Religious Licensing: Text Analysis and Experimental Evidence

In many Arab countries, high levels of religiosity sometimes co-exist with dishonesty and low levels of trust and cooperation. We explain this puzzle by showing that a specific (but widespread) brand of conservative religious discourse – which emphasizes religious rituals (‘ibadat) at the expense of worldly transactions (m'uamalat) – sometimes creates the perception that religious deeds either justify the neglect of good (worldly) deeds, or remove the guilt otherwise associated with bad (worldly) deeds. We develop three hypotheses that we test via (1) two lab experiments conducted in Egypt and (ii) text analysis of fatwas spanning over 121 years. In our first lab experiment, we test whether a prior religious ritual (zakat) decreases subsequent prosociality. Our data show that in the treatment, subjects showed less altruistic behaviour, but the effect lacks statistical significance. In Experiment 2, we test whether in cases where religious acts signal virtue to others, tendency for subsequent less prosocial behaviour increases because low prosociality would be less damaging to one’s reputation. Our data do not fully confirm our hypothesis. They show a positive effect of a prior religious act. However, when no third party is watching one’s religious act, then ones’ level of altruism regresses to the mean that existed before the religious act. Finally, we test a third hypothesis where we argue that a major factor contributing to religious licensing is exposure to religious discourse that prioritizes religious rituals (acts towards God) over human-to-human transaction. We ran text analysis of the official religious fatwas issued by Dar El-Iftah in Egypt from 1898 to 2016. We find that fatwas emphasizing rituals have been increasing over time compared to an overtime decline of fatwas emphasizing transactions.