PONE-D-24-04966Who Can I Count On: Honor, Self-Reliance, and Family in the United States and IranPLOS ONE

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to review this paper. This paper makes an interesting case about the difference in honor values in Iran and the US. It is timely and important. I believe that honor as a construct in cultural psychology benefits from further scrutiny and this paper presents interesting ideas in this regard.

This paper studied the link between honor and self-reliance in the US and Iran across four studies. In the first three studies, researchers examined the association between honor values, self-reliance, and adherence to Covid health guidelines. They found that self-reliance mediated the link between honor and public health guidelines in the US but not in Iran. In study 4, they found that self-reliance was moralized in the US but not in Iran whereas family reliance was moralized in both cultures. They concluded that honor is construed differently in Iran and the US with the higher emphasis on family reliance in Iran. I find the argument valid and consistent with other cultural works in the Middle East. However, I see several major issues with the writing and operationalization of the paper which undermines the paper’s argument. Below I highlight my suggestions, hoping it would be beneficial to authors to improve their valuable work. Most importantly, I believe running a new study in the post-Covid time with modified self-reliance items and comparable age groups can significantly improve the argument of the paper:

Major issues:

• Writing of the introduction can be improved for clarity. The link between the ideas is not established well and paragraphs lack coherence.

• In their operationalization of self-reliance, authors seem to contrast self-reliance with reliance in the government. This is evidenced by their self-reliance measure: “During this pandemic, instead of relying on official sources, I should trust myself” These two, however, may not be mutually exclusive. One can, for example, have high levels of trust on themselves AND the government. In other words, self-reliance is operationalized to show disobedience to government. Then it is shown to predict lower levels of public health adherence.

• In study 4, the mean age of Iranian participants is 21.03, SD = 5.52, range 18-45 while for American participants it is = 40.01, SD = 13.42, range 19-79. This is a big difference and make the interpretation of the results questionable. These two samples comprise people from different generations, potentially with different values and priorities.

• Study 1-3 study took place during the pandemic. study 4 data collection time in Iran was mid 2022 while it was early 2024 in the US. The results of self-reliance scores, therefore, might be influenced by the salience of disease and Covid health concerns. I suggest replicating the self-reliance findings in the post-covid time as a robustness check.

• In study 4, researchers measured self-reliance moralization but not self-reliance itself. On the other hand, they measured family reliance but not family reliance moralization. What is the reason for this inconsistency? Wouldn’t it be valuable to measure both types for both constructs?

Minor issues:

• The main argument of the paper is not clear in the introduction. My understanding is that self-reliance is argued to be the central theme in the version of honor prevalent in the US South. However, there are other equally important themes in the Iran’s version. If this is the case, it needs to be clearly stated in the introduction.

• The introduction begins with reputation and then transits rapidly to honor without establishing the link between the two: “Maintaining a good reputation is so vital that honor is arguably one of the three features of human culture [5], affecting how people engage with institutions [6,7] and other groups [8]. It’s not clear why and how honor is related to reputation.

• The term “moral conventions” and its relevance to the argument is not explained well. “This perspective allows self-reliance to be one of many means of demonstrating strength, with preference shaped by moral conventions [25,28]. Moral conventions specify the qualities that indicate prestige or superiority, thereby governing how honor relates to those qualities.”

• Study 2 and 3 are similar in their goals and methods. Therefore, I suggest rewriting them as study 2a and 2b.

• On section 5.2.2. there is a mistake in reporting the correlation between honor scores and moralization of self-reliance: “Overall, honor scores correlated with endorsement of family-reliance, r = 0.35, p < .001, and moralization of self-reliance, r = 0.12, p = .231.” The moralization of self-reliance correlation is not significant.

• The political orientation question (left-leaning vs right-leaning) does not seem to be diagnostics in the contemporary Iran for various reasons. Was this item pre-tested to ensure its validity?

• It would be beneficial to report the reliability (e.g. alphas) of the measures for each study in the main text.

