Abstract
Little is known about the behavior of Madrassa (Islamic religious seminaries) students, how Madrassas shape their behavior, and how other groups in their communities interact with them. To investigate this, we use experimental data that we collected from students pursuing bachelors-equivalent degrees in Madrassas and other educational institutions of distinct religious tendencies and socioeconomic background in Pakistan. First, we find that Madrassa students are the most trusting, exhibit the highest level of other-regarding behavior, and expect others to be the most trustworthy. Second, there is a high level of trust among all groups. Third, within each institution group, we fail to find evidence of in-group bias or systematic out-group bias either in trust or tastes. Fourth, we find that students from certain backgrounds under-estimate the trustworthiness of Madrassa students.
Highlights
Madrassas – Islamic religious seminaries – have received considerable attention recently, especially since 9/11 and the 2005 London bombing
Since most Madrassas are similar to the ones in the study and most prominent Madrassas are located in urban centers, our findings would extend to the vast majority of those institutions in Pakistan
Respondents are quite trusting on average, with 74.6% of students sending the Rs. 300. This is in the higher range of what respondents have been found to send in the few studies that use a version of the binary trust game, where the investment rate varies from 32% (Bohnet and Huck, 2004) to 91% (Engle-Warnick and Slonim, 2004)
Summary
Madrassas – Islamic religious seminaries – have received considerable attention recently, especially since 9/11 and the 2005 London bombing. Our experiments measure aspects that are likely to be important for the decision to engage in violence, and for the well-functioning of a society more generally In this setting, we study how Madrassa students, who tend to come from modest origins, exhibit high levels of religiosity, and are thought to be exposed to teachings that reject Western ideas (Rahman, 2008), interact with individuals from diverse religious and socioeconomic backgrounds, and varied exposure to Western ideas. While our paper takes a similar approach as Fershtman and Gneezy (2001), our context is made unique by having two dimensions of inequality: religiosity and socioeconomic status, both of which are valued by the Pakistani society.11,12 These two dimensions are negatively correlated: Liberal University students are the highest social status group when judged by socioeconomic characteristics but the lowest status group when judged on the metric of religiosity, and the reverse is true for Madrassa students.
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