Do psychologists understand honor cultures when they operationalize them?

This paper brings the thought of philosopher and world‐class chemist Michael Polanyi to bear on psychologists' study of honor cultures. After reviewing some fundamentals of Polanyi's outlook on science and persons, the paper develops a heuristic involving two dimensions to the process of knowing others—one that is integrative, another that is affective—in which seeing with honor cultures only characterizes one side of the intersection between these dimensions. This leads on to consideration of the Honor Ideology for Manhood scale (Barnes, Brown, & Osterman, 2012), an operationalization of honor in the southern U.S. that misses understanding because of impairments it naturally suffers as an instrument of detachment. The possibility follows that understanding as seeing with another culture most readily succeeds when that culture's way of life is personally indwelt so that the psychologist directly encounters what its members can speak of and only convey by showing. The distinction Polanyi makes between explicit and tacit knowledge informs this proposal, and his vision of apprenticing—such as occurs between masters and pupils in the training of a science or an art—is presented as an exemplary form of such encounters.