perfectly balanced training and validation sets. the training sets for each task were then used to fine-tune @xcite gpt-3.5 mod- ## discussion the three landmark experiments performed by nisbett and cohen (1996) "did not produce any truly violent behavior in [their] subjects, so it is an extrapolation to say that [they] have shown the process by which an insult results in actual violence for members of a culture of honor." indeed, they measured more indirect attributes of cultures of honor such as ratings given by third-party observers and physiological changes to draw their conclusions. in contrast, our methodology demonstrated that the southerners are more likely to signal verbal violence or capacity for verbal violence to protect their reputation in their online interactions. ## conclusion in this study, we were able to confirm a theoretically motivated prediction: internet users from the us south are more likely to retaliate against verbal aggression on the theory that reputation must be aggressively defended in a culture of honor. we show that analyses such as ours, on an extremely large scale, are possible by fine-tuning gpt-3.5 and manually verifying its outputs on samples of the inputs. by following similar processes laid out in this paper, analyses other than comparing the us south and the us non-south populations or testing hypotheses presented by social science frameworks aside from culture of honor are also possible.