A masterful page on the subject, and a report about it.
"The guilt/innocence perspective in which westerners live dictates much of our thinking in the west. However, not everyone in the world operates within this paradigm. As I mentioned earlier, while living in the Middle East I noticed that when the lifeguard at a swimming pool blew his whistle, the westerners all stopped to see who was guilty, but the Arabs kept right on swimming."
"As I observed this and other phenomena, I began to realize that Arabs and Arab society were operating in another whole dimension. Guilt did not have the same power and influence as it did in the west. While they were aware of guilt, it didn't have the same strong connotations for them as it had for me."
"If a policeman pulled me over, I immediately felt guilty, thinking that perhaps I had done something wrong. But when my Arab friends were pulled over, they didn't display any sign of guilt. They talked boldly to the policeman, and even argued loudly with him over the issues at hand."
"It was only after many years of living in a Muslim culture that it started to dawn on me that the Arabs around me were not operating on a level of guilt versus innocence. Nor were they operating in a fear versus power paradigm. I had heard much about this from missionaries living in Africa but it didn't seem to apply to the Arabs of the Levant. Rather, I discovered that Arabs were living in a worldview where the predominant paradigm was shame versus honor."
(From Honor and Shame in a Middle Eastern Setting by Roland Muller)
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