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I realize that we are often wary of making these kinds of broad generalizations about different culture groups, and with good reason.
我知道，我们常常对这些不同文化群体的进行各种区分一向很警惕--出于良好的用心，
This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take.
这就是为了避免种族歧视和种族偏见。
We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories.
但我们要相信，我们不是自己种族历史的囚徒。
But the simple truth is if you want to understand what happened in those small towns in Kentucky in the nineteenth century, you have to go back into the past,
但简单的事实是，如果你想了解发生在19世纪肯塔基州的这些小城镇的事，你还必须回到过去
and not just one or two generations, you have to go back two or three or four hundred years to a country on the other side of the ocean
而且不仅仅一两个世纪。你必须到两三个或四个世纪以前，在一个大洋彼岸的国家里，
and look closely at what exactly the people in a very specific geographic area of that country did for a living.
密切关注那些来自特殊地理区域的人们到底是怎样生活的。
The "culture of honor" hypothesis says that it matters where you are from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up,
"荣誉文化"假说的关键是你来自哪里，而不只是你在哪里长大，是你的父母、
but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your-great-great-great-grandparents grew up.
祖父母甚至曾祖父母乃至辈分更高的先祖们长大的地方。
That is a strange and powerful fact.
这很奇怪，但无可厚非。
It's just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, culture legacies turned out to be even stranger and more powerful than that.
而且这仅是开始，因为越接近考证，文化传承的影响反而更显陌生和更强大。
In the early 1990s, two psychologists at the University of Michigan, Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett, decided to conduct an experiment on the culture of honor.
在90年代初期，密歇根大学的两位心理学家--多夫·科恩和理查德·尼斯贝特决定进行一项荣誉文化的实验。
They knew that what happened in places like Harlan in the nineteenth century was, in all likelihood, a product of patterns laid down in the English borderlands centuries before.
他们知道上文中的哈兰事件，也许是英国边境争端的世纪遗留下来的产物。
But their interest was in the present day.
但他们对现在更感兴趣，
Was is possible to find remnants of the culture of honor in the modern ear?
如今是否还能寻获到荣誉文化遗留下来的痕迹？
So they decided to gather together a group of young men and insult them.
所以，他们召集一群年轻的男子进行实验。