Reviewer #2: Dear authors,

Thank you for sending your work to be reviewed in the PLOS ONE. This paper investigates the relationship between honor, self-reliance, and public health attitudes-behaviors under the threat of COVID-19 in two countries (i.e., Iran and the US). Specifically, the paper looked at whether those Americans and Iranians endorsing honor values show a greater preference for self-reliance and if self-reliance, in turn, could mediate the relationship between honor values and adhering to public health guidelines. Additionally, the paper tests whether Iranians and Americans who value honor tend to moralize self-reliance to rule out the possibility that they consider self-reliance good but (for any reason) do not act upon it. The work is theoretically sound and robust, and the arguments in the introduction are solid and persuasive, so I have no comments/concerns about the theoretical aspects of the study. The translations of the Persian versions of measures were exact and sound (I am familiar with Farsi); thus, the authors were successful in measuring the construct they were looking for. In general, I would like to see this paper published in PLOS ONE. However, I have some concerns regarding the methods and implementation of the study, especially the Iranian samples in studies 3 & 4. Please find my comments/concerns below:

* Please note that these comments/concerns are primarily intended to generate a two-way conversation between the reviewer and the author(s). They do not mean that the authors should adhere to and revise every aspect of the review’s concerns. These comments could be addressed by having a two-way conversation between each side.

Major Comments

1. Study 3 did not have attention checks, so no one was excluded from the analysis. Why did the authors decide to drop the attention check in this study? How did they ensure their data quality? How can they be certain that their participants paid enough attention in responding to the surveys, especially when data was recruited from social media, and participants did not receive any compensation?

2. Table S2 supplementary materials: some measures across studies did not show what often considered in psychology good fit indices (CFI > .90, TLI > .90, RMSEA < .06-.08). I appreciate the fact that authors provided results on those measures that a two-factor or even three-factor solutions showed better fits in supplementary, but in some cases, even two-three factor solutions showed relatively weak fits (e.g., Study 4 US. Honor Values, Study 4 Iran Self-Control Moralization). Interpretations, therefore, should be made with caution, and authors should point it out when discussing their limitations.

3. The authors did a great job mentioning the potential limitations of applying this study's findings to other racial-ethnic minorities in the US (e.g., African Americans). While they rightly acknowledge the United States' racial and ethnic diversity, they do not discuss Iran's ethnic diversity. Iran's ethnic composition includes various ethnic groups, such as Persians, Azeris (Turkish), Kurds, Lurs, etc. Therefore, ignoring this diversity and generalizing findings from Persian Iranians (as reported in Table 1, 100% of the sample was Persian and Farsi was their first language) to all Iranians is not a good research practice and should be noticed. We should never assume the other, non-American context is homogeneous, thus avoiding the out-group homogeneity bias.

4. My previous experiences with collecting data from Iranian social media have shown that the sample you usually get is highly educated, liberal (as in study 3), young, has a high rate of people from average to high SES, and is biased toward females (as in study 3 & 4). Therefore, the sample might be different from the actual Iranian demographic. A representative sample may bolster this study's findings, as samples from Iranian social media users tend to be similar to WEIRD populations. Still, it would be highly appreciated if the authors could also mention this as a limitation.

5. Age in Study 4: As shown in Table 1, the mean age difference between the American and Iranian samples is ~19 years old, which is not controlled for in Study 4! It is also possible that differences exist in the political orientations of the two samples (related to my comment above on problems with samples from Iranian social media). As shown in Table 1, the mean political orientation of the American sample is M = 3.23. Although the authors did not report the same construct for the Iranian sample (my first comment is minor concerns), based on the information provided in study 3, we would expect a highly liberal sample of Iranians. I’m unsure if the authors collected other demographics (it seems they have collected education levels from Americans and not Iranians, and it is not clear why). Still, it is highly advised to control for all the possible demographics when comparing samples from two cultures and to report them either in the main manuscript or supplementary materials.

Minor Comments/suggestions

1. Table 1: Information about the political orientation of the Iranian sample needs to be included in Study 4.

2. Instead of presenting the same mediation model three times in three different figures, the authors could provide one figure in which the conceptual mediation model is explained and then report the findings in the manuscript (because they will report them in the manuscript anyway). This would save a lot of space.

3. The same could also be applied to regression tables from study 1 to study 3 (tables 3, 5, and 6).

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Mazyar Bagherian

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Who Can I Count On: Honor, Self-Reliance, and Family in the United States and Iran

PONE-D-24-04966R1

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