Masanori Takezawa

Hokkaido University | Hokudai · Department of Behavioral Science

People willingly follow norms and values, often incurring material costs. This behaviour supposedly stems from evolved norm psychology, contributing to large-scale cooperation among humans. It has been argued that cooperation is influenced by two types of norms: injunctive and descriptive. This study theoretically explores the socialisation of huma...

Large-scale cooperation among unrelated humans remains an evolutionary puzzle. Cultural group selection theory suggests that strong intergroup selection drives the evolution of cooperation, given substantial behavioral variation between groups. This study investigated payoff-biased imitation of successful out-groups as an intergroup selection proce...

The optimization of cognitive and learning mechanisms can reveal complicated behavioral phenomena. In this study, we focused on reinforcement learning, which uses different learning rules for positive and negative reward prediction errors. We attempted to relate the evolved learning bias to the complex features of risk preference such as domain-spe...

People willingly follow norms and values, often incurring material costs. This behavior supposedly stems from evolved norm psychology, contributing to large-scale cooperation among humans. It has been argued that cooperation is influenced by two types of norms: injunctive and descriptive. This study theoretically explores the socialization of human...

Human language is characterized by complex structural features, such as the hierarchical combination of words to form sentences. Although other animals use communication systems, empirical evidence of hierarchical structures is rare. Computational studies of language evolution have suggested that cultural transmission plays a key role in the emerge...

It has been argued that teaching promotes the accurate transmission of cultural traits and eventually leads to cumulative cultural evolution (CCE). However, previous studies have questioned this argument. In this study, we modified the action sequences model into a network exploring model with reinforcement learning to examine the conditions under...

Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like “moral” and “immoral”? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent to which they perceive moral character as “localized” (varying along many contextually embedded dimensio...

Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like “moral” and “immoral”? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent that they perceive moral character as “localized” (varying along many contextually embedded dimensions)...

The grammatical structure found in human language may have emerged through communication and cultural transmission. To focus on the role of communication in the evolution of word order rules, we designed an iterated learning experiment in which participants use a given set of words. The results of the experiment showed that communication facilitate...

This is a preprint of the editorial for special issue “The new style of psychological research: CHANGE we can believe in” of Japanese Psychological Review.

The principle of majority rule is a major decision-making strategy widely used in human and animal society. While majority rule yields highly accurate performance compared to individuals in the same situation, its performance is strongly undermined by a small correlation among individual judgments. We focus on the alternative, the selected majority...

In the last decade, psychology faced a serious crisis, called the reproducibility problem. To solve the problem, several methodological and institutional changes have been proposed and implemented such as the promotion of replication studies and publication of negative results, the introduction of a preregistration system in academic journals, and...

It has long been argued that people use their own mental states to infer those of others who they perceive as similar to themselves. Tamir and Mitchell (2013) examined this hypothesis through the reaction time paradigm and demonstrated a positive relationship between the reaction time of other’s mental state judgments and the distance of judgments...

The severity of the environment has been found to have played a selective pressure in the development of human behavior and psychology, and the historical prevalence of pathogens relate to cultural differences in group-oriented psychological mechanisms, such as collectivism and conformity to the in-group. However, previous studies have also propose...

Theories of trust distinguish general trust in situations of social uncertainty from assurance-based trust in committed, long-term relationships. This study investigates European-Japanese differences using the Centipede game, in which two players choose between cooperation and defection. The game models repeated reciprocal interactions, necessitati...

Most human relationships are characterized by reciprocal patterns of give-and-take that can be studied using a decision making task called the Centipede game. The game involves two players alternating in choosing between cooperation and defection, with their choices affecting payoffs to themselves and the co-player. We compared trust and cooperatio...

In social dilemma games, human participants often show conditional cooperation (CC) behavior or its variant called moody conditional cooperation (MCC), with which they basically tend to cooperate when many other peers have previously cooperated. Recent computational studies showed that CC and MCC behavioral patterns could be explained by reinforcem...

Direct reciprocity, or repeated interaction, is a main mechanism to sustain cooperation under social dilemmas involving two individuals. For larger groups and networks, which are probably more relevant to understanding and engineering our society, experiments employing repeated multiplayer social dilemma games have suggested that humans often show...

