Last Friday, we ran
an essay from Dave Cullen, author of the terrific book,
Columbine, on the similarities between the mass shootings at Fort Hood and Columbine High School. Then, an interesting debate broke out in our comments section. What triggered that debate was a comment posted by Jeff Kass, author of another book on Columbine. Kass presented his theory on Fort Hood: that the base’s assailant may have been motivated by a “culture of honor.”
A culture of honor leads men to feel their masculinity is questioned if they don’t personally defend themselves or enact revenge. A culture of honor, to some extent, sanctions vigilante justice.
In the comments, it was roundly debated whether a culture of honor was a factor at Fort Hood, either because of its location in Texas, or the assailant’s Islamic beliefs. Kass also argued that a culture of honor was a factor in Columbine, and this, too, was debated─with some quick math on the location of dozen or so school shootings in the last decade.
Now, an important caveat─Dave Cullen’s main advice was to be careful about rushing to conclusions, something that had happened in Colorado. “If we guess now,” he wrote, “the myths will be with us forever.” So I want to make this clear: I do not have any information that relates to Ft. Hood and the culture of honor. And I will leave it to Messrs. Cullen, Kass and others to work out how it specifically may or may not played a role in Columbine."
But as to the connection between a culture of honor and school shootings─there’s actually a brand-new study directly on point.
Over the weekend, I was catching up on reading of my psychological journals, and─coincidentally─it turned out that the just-published
November issue of Psychological Science includes a new study on this phenomenon. The scholars, lead by University of Oklahoma professor Ryan P. Brown, looked to see if there is a connection between a culture of honor and school violence.
First, a little history of how culture of honor in America is linked to geographical regions.
As Dr. Brown explained it to me, the culture of honor is an attitude where people believe that they are responsible for taking care of one's self─and to do so, they aggressively and proactively defend both tangible property and reputation. In the U.S., this has roots in the Appalachian mountains, with its residents descending from a combative Scotch-Irish tradition─which itself descended from the Vikings. As their descendants migrated, first to the South, then pushing westward with the frontier, they brought with them this centuries' old belief in aggressive defense.
Life on the frontier added to this aggressive sensibility. Settlements were far apart, resources were scarce, and life as a cowboy or rancher was peculiarly vulnerable to the guys who wore black hats. On the range, no one was coming to help you, so you had to make sure that you could defend yourself. Ideally, you had a tough enough reputation that you wouldn't be crossed in the first place. Add to that a certain amount of pioneer self-selection bias─those who had this fearless independence were the ones who struck out on their own.
While the harshness of life in these areas has dissipated, these values inspired by it became institutionalized. And toughness and taking control became part of the cultural understanding of masculinity (e.g., the increasingly popular instruction to "man up").
The self-reliant, tough, take-the-law-into-your-own-hands attitude is so interrelated with American geography, that researchers now use census maps to divide the nation into "culture of honor states" (those south of the Mason Dixon line, and the West) or "non-culture of honor states" (Northern and Eastern states). As colorfully written about in Malcolm Gladwell's
Outliers, researchers like Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett find that, Southerners are very polite─up to a point. But when they feel insulted, they react much more aggressively.
So Brown's team wondered if there was a connection between states with a culture of honor and school violence.
To look at this, they first analyzed data from a
nationally representative survey that asked high school students if they had brought a weapon to school within the past 30 days.
Brown found that, in states labeled as having a culture of honor, 7.08 percent of the students replied that they had brought weapons to school, but in states with no such tradition, the amount was 5.56 percent. While that's a small difference mathematically, it is means that kids in culture-of-honor states are statistically much more likely to be armed. “Weapons” included everything from guns to hunting rifles to pocket knives and brass knuckles. They brought weapons to school for all varieties of reasons─to defend themselves, to go hunting after school, or just to show off their families’ ammo collection.
Brown wasn’t satisfied from just this data, though─he also wanted to learn if school shootings were higher in culture-of-honor states.
Brown's team looked at school shootings that occurred between 1988 and 2008. In this dataset, the scholars only included what they considered were "proto-typical school shootings." So a school robbery or gang-drive-by didn't count, but a targeted attack by a student on his teachers or peers would have. Using that metric, the team identified 108 school shootings as having occurred in the past 20 years. Then they plotted these on the map of the U.S.A.
Some 75 percent of the 108 shootings occurred in culture-of-honor states. To put it another way, a school shooting was three times more likely to occur in one of those states than in a Northern or Eastern state. This finding held even after the researchers included statistical controls for economic conditions, ethnicity, and urban/rural environments─even weather.
It may seem hard to understand how the cowhand's "law into his own hands" tradition of masculinity would have any relationship to middle- or high-school interactions─let alone school shootings.
After all, we aren't talking about the theft of one's livelihood or running off with someone else's wife. The school equivalent would be taking off with someone else's bike, or asking the wrong girl out to a movie.
But, Brown explains, kids' sense of identity is very fragile. Pubescent teenage males may know what is expected of men, but they don't really know if they are men or still boys. So the epithet of "***" would cut to the core, regardless of actual sexual orientation. Stealing a kid's first real girlfriend could seem devastating. And the fragility is exacerbated for those with serious pathology: those with psychiatric disorders may even visually appear more vulnerable.
"I think it becomes some sort of cascading problem─they are more easily threatened and more likely to become threatened." says Brown. And in a culture of honor, a threat requires a response.
Add to that the fact that most school shooters are commonly depressed─often suicidal. Some tragically conclude that they will go out in a blaze of glory. A last final act that will show everyone just how tough and fearless they really were.
