The World Economic Forum recently released a report encouraging economists to develop a new understanding for human behavior.
Perhaps the most interesting piece in the article pointed to a chart that showed the physiological responses to insults by U.S. Northerners versus Southerners.
Maybe not so surprisingly, the study found that, "The insult caused a surge in hormones among subjects who were from the U.S. south but not those from the U.S. north (Nisbett and Cohen 1996 and Figure 1)."
"Southerners’ heightened physiological responses and comparatively aggressive behaviour after being insulted provide some evidence that culture shapes how people think and how they interact in society."
So from this we can conclude that Southerners—when offended— experience significantly higher levels of testosterone and cortisol compared to northerners.
But one thing to point out related to southern "aggression" is that it stems from, "a ‘culture of honour’, which holds that a slighted person must stave off humiliation by punishing his insulter." This ideal seems more prevalent in the south.