Supporting Information for: Reinforcement Learning Explains Conditional Cooperation and Its Moody Cousin. (PDF)

Humans often forward kindness received from others to strangers, a phenomenon called the upstream or pay-it-forward indirect reciprocity. Some field observations and laboratory experiments found evidence of pay-it-forward reciprocity in which chains of cooperative acts persist in social dilemma situations. Theoretically, however, cooperation based...

It has been argued that people selectively use two strategies, projection and stereotyping, to infer the mental state of others. Through a series of studies, Ames (2004) confirmed the hypothesis that people project their own mental state to the other when the target person is perceived to be similar to oneself, while the stereotype of a group or ca...

Significance Humans help strangers even if the strangers will not directly help them in the future. The so-called indirect reciprocity seems to support large-scale cooperation in human society. We revealed functional and anatomical neural bases of two types of indirect reciprocity by combining group and neuroimaging experiments. Reputation-based in...

The evolution of punishment toward norm-violators has been discussed for understanding a large-scale human cooperation. Recent studies showed that the presence of cues of surveillance makes people concern about their reputation and increase altruistic behavior. Recent study also suggests that explicit cues of observation affect punitive behavior. W...

Inferences are often based on uncertain cues, and the accuracy of such inferences depends on the order in which the cues are searched. Previous experimental and theoretical research has shown that individuals progress only slowly in learning of cue orderings through feedback. A clue to how people (as opposed to computers) solve this problem is soci...

The chapter reports a series of studies comparing sharing behavior, moral judgment, and the negotiation of sharing in the dictator game, a nonstrategic fairness task in behavioral economics. Participants of five age groups of 9-, 12-, 14-, 17-year-olds and adults first made (hypothetical) individual decisions and then negotiated in groups of three...

Many studies showed that a concern to maintaining good reputation induces cooperation. Haley & Fessler (2005) found that an illustration of a human face makes people cooperative in the dictator game. We demonstrate that this effect is moderated by a particular contextual variable – darkness. We found that the illustration of a human face did not in...

Many studies showed that a concern to maintaining good reputation induces cooperation. Haley & Fessler (2005) found that an illustration of a human face makes people cooperative in the dictator game. We demonstrate that this effect is moderated by a particular contextual variable – darkness. We found that the illustration of a human face did not in...

Social contexts are notoriously complex, yet decisions are nevertheless made by using simple strategies. We argue that the concept of fast and frugal heuristics provides a promising framework for understanding how we gather social information to make decisions in social environments. That is, we assume that under limitations of time, energy, and co...

For many years in evolutionary science, the consensus view has been that while reciprocal altruism can evolve in dyadic interactions, it is unlikely to evolve in sizable groups. This view had been based on studies which have assumed cooperation to be discrete rather than continuous (i.e., individuals can either fully cooperate or else fully defect,...

Frecuentemente, basamos nuestras decisiones en diversas claves con distinto poder predictivo. Para obtener una precisión elevada en dichas decisiones, es crucial el orden en que exploramos las claves. La investigación previa ha puesto de manifiesto que las personas mostramos severos problemas a la hora de aprender a discriminar qué claves son predi...

Our decisions about the world are often based on a sequential analysis of various uncertain cues. To achieve high accuracy, the order in which these cues are searched is crucial. Previous research, however, has shown that people demonstrate slow progress in learning cue ordering by validity when they could update such cue ordering through feedback....

The present study investigated the underlying mechanism yielding a positive correlation between dyad members' mutual liking and meta-accuracy (i.e., dyad members who like each other tend to be accurate in judging how their partner sees them). Two pilot studies were first conducted to confirm the presence of the positive correlation. The main study...

Evolutionary theories of altruism have suggested that reciprocal exchanges and ingroup favoritism have been important strategies leading to the evolution of altruistic behavior among strangers. This study investigates whether minimal information about an interaction partner's membership in a trivial social group affects the allocations of adults an...

