Institutional Signals, Religious Framing, and Social Norm Change: Experimental Evidence on Transgender Inclusion from Pakistan

Last registered on August 10, 2026

Pre-Trial

General Information

Title

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0019003

Initial registration date

August 05, 2026

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

August 10, 2026, 3:18 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country

Pakistan

Region

Lahore

Primary Investigator

Name

Muaz Chaudhry

Affiliation

University of Cambridge

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

Additional Trial Information

Status

In development

Start date

2026-09-01

End date

2027-01-01

Keywords

Behavior, Gender, Labor

Additional Keywords

Social norms, institutional signalling, religious framing, transgender rights, norm change, pluralistic ignorance, labour market inclusion, Pakistan, South Asia, field experiment, discrimination

JEL code(s)

J15 — Economics of Minorities and Races; J71 — Discrimination; D91 — Micro-Based Behavioral Economics; K38 — Other Substantive Areas of Law; Z12 — Religion; C93; D91; D72

Secondary IDs

Prior work

This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.

Abstract

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that laws and institutions shape social norms — not only through enforcement but through their signalling function: communicating what is socially acceptable and legitimising or delegitimising group identities in the public sphere. This signalling effect is theorised to be especially powerful when institutional signals are reinforced by religious authority, yet causal evidence from low-institutional-legitimacy, high-religious-salience contexts remains scarce. In contexts such as Pakistan, where the credibility of secular state institutions is constrained and Islamic authority operates as the primary mechanism of norm legitimation, understanding how religious framing modulates the effect of institutional signals on public behaviour is both theoretically important and practically urgent.

This study provides the first large-scale randomised experimental test of this mechanism, exploiting the live and unresolved legal context of Pakistan's Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 — currently under Supreme Court review following its partial annulment by the Federal Shariat Court on Islamic grounds in 2023. Approximately 2,000–3,000 adults across urban localities in Lahore are randomly assigned to one of five conditions: a control condition receiving no institutional signal, or one of four vignette treatments describing an anticipated 2027 Supreme Court ruling either upholding or annulling the Act, with or without explicit religious framing drawn from real institutional discourse — the Council of Islamic Ideology's prior endorsement of the Act as consistent with Islamic principles, or the Federal Shariat Court's Quranic jurisprudential reasoning against it.

The study measures whether and how these signals shift: perceived descriptive and injunctive social norms regarding transgender inclusion; personal attitudes toward transgender individuals across social, economic, and educational domains; pluralistic ignorance — the gap between personal attitudes and perceived social norms; labour market perceptions including perceived employability of transgender individuals; and real behavioural outcomes including incentivised donation allocation, voluntary enrolment in transgender-staffed household and tutoring services, and willingness to publicly associate with transgender inclusion through information sharing.

A difference-in-differences/ANCOVA design on pre- and post-treatment institutional trust measures tests whether judicial signals shift the very legitimacy of the institutions sending them. Heterogeneity analysis examines whether religious framing amplifies institutional signals differentially for high-religiosity respondents, whether this amplification is symmetric across inclusive and exclusionary signals, and whether prior knowledge of the Act moderates treatment effects through belief updating.

The study contributes to three literatures: the economics of social norm formation and institutional signalling; the political economy of religion and governance in Muslim-majority societies; and the economics of discrimination and labour market exclusion of stigmatised minorities. Findings have direct policy relevance for the design of judicial communication strategies, civil society advocacy, and inclusion programming in contexts where conventional rights-based institutional legitimacy is weak and religious authority functions as the primary vehicle for norm change.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Chaudhry, Muaz. 2026. "Institutional Signals, Religious Framing, and Social Norm Change: Experimental Evidence on Transgender Inclusion from Pakistan." AEA RCT Registry. August 10. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.19003-1.0

Sponsors & Partners

Interventions

Intervention(s)

Participants are randomly assigned to one of five experimental conditions with equal probability (0.20 each). All participants first complete a demographics and baseline moderators block measuring institutional trust, religiosity, social norm sensitivity, and prior contact with the transgender community.

