Honor Bound : How a Cultural Ideal Has Shaped The American Psyche

Ryan P. Brown

Ryan Brown Managing Director for Measurement at Rice University's Doerr Institute for New Leaders. He was a professor of social psychology at The University of Oklahoma for almost 20 years, where he taught and conducted research on how people think, feel, and behave. After earning his Ph.D. at The University of Texas at Austin, he briefly taught at Amherst College in Massachusetts before going to OU. He graduated cum laude with a B.A. in psychology from Rice University in Houston, Texas. Having grown up in Alabama of Scotch-Irish descent, he has spent almost all of his life in “honor states,” an experience which no doubt has motivated and supported his research interests. Ryan is a fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology and has served as an ad hoc reviewer for approximately 20 national and international journals in psychology. He is a member of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Association for Psychological Science. Ryan has published more than 50 scientific articles and book chapters, along with a book on honor ideology in the U.S. (published by Oxford University Press in 2016) and has received research funding from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and from the National Institutes of Health. In the wake of the tragic mass-shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, he was invited to serve on the Oklahoma Commission on School Security (PDF), which advised the governor’s office on ways to enhance security in Oklahoma’s schools.