Inferences are often based on uncertain cues, and the accuracy of such inferences depends on the order in which the cues are searched. Previous research has shown that people and computers progress only slowly in individual learning of cue orderings through feedback. A clue to how people (as opposed to computers) solve this problem is social learni...

In daily life, people frequently make inferences about current and future states of the world. Most of these inferences are not made individually, but by exchanging information about which strategies could be used with other people. In an experiment, we analyzed whether exchanging information socially increased the probability of selecting the most...

Two hundred and ninety-four participants aged between 7 and 17 years of age were asked to share out money between themselves and another, imaginary group. Individual responses were recorded as well as responses after discussion in a group with two other participants. The distribution task took place in two different experimental conditions that eit...

This study interconnects developmental psychology of fair and moral behavior with economic game theory. One hundred eighty-nine 9- to 17-year-old students shared a sum of money as individuals and groups with another anonymous group (dictator game). Individual allocations did not differ by age but did by gender and were predicted by participants' pr...

En nuestro entorno, frecuentemente hacemos inferencias sobre los acontecimientos. Muchas de estas inferencias no se realizan individualmente: En ocasiones, tomamos decisiones colectivas o intercambiamos información sobre las estrategias que podemos emplear para realizarlas con otras personas. En un experimento, hemos estudiado si los procesos de co...

We present a new method for quantitatively documenting concerns for economic fairness. In particular we focus on the method’s potential for identifying variation in prosociality within and across societies. Specifically, we conducted multiple dictator games per player in two small-scale societies. Each game presented the decision maker with a choic...

Previous research on childrens understanding of social contracts has shown that children are able to identify violations of social contracts from an early age, that they attribute negative feelings including anger to victims of contract violations, and that attributions of negative (moral) feelings to violators increase with age. This study examine...

Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...

Take The Best (TTB) is a simple one-reason decision- making strategy that searches through cues in the order of cue validities. Interestingly, this heuristic performs comparably to, or even better than, more complex information-demanding strategies such as multiple regression. The question of how a cue ordering is learned, however, has been only re...

Where do social norms come from? Part of the answer must surely lie in such norms' ability to support individual adaptive success in local ecologies. This theme is dominant in analyses of social behavior by economic game theorists and behavioral-ecology researchers, but it has been neglected by psychologists. An illustration of the methods and adva...

Where do social norms come from? Part of the answer must surely lie in such norms' ability to support individual adaptive success in local ecologies. This theme is dominant in analyses of social behavior by economic game theorists and behavioral-ecology researchers, but it has been neglected by psychologists. An illustration of the methods and adva...

Abstract Asan,attempt ,to fill ,the gap between ,psychological ,studies on negotiations ,and game-theoretical studies on bargaining, I provide a new conception, that of the concession- making,strategy. This type of strategy is formally defined as a pattern of consecutive concessions,in bargaining. Because such a pattern is a product of decision mak...

Although norms can potentially serve useful constructs to understand human minds, being fundamentally social in evolutionary as well as cultural senses, there are as yet no useful psychological theories of adaptive norm development. This article provides an illustrative model about how a norm emerges in a society. We focus on the "communal-sharing...

The trees for classification and for decision that are introduced in this chapter are naïve, fast, and frugal. Why they are "naïve," that is, why they ignore conditional dependencies between cues, is extensively illustrated. Why they are "frugal," in the sense that they tend to use much fewer cues than those provided by the environment, is also exp...

Sharing important resources widely beyond direct kin group members is one of the core features characterizing human societies. Moreover, generalized exchange involving many community members (e.g., meat sharing in bands) seems to be a uniquely human practice. This paper explores a computational algorithm for the psychology of social sharing that ma...

The social dilemma problem has been noticed to be involved in collective action. In this paper I explained a process through which the social dilemma problem involved in collective action is resolved when participants share the heightened sense of unfairness. The heightened sense of being unfairly treated motivates people to take actions aimed at r...

Social influence in consensus formation was examined using a notion of sociocognitive network. Given the robustness of shared information in determining group decisions, the authors propose the concept of a sociocognitive network that captures the degree of members' knowledge-sharing prior to group interaction. A link connecting a given pair of me...