The control condition (C) receives no information about the Supreme Court case. Four treatment conditions present participants with a vignette describing an anticipated 2027 Supreme Court ruling on the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018:

T1 — Positive institutional signal without religious framing: the Supreme Court is expected to uphold the Act and maintain all existing protections for transgender individuals.

T2 — Negative institutional signal without religious framing: the Supreme Court is expected to strike down the Act and revoke existing protections.

T3 — Positive institutional signal with Islamic religious framing: same as T1, with additional framing citing Islamic principles of justice, compassion, and human dignity, consistent with Islamic teachings in the Holy Quran and Sunnah.

T4 — Negative institutional signal with Islamic religious framing: same as T2, with additional framing citing the Federal Shariat Court's 2023 reasoning that the Act contradicts Quranic injunctions on the divine fixity of gender, drawing on Surah An-Nisa 4:11-12.

All vignettes are read aloud by trained enumerators and are designed to reflect real institutional discourse previously used by Pakistani state and religious bodies. A manipulation check immediately following the vignette measures perceived likelihood of the ruling to test vignette credibility. Outcome measures follow in the order: social norm perception, personal attitudes, behavioural measures, post-treatment institutional trust.

Intervention Start Date

2026-09-01

Intervention End Date

2027-01-01

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

Perceived descriptive social norms index: mean response across eleven items measuring what most people in the respondent's community are believed to feel regarding social proximity, labour market inclusion, and educational inclusion of transgender individuals (5-point agree/disagree scale)

Personal attitudes index: mean response across fourteen items measuring respondent's own comfort with and support for social proximity, labour market inclusion, and educational inclusion of transgender individuals (5-point agree/disagree scale)
Donation allocation: amount donated (PKR 0–300) from guaranteed participation payment to a transgender employment NGO (Gender Rights Watch)
Service enrolment — cleaning: binary indicator of whether the respondent signs up for free household cleaning services delivered by trained transgender employees
Service enrolment — tutoring: binary indicator of whether respondents with school-age children enrol in free tutoring services delivered by qualified transgender teachers (conditional on having school-age children in household)

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

The perceived norms index and personal attitudes index will each be constructed as Anderson (2008) summary indices — standardised z-scores averaged across constituent items — to address multiple outcomes within each family and to maximise power. Items within each index will be standardised to mean zero and unit standard deviation using the control group mean and standard deviation before being averaged. Reverse-coded items (two per block) will be recoded before standardisation so that higher values consistently indicate greater acceptance of transgender inclusion. Cronbach's alpha will be reported for each index. The donation measure is a continuous variable (PKR 0 to 250) and will be analysed both in levels and as a binary indicator (donated any amount versus none). Enrolment measures are binary (yes/no) and will be analysed using linear probability models and logistic regression as robustness checks.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Injunctive social norms index: mean response across two items measuring what most people believe should happen regarding transgender rights and legal protections

Pluralistic ignorance measure: within-respondent gap between personal attitude score and perceived descriptive norm score — a positive gap indicates the respondent is more accepting than they believe their community to be
Labour market perceptions: two items measuring perceived employability of transgender individuals in professional versus informal labour
Post-treatment institutional trust index: Anderson summary index of five items measuring trust in the Supreme Court and government, repeated post-treatment to enable difference-in-differences estimation of whether judicial signals shift institutional legitimacy
Religious identity activation: single post-treatment item measuring the extent to which religious beliefs influenced the respondent's views during the survey — mechanism test for religious framing effects
Leaflet acceptance: binary indicator of whether respondent accepts a leaflet about transgender employment opportunities for sharing with others — measure of willingness to be publicly associated with transgender inclusion
Manipulation check: perceived likelihood of the ruling (1–5 scale) — used as a moderator to test whether treatment effects are larger among respondents who found the vignette credible

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Pluralistic ignorance will be computed as the individual-level difference between the respondent's personal attitudes index score and their perceived descriptive norms index score. A positive value indicates the respondent is more accepting than they perceive their community to be, consistent with pluralistic ignorance in the inclusion direction. Treatment effects on pluralistic ignorance will be estimated both directly (as a constructed outcome) and by comparing treatment effects on the two underlying indices separately, allowing identification of whether signals primarily shift perceived norms, personal attitudes, or both. The institutional trust DiD will be estimated as: (post-treatment trust score minus pre-treatment trust score) compared across treatment arms, with the control group change providing the counterfactual for survey-induced drift in trust scores.

