The latest issue of Rationality and Society has a nice paper by David Patel on the increased popularity of ‘fundamentalist’ Islamic clothing styles such as the full-face veil or niqab. According to Patel, this increase is not the result of an increase of fundamentalism, but can be explained by other social factors using signaling theory. Whereas simpler clothing styles such as headscarves used to be a credible signal of piety, this signal lost it credibility when social and economic developments created more and more incentives for non-pious women to wear headscarves. In response, the truly pious women turned to signals that are more costly and therefor more credible, such as the niqab.
I’m far from a specialist on Islamic culture so I can’t really judge the substantive claims of the paper, but I’d like to highlight three nice features of this paper:
- Patel provides a game-theoretical explanation of an interesting social phenomenon without using any formalization or math. Not that I’m against formalization, but it’s nice to see that sometimes you can do without and still use the power of the underlying theory.
- The paper shows the enormous potential of signaling theory for explaining sociological phenomena. I hope to see a lot more of it (see also the work by Diego Gambetta).
- Although the paper does not include a rigorous empirical test of the theory, Patel does quite explicitly argue which empirical phenomena could be used to test the theory, and also identifies concrete hypothetical observations that would falsify the theory. People should do that more often.
(By the way: most people seem to have forgotten that for much of the 20th century headscarves were very common in Western societies. My grandmother routinely wore one when going out, and I don’t think it had anything to do with religion.)