Honor

From Roger V. Gould's book, Collison of Wills: How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict:

Much of the difference between honor societies, which value impulsive acts and vengeance, and urbanized modern societies, which putatively encourage prudence and forgiveness, amounts to a difference in models of how individuals are supposed to cohere over time. Revenge-seeking and impulsive, violent responses to insult require that individuals look backward, notably to past wrongs, and that they substantially disregard their personal well-being in the future; prudence and peacemaking demand, in contrast, that wronged persons abandon the past and embrace the future.

[…]

It is well known that both men and women in honor settings are highly sensitive to verbal insults. More important, they remember insults, and bear grudges about them, for a long time. In one of the more dramatic demonstrations of this aspect of personal honor, Richard Nisbet and Dov Cohen showed that college students from the southern United States were about twice as likely as northerners to say they would be angry for a month or more if a friend were to insult them. Strikingly, there was not much difference between northerners and southerners in their reports of how long they would remain angry about being punched. Honor requires in particular that people nurse memories of symbolic affronts, the effect of which is to prolong the period during which the affronted person continues to want redress – hence increasing the likelihood of some kind of retaliation.