Collin D Barnes

Abstract
A climactic moment appears in Michael Polanyi’s
Personal Knowledge
when he describes the modern predicament of humanity as a second ejection from paradise triggered by the uneasy discovery that our knowledge cannot be justified objectively. Polanyi’s philosophy is a response to the cataclysmic consequences of this second fall from grace. It seeks to establish a “balance of mind” that yields neither to the Scylla of objectivism nor the Charybdis of nihilism. Such themes are reminiscent of Jungian psychology and the process of individuation, yet there is no evidence that Polanyi appreciated this. That he nevertheless employs metaphors and ideas suggestive of the psychical transformations recorded by alchemists is telling. It raises the possibility that while his work is evidently concerned with epistemology, it is, at another level, a highly sophisticated depiction of psychological growth—both for Polanyi, and for anyone who accepts his invitation to join the opus.

Rating scales that link numbers to verbal labels are ubiquitous in social psychological research and are used to re-express individuals’ attitudes on wide-ranging matters in quantities that can be treated statistically. These re-expressions pay tribute to an objectivist framework, but at the expense of eclipsing the powers of personal knowing Polanyi attributes to other minds. This fact comes to the fore in the present paper through an investigation of Polanyi’s analysis of linguistic indeterminacy, indication and symbols, and the application of neurological models to persons who are competent to make sense of their own lives. Accrediting the result of this inquiry compels one dedicated to Polanyi’s thought to wonder how social psychology ought to be conceived. Clues to an answer appear in the educational bonds formed between mentors and pupils in the transmission of cultural lore.

This paper brings the thought of philosopher and world-class chemist Michael Polanyi to bear on psychologists' study of honor cultures. After reviewing some fundamentals of Polanyi's outlook on science and persons, the paper develops a heuristic involving two dimensions to the process of knowing others-one that is integrative, another that is affective-in whichseeing withhonor cultures only characterizes one side of the intersection between these dimensions. This leads on to consideration of the Honor Ideology for Manhood scale (Barnes, Brown, & Osterman, 2012), an operationalization of honor in the southern U.S. that misses understanding because of impairments it naturally suffers as an instrument of detachment. The possibility follows that understanding asseeing withanother culture most readily succeeds when that culture's way of life is personally indwelt so that the psychologist directly encounters what its members can speak of and only convey by showing. The distinction Polanyi makes between explicit and tacit knowledge informs this proposal, and his vision of apprenticing-such as occurs between masters and pupils in the training of a science or an art-is presented as an exemplary form of such encounters.

Identifying strongly with the nation could entail a willingness to criticize the country or a refusal to do so. The studies reported here examine the extent to which masculine honor inspires the latter and, in turn, motivates teaching allegiance to youth in a manner that could discourage national criticism. Whereas Study 1 provides an initial test of this idea by evaluating blind patriotism's ability to mediate the link between honor endorsement and general support for allegiance education (e.g., singing the National Anthem at school functions), Studies 2 and 3 do so more decisively by focusing on more severe outcomes such as punishing students who refuse to pledge loyalty to the United States. The predicted pattern of mediation occurred in every case, even when honor endorsers were experimentally induced to feel anger toward the country (Study 3). Explanations for this latter finding are discussed and include the role of identity fusion in honor endorsers' commitment to the nation and the potential for real and enduring governmental threats to weaken or eliminate the pattern of mediation observed.

Honor endorsement might predict an intertwining of personal and national identities that facilitates taking country-level threats personally. If true, this could help explain why honor endorsement predicts support for defensive reactions to national provocations. In a sample of US college students (Study 1) and adults (Study 2), a latent honor variable predicted (1) personalizing national threats, and (2) defensive responses to illegal immigration and terrorism. The first of these associations was mediated by respondents' identification with the nation, and the second was mediated sequentially by national identification and the resultant tendency to personalize national threats. Together, these results highlight a mechanism by which the honor-national-defensiveness association emerges and opens the door for further research on honor and group-level processes.

Using both college students and a national sample of adults, the authors report evidence linking the ideology of masculine honor in the U.S. with militant responses to terrorism. In Study 1, individuals' honor ideology endorsement predicted, among other outcomes, open-ended hostile responses to a fictitious attack on the Statue of Liberty and support for the use of extreme counterterrorism measures (e.g., severe interrogations), controlling for right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and other covariates. In Study 2, the authors used a regional classification to distinguish honor state respondents from nonhonor state respondents, as has traditionally been done in the literature, and showed that students attending a southwestern university desired the death of the terrorists responsible for 9/11 more than did their northern counterparts. These studies are the first to show that masculine honor ideology in the U.S. has implications for the intergroup phenomenon of people's responses to terrorism.