Publication details
Unpredictable Socioecology and the Context-Dependent Expression of Religious Norms in Mauritius
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Normative decision-making is central to collective action, as it often requires individuals to forgo partial personal gains in order to sustain broader within-group equality. Religious traditions have been theorized to foster such normative conduct through mechanisms including beliefs in punitive supernatural agents and participation in collective rituals. Yet these effects may not operate uniformly across contexts. Given that religions are multifunctional cultural systems, their norm-regulatory role may vary with local socioeconomic conditions. We tested this idea among 198 Mauritian Christians recruited from neighborhoods differing in material, economic, and social security. Participants reported religiosity and socioeconomic indicators, stated how much people should donate to charity (local religious norm), and then made real, incentivized contribution decisions. We found that religiosity was associated with stronger endorsement of prosocial contribution norms among individuals of low economic status, but not among individuals of high status. However, this heightened endorsement did not consistently translate into higher contributions. Instead, more religious participants in economically marginalized contexts exhibited a larger gap between endorsed norms and actual behavior. Moreover, religiosity was associated with longer response times when people failed to match their stated standards with actual contributions, suggesting cognitive conflict. Interpreted against the backdrop of Mauritius’ history of structured inequality, these findings suggest that economically marginalized individuals may draw on religiosity as a means of stabilizing cooperative networks and fostering norms of sharing and mutual support. Nevertheless, behavioral realization of these norms depends on material possibilities, indicating that commitment alone does not guarantee compliance when resource are scarce. |
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