What do you do when someone curses at you?
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How you respond may depend on where you’re from. In
2009 Malcolm Gladwell, author of the non-fiction best-
sellerThe Tipping Point, described a psychology test in
which researchers asked male students at the University
of Michigan to complete questionnaires and, one-by-
one, to take them to an office down a narrow corridor
past a row of file cabinets. As each student neared the
office, a researcher posing as a clerk opened a file
drawer, forcing the student to squeeze past. As he did,
the “clerk” slammed the drawer and muttered,
“Asshole.” The student, after delivering his question-
naire, was asked to provide a technician with a saliva
sample. It turned out that the saliva of students from
the South showed heightened levels of cortisol and
testosterone—chemicals released as part of a person’s
fight response; but the saliva of students from northern
states showed no such elevation. Gladwell regarded this
as proof that cultural legacies persist “virtually intact”
over many generations. Today’s southern men, even
though attending a northern university, were behaving
much as had their great-great-grandfathers 180 years
earlier. When confronted with a challenge to their
honor, their psychic defenses readied them to fight, or
so Gladwell contended.