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Although intimate partner violence (IPV) and “honor”-based violence (HBV) are major concerns throughout the world, little research has investigated the acceptance of these forms of abuse outside of the West. The purpose of this paper is to therefore respond to this gap in the literature by exploring attitudes toward HBV in a fictional depiction of IPV across four Asian samples: India, Iran, Malaysia and Pakistan.

Participants (n=579) read a hypothetical scenario in which a husband, despite his own marital infidelity, verbally abuses and physically assaults his wife after discovering that she has been unfaithful. Participants then completed a questionnaire that assessed perceptions of damage to the husband’s honor, approval of intimate partner HBV against the wife, and perceptions of both the victim-wife and the perpetrator-husband.

The findings revealed that more males than females, across all four nations, were endorsing of honor-adhering attitudes in response to the perceived threat to the husband’s reputation resulting from the wife’s infidelity. Additionally, of the four samples, Pakistani participants were the most approving and Malaysians least endorsing of honor-adhering attitudes.

The results are discussed in relation to studies of honor-adherence in Asian populations. This study provides an original glimpse into the perceptions of intimate partner HBV in these not-often sampled nationalities.

This paper aims to investigate Western studies on beliefs about aggression which have found that men typically hold instrumental beliefs and women hold expressive beliefs.

To investigate whether beliefs about aggression are qualitatively different in an Indian sample, interviews were undertaken with focus groups of 16 and 26‐year‐olds from north‐east India.

IPA analysis indicated that respondents viewed their aggression in terms of: how they might appear; honour or shame; gender roles; and as a loss of self‐control. These findings indicate that beliefs about aggression held in this Indian sample are more complex than can be characterised by the instrumental/expressive dimension.

Implications of these findings for developing more culture‐specific measures of beliefs about aggression are discussed.