Culture Of Honor In Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

The coined phrase “Culture of Honor” harps on the theoretical idea that the Southern United States at all costs tries to avoid intentionally insulting or offending each other. This “honor” protects the South’s vernacular belief to insure one’s liberty and to daunt uncivil actions against families of the south, their living quarters, and their possessor ship. The culture of honor phrase was heavily discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s Entertainment Weekly National Bestselling book entitled Outliers and even more specifically, in chapter six, “Harlan, Kentucky.” In the mist of the mountainous land of the Cumberland Plateau, which can also be known as the Appalachian Mountains, lies the small town of Harlan, Kentucky. In 1819, eight immigrant families …show more content…
The Howards and the Turners brawl ended fatally. The mother of the Howards was so in tuned with the environment and world of gunshots around her that she had her expectations for her son’s death. “Die like a man, like your brother did!” were the last words her son endured from her, and he shut his mouth and did just that. The Turners and Howards were not the only families that were feuding in Harlan during this time period. Gladwell infers that when one family fights with another, then it is a feud. When lots of families fight with one another then it is a pattern. Along with the Howards and Turners were just the focal points of Gladwell’s story. While those families were killing each other, identical incidents were taking place in various towns along the Appalachians. These feuds were all implications of the Culture of Honor …show more content…
They knew that the actions of the families of Harlan in the nineteenth century were a product of patterns laid down in the English borderlands centuries before. Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett purposely mistreated students of the University in order to obtain and record their reactions. The students were categorized by where they were from, primarily people from the North and the South. The series of experiments included filling out and completing a questionnaire and returning it to a file cabinet at the very end of an extremely long and narrow hallway. As the students were proceeding down the hallway, they would endure another man known as the confederate of experiments who was seemingly larger and did not appear to be the friendliest. This unwelcoming man was just another part of Cohen and Nisbett’s experiment that ultimately proved that Southerners still behaved as if they were living in nineteenth-century Harlan,