Yang Li

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Nagoya University

The Triple Dominance Measure (choosing between prosocial, individualistic, and competitive options) and the Slider Measure (“sliding” between various orientations, for example, from individualistic to prosocial) are two widely used techniques to measure social value orientation, that is, the weight individuals assign to own and others’ outcomes in...

Previous studies on psychological adaptations to pathogen threats revealed the link between pathogen psychology and group behavior, especially in-group-oriented mindsets such as conformity, and the endorsement of group binding moral values. The relationship between behavioral immune responses and in-group attitudes has been mostly discussed in rela...

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, authorities worldwide imposed coercive regulations aimed at curbing the virus’s spread, often at the expense of individuals who were considered potential threats to public health. We argue that individual differences in their support for such actions can be understood from the perspective of an evolved “behavioral immune...

When someone violates a social norm, others may think that some sanction would be appropriate. We examine how the experience of emotions like anger and disgust relate to the judged appropriateness of sanctions, in a pre-registered analysis of data from a large-scale study in 56 societies. Across the world, we find that individuals who experience an...

The emergence of COVID-19 dramatically changed social behavior across societies and contexts. Here we study whether social norms also changed. Specifically, we study this question for cultural tightness (the degree to which societies generally have strong norms), specific social norms (e.g. stealing, hand washing), and norms about enforcement, usin...

Two pre‐registered studies examined people's psychological collectivism, personal control, and attitudes toward disease‐control measures in the context of the COVID‐19 crisis and more generalized contexts. Study 1 surveyed 819 residents in Shanghai in late May 2022 when they were undergoing a stringent city‐wide lockdown caused by an outbreak of th...

Discrimination, which arose during the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak, is a global public health issue. This study aimed to provide fundamental knowledge in proposing control measures to mitigate discrimination. We focused on two psychological variables: belief in just deserts (BJD, i.e. , the belief that the infected individual deserves to be i...

The evolution of human cooperation toward strangers remains puzzling. While the punishment of non-cooperators is a possible explanation, whether punishments can help cooperation evolve depends on how people evaluate punishers. Thus, it is of vital importance to elucidate the perception of punishers. Previous studies have found that punishment is ev...

Like any organism, humanity constructs its niche and adapts to the rest of nature by modifying available materials around them. In the era that some have dubbed the "Anthropocene," human niche construction has gone so far as to threaten the planetary climate system. The central question of sustainability is how humanity can collectively self-regula...

Humans form complex societies in which we routinely engage in social decision-making regarding the allocation of resources among ourselves and others. One dimension that characterizes social decision-making in particular is whether to prioritize self-interest or respect for others—proself or prosocial. What causes this individual difference in soci...

Trust attitude is a social personality trait linked with the estimation of others’ trustworthiness. Trusting others, however, can have substantial negative effects on mental health, such as the development of depression. Despite significant progress in understanding the neurobiology of trust, whether the neuroanatomy of trust is linked with depress...

The evolution of human altruism toward strangers remains a puzzle. While a possible explanation may exist in the concept of punishment for non-cooperators, its own evolution depends on how others evaluate punishment. In general, punishment is assessed differently based on the context, with negative evaluations in the public goods game with punishme...

Nielsen et al. (1) argue that Van Doesum et al. (2) need to consider three points for their interpretation of a positive association between individual-level social mindfulness (SoMi) and environmental performance (EPI) at the country level (3). The association is weaker when 1) it is controlled for GDP and 2) when the data of three countries are r...

Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one’s location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost...

Despite the universality of cultural worldviews and self-esteem in providing people with general protection against death anxiety, recent empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that death anxiety is more pronounced in East-Asian collectivist cultures than in Western individualist cultures. We propose that collectivists are encumbered by the addi...

Norm enforcement may be important for resolving conflicts and promoting cooperation. However, little is known about how preferred responses to norm violations vary across cultures and across domains. In a preregistered study of 57 countries (using convenience samples of 22,863 students and non-students), we measured perceptions of the appropriatene...

In the era when human activities can fundamentally alter the planetary climate system, a stable climate is a global commons. However, the need to develop the economy to sustain the growing human population poses the Climate Commons Dilemma. Although citizens may need to support policies that forgo their country’s economic growth, they may instead b...

Social and behavioral scientists have long investigated the relationship between interpersonal trust and features of the environment. However, it remains unclear how the micro-environment of relational distance (i.e., social proximity between two persons) interacts with the macro-environment of human ecology (i.e., social and natural environments)...

Although punishment can promote cooperative behavior, the evolution of punishment requires benefits which override the cost. One possible source of the benefit of punishing uncooperative behavior is obtaining a positive evaluation. This study compares evaluations of punishers and non-punishers. Two hundred and thirty-four undergraduate students par...

General trust, or trust in people with unknown personal backgrounds and with whom there is no interpersonal relationship, is key for the formation of an effective society. The Trust Game has long been a popular behavioral measurement of general trust; however, other measurements, such as the Faith Game, are increasingly attracting attention. Nevert...

Norm talk is verbal communication that explicitly states or implicitly implies a social norm. To investigate its ability to shape cultural dynamics, 2 types of norm talk were examined: injunction, which explicitly states what should be done, and gossip, which implies a norm by stating an action approved or disapproved of by the communicator. In 2 e...

Altruistic punishment following social norm violations promotes human cooperation. However, experimental evidence indicates that some forms of punishment are spiteful rather than altruistic. Using two types of punishment games and seven non-strategic games, we identified strong behavioural differences between altruistic and spiteful punishers. Altr...

Why do great powers with benign intentions end up fighting each other in wars they do not seek? We utilize an incentivized, two-person “Preemptive Strike Game” (PSG) to explore how the subjective perception of great power interdependence shapes defensive aggression against persons from rival great powers. In Study 1, college students from the US (N...

Significance Prosocial and proself predispositions dictate economic game players’ fast decisions but exert limited influence when game players take a longer time in making decisions. Prosocially predisposed individuals use the extended time to contemplate the risk of being exploited. Selfishly predisposed individuals are suggested to behave accordi...

Ontogenic studies of human prosociality generally agree on that human prosociality increases from early childhood through early adulthood; however, it has not been established if prosociality increases beyond early adulthood. We examined a sample of 408 non-student residents from Tokyo, Japan, who were evenly distributed across age (20–59) and sex....

Dataset including all variables used for analysis. (XLSX)

Supplementary methods and tables. (PDF)

Supplementary figures. (DOCX)

Correlations between all variables used for analysis. (PDF)

Despite the repeatedly raised criticism that findings in economic games are specific to situations involving trivial incentives, most studies that have