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Endorsement of a "culture of honor" contributes to the belief that family honor is tied to female obedience across a variety of moral values. Violations of these moral values may lead to aggression. Male participants in studies 1 and 3 filled out a measure of cultural honor and closeness to their present wife or partner. Participants with high levels of both closeness and honor were most aggressive toward a hypothetical moral violation. In study 2, we randomly assigned men to bond or not with a female confederate who devalued his most important moral value. Participants were then given the opportunity to aggress against her in a supposedly unrelated study by choosing how much painful hot sauce she would be forced to drink. Once again, high levels of closeness and honor predicted the greatest levels of aggression. In sum, moral disagreements by women are met with increased aggression within the culture of honor, the closer an honor-endorsing male is to the woman.

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Generalization has been suggested as a basic mechanism in forming impressions about unfamiliar people. In this study, we investigated how social evaluations will be transferred to individual faces across contexts and to expressions across individuals. A total of 93 people (33 men, age: M = 29.95; SD = 13.74) were exposed to facial images which they had to evaluate. In the Association phase, we presented one individual with (1) a trustworthy, (2) an untrustworthy, (3) or an ambiguous expression, with either positive or negative descriptive sentence pairs. In the Evaluation phase participants were shown (1) a new individual with the same emotional facial expression as seen before, and (2) a neutral image of the previously presented individual. They were asked to judge the trustworthiness of each person. We found that the valence of the social description is transferred to both individuals and expressions. That is, the social evaluations (positive or negative) transferred between the images of two different individuals if they both displayed the same facial expression. The consistency between the facial expression and the description, however, had no effect on the evaluation of the same expression appearing on an unfamiliar face. Results suggest that in social evaluation of unfamiliar people invariant and dynamically changing facial traits are used to a similar extent and influence these judgements through the same associative process.

Agentic self-enhancement consists of self-protective and self-advancing tendencies that can lead to aggression, especially when challenged. Because self-enhancers often endorse aggression to defend or enhance the self-concept, religious self-enhancement should lead to endorsing aggression to defend or enhance one’s religion. We recruited three samples ( N = 969) from Mechanical Turk ( n = 409), Iran ( n = 351), and the U.S.–Mexico border region ( n = 209). We found that religious (but not secular) self-enhancement in the form of religious overclaiming predicted support for, and willingness to engage in, religious aggression. In contrast, accuracy in religious knowledge had mostly negative associations with aggression-relevant outcomes. These results emerged across two separate religions (Christianity and Islam) and across three different cultures (the United States, Iran, and the U.S.–Mexico border region). Thus, religious overclaiming is a promising new direction for studying support for religious aggression and identifying those who may become aggressive in the name of God.

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