Last year, George Will got into a heap of trouble for a column in which he wrote that colleges and universities are learning that “when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous … and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.”

It wasn’t a particularly great column by the author’s standards: It was a little unfocused and too easily allowed for ungenerous readings that implied Will was downplaying sexual assault. (It would almost certainly have fared better had it been published after the exposure of the Rolling Stone/University of Virginia hoax). The resulting outrage was enough to get Will disinvited from a speaking gig at Scripps College, a women’s college in Claremont, California. Will’s position gets some support, however, from a new paper by sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, summarized at length by Jonathan Haidt at his The Righteous Mind blog.

The study posits that the West is in the process of a third major cultural shift. In brief, it argues that we began as an honor-based society characterized by a low tolerance for slights and a strong preference for seeking personal redress (think of the characters of the Iliad or duelists in the early American Republic). Over the past few centuries, we’ve shifted to a culture based more on personal dignity, which encouraged people to shrug off all but the worst slights as being beneath their notice and to appeal to third-party authorities for redress of the most intolerable wrongs.