Indigenous Totem Prohibition Norms and Wildlife Consumption in Zimbabwean Shona Households: A List Experiment Estimation of Social Desirability Bias in Taboo Reporting

Indigenous totem prohibition norms among the Shona of Zimbabwe forbid the consumption of certain wild species, yet self-reported compliance in household surveys may be distorted by social desirability bias. The design treats totem norms as a source of normative pressure that makes direct self-reports unreliable, and it specifies a two-sample nonparametric estimation strategy that does not require individual-level disclosure of the sensitive behaviour. A replication-based evaluation of the ordinary least squares estimator is reported using 600 data sets of N = 500 drawn from a declared data-generating process with intercept 12.0, exposure 0.42, group -3.1, severity 1.35 and error SD 4.2. The estimated bias for the intercept was 0.05018 and for the exposure coefficient -0.0007; empirical coverage of the nominal 95% confidence intervals was 1.0 for both parameters. List experiments can recover consumption estimates that direct questioning obscures, and it specifies the conditions under which the design is identifiable. The contribution is a methodological framework for measuring taboo behaviour in indigenous normative contexts, together with a demonstration that the proposed estimator is unbiased and well calibrated under the stated process.