Papers by Kosuke Takemura
PSYCHOLOGIA
Since Yamagishi and Yamagishi (1994) proposed the important role of trust toward generalized othe... more Since Yamagishi and Yamagishi (1994) proposed the important role of trust toward generalized others (general trust) in social dynamics, trust among people has been a key concept not only in psychology but also in a wide range of disciplines such as sociology, economics, political science, social epidemiology, biology, and neuroscience. Trust has been studied as an antecedent of several important human behaviors/experiences such as cooperation (e.g.,
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, Jan 29, 2012
People vary in how easily they feel ashamed, that is, in their shame proneness. According to the ... more People vary in how easily they feel ashamed, that is, in their shame proneness. According to the information threat theory of shame, variation in shame proneness should, in part, be regulated by features of a person's social ecology. On this view, shame is an emotion program that evolved to mitigate the likelihood or costs of reputation-damaging information spreading to others. In social environments where there are fewer possibilities to form new relationships (i.e., low relational mobility), there are higher costs to damaging or losing existing ones. Therefore, shame proneness toward current relationship partners should increase as perceived relational mobility decreases. In contrast, individuals with whom one has little or no relationship history are easy to replace, and so shame-proneness towards them should not be modulated by relational mobility. We tested these predictions cross-culturally by measuring relational mobility and shame proneness towards friends and strangers ...
Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed t... more Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species' social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action's direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the magnitude of devaluation expressed by audiences in response to those acts. Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology. We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean r = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame's match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution. emotion | cognition | culture | cooperation | evolutionary psychology
Asian Journal of Social …, Jan 1, 2009
Several studies have demonstrated that similarity between friendship partners is higher in the We... more Several studies have demonstrated that similarity between friendship partners is higher in the West than in East Asian countries. We hypothesized that these differences could be explained by relational mobility, or the number of opportunities to form new relationships in a given society. Through two studies, we confirmed that whereas the preference for similarity did not differ, similarity between friendship partners was higher in the USA than in Japan. Furthermore, a measure of relational mobility mediated the cultural difference in similarity, supporting our hypothesis. The effectiveness of considering socio-ecological factors when interpreting cultural differences in behaviour is discussed.a jsp_ 95..103
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Papers by Kosuke Takemura