Experimental Design

The study uses a between-subjects randomised vignette experiment embedded in a household survey. The design has five arms — one control and four treatments — with equal probability of assignment (0.20 per arm). Assignment is individual-level, implemented through Qualtrics/Kobo randomiser software administered by trained enumerators on tablets during face-to-face household visits.

The four treatment conditions follow a 2x2 factorial structure crossing two dimensions: policy direction (positive ruling upholding the Transgender Persons Act versus negative ruling striking it down) and religious framing (absent versus present). The control condition receives no information about the Supreme Court case.

The survey flow is: demographics and baseline moderators (including pre-treatment institutional trust and religiosity measures) → prior knowledge questions → randomisation → vignette or control → manipulation check → outcome measures (social norm perception, personal attitudes, behavioural measures) → post-treatment institutional trust measures.

Household sampling uses geographically clustered systematic sampling within selected Union Councils in urban Lahore. Streets within each UC are mapped and randomised using QGIS. Within selected streets, every third household is approached starting from a randomly dropped GPS pin. Within each household, one adult is randomly selected using a pre-generated random number assignment protocol. Enumerators follow a callback protocol for unavailable respondents.

Experimental Design Details

Not available

Randomization Method

Individual-level randomisation implemented by Qualtrics/Kobo survey software at the point of survey administration. Each tablet-based survey session is independently randomised with equal probability (0.20) to one of five arms using Qualtrics'/Kobo's built-in randomiser function with 'evenly present elements' option enabled. For offline administration, a pre-generated randomisation list created in Stata using a documented random seed is used, with treatment assignment entered by enumerators at the start of each survey. The randomisation seed and full assignment list will be archived and made available in the replication package.

Randomization Unit

Individual adult respondents. Randomisation occurs at the individual level — each respondent is independently assigned to a treatment arm regardless of which household or street they are from. Treatment is not clustered at the household, street, or UC level. Standard errors will be clustered at the UC level to account for potential within-UC correlation in outcomes arising from shared neighbourhood norms and social networks.

Was the treatment clustered?

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

50-60 Union Councils in urban Lahore (the unit used for standard error clustering in estimation, not the randomisation unit)

Sample size: planned number of observations

2,000–3,000 individual adult respondents

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

Approximately 400–600 respondents per arm across five arms (Control: 400–600; T1 Positive no religion: 400–600; T2 Negative no religion: 400–600; T3 Positive with religion: 400–600; T4 Negative with religion: 400–600). Equal allocation across arms.

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

Based on effect sizes reported in Tankard and Paluck (2017) for comparable institutional signalling vignette experiments — standardised effect sizes of d=0.15 to d=0.25 on norm perception and attitude outcomes — the following power calculations apply: At n=400 per arm, two-arm comparison (any treatment vs control), two-tailed alpha=0.05, power=0.80: minimum detectable effect size d=0.20. At n=600 per arm, same parameters: minimum detectable effect size d=0.16. The study is adequately powered to detect main treatment effects at the lower bound of effect sizes observed in comparable experiments. For pre-registered heterogeneity analyses (religiosity and prior knowledge moderators), splitting each arm on a binary moderator produces subgroups of approximately 200–300 respondents per subgroup. Minimum detectable interaction effect sizes at 80% power for n=300 per subgroup: d=0.23. The study is therefore powered for heterogeneity tests of moderate to large interaction effects but not for small interactions, which will be reported as directional with appropriate confidence intervals. For behavioural outcomes (donation allocation, service enrolment), power calculations assume a base rate of 30% enrolment in the control group based on comparable NGO opt-in experiments in South Asia. At n=400 per arm, the study detects differences in proportions of approximately 7–8 percentage points at 80% power. At n=600 per arm, approximately 6 percentage points.

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name

Ethics, Risk and Fieldwork (ERF) | Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge

IRB Approval Date

2026-07-09

IRB Approval Number

N/A

Analysis Plan