The idea that honor cultures encourage hypersensitivity has been coming up a lot, and that's definitely not how I see it. At least for the ones practiced in the early US. https://twitter.com/adamgurri/status/1357006881030631431

Honor cultures lay down an explicit code of conduct. The entire point is that violations of its key tenets are widely understood to be serious social threats. The code also dictates the expected response. Alertness did not require hypersensitivity or "reading the room."

That's a simplistic summary, so there are finer points to debate, but my main argument is that the response is not primarily dictated by the emotional tenor of the moment, or by the audience's reaction. It is rooted in a stable and coherent code.

Of course, lots of people are hotheads, and baseline emotional volatility could play a big role in how things ended. But this is a different thing from "reading the room," because only certain forms of social disagreement touch on matters of honor.

In other words, someone in an honor culture would usually know in advance whether or not a viewpoint would be considered offensive. When expressing opinions on current events, there would be no need to read a situation in real time.

Inadvertent violations could happen when someone did not realize the full implications of a remark, but by the time they sensed a bad reception, the damage was done. Changing the subject was insufficient. They would have to address it directly and clarify what they meant.

And doing this would require knowing *why* it had been interpreted as violating the code of honor. There's an internal logical that goes much deeper than responding to the crowd's emotional state.