Religious Rituals and the Transmission of Gender Beliefs from Society to Markets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using ethnographic, experimental, and survey data from an indigenous community in India, this study examines whether participation in rituals that reinforce gender stereotypical beliefs influences the ritual participants’ gendered market preferences. Based on the findings from ethnographic fieldwork, we hypothesized that during the non-ritual period, people would exhibit gender homophiles in the market by preferring same-gender sellers over opposite-gender sellers. However, after participating in a religious ritual enacted with gender stereotypical beliefs, the participants will drift from gender homophily by choosing to buy products from the sellers whose gender was venerated in the ritual. We propose that the mechanism underlying this behavior is the internalization of the gendered beliefs conveyed through the ritual: people who are exposed to a culturally relevant and powerful ritual internalize the beliefs conveyed through the ritual and carry these beliefs to the market arena. We tested our theory using a natural experiment where indigenous people from one village participated in a three-day-long clan ritual that strictly enforced purity restrictions and treated men as inherently pure and women as inherently impure; only men were allowed to participate in ritual preparations and enactment, and women were only allowed to be spectators to the ritual. Indigenous people from two other villages who were not exposed to this ritual became our control group. Whereas control group villagers exhibited homophily when choosing vendors to buy merchandise, treatment group villagers preferred to buy predominantly from male vendors. This paper contributes to our understanding of how moral codes penetrate the market structure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".