Hair Speaks: Social Context and the Interpretation of Religious Signals--Evidence from a Pre-Registered Face-to-Face Large-Scale Experiment

We constantly make inferences about others based on their speech, posture, facial expression, physical attire, and so on. An important set of such signals which an individual is inferred on concerns the treatment of facial hair and head. Headscarves and the conservative dresses collectively referred to as veiling are particularly distinctive signals. Veiling is exclusively interpreted as a signal of Muslim religiosity. Beards too are widespread among Muslim men. But beards are less distinctive signals of Muslim religiosity for men than veils are for women. This is perhaps because or why many non-Muslim men also sport beards.

To understand how people interpret such signals we use a pre-registered, face-to-face factorial survey experiment with a large sample from Turkey. Turkey is a strategic research site for the purpose of the study because: (1) it is a non-Western context where the type of signals we study (beards and veils) are widespread (2) there is population heterogeneity, in that a sizable portion of the population is secular while the rest is conservative, and (3) the signals we study are not legislated, that is, they are not imposed as in Saudi Arabia or Iran, or forms of it are not banned as in some Western European countries or Tajikistan. These characteristics of the country make such visible signals potentially highly informative and rich (see Aksoy and Gambetta 2021) allowing us to test our hypotheses. Our hypotheses and the results broadly suggest that people's interpretations of such religious signals depend strongly on context (as measured, for example, by the level of religiosity or support for Islamic political parties in the neighbourhood), and that people factor in the possibility of strategic manipulation of one's religious attire depending on the context.