Cigarettes for the dead: effects of sorcery beliefs on parochial prosociality in Mauritius
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research testing evolutionary models of religious morality shows that supernatural beliefs in moralizing gods positively affect prosociality. However, the effects of beliefs related to local supernatural agents have not been extensively explored. Drawing from a Mauritian Hindu sample, we investigated the effects of beliefs and practices related to two different types of local supernatural agents (spirits of the deceased unconcerned with morality) on preferential resources allocation to receivers differing in geographical and social closeness to participants. These spirits are ambiguously linked to either ancestor worship or sorcery practice. Previous studies suggested that sorcery beliefs erode social bonds and trust, but such research is often limited by social stigma and missing relevant comparison with other beliefs. To overcome these limitations, we used nuanced free-list data to discriminate between the two modes of spirit beliefs and tested how each contributes to decision-making in economic games (Random Allocation, Dictator). Expressing sorcery beliefs together with performing rituals addressed to the spirits was associated with greater probability of rule-breaking for selfish/parochial outcomes in the Random Allocation Game (compared to ancestor worship). No difference in money allocations was found in the Dictator Game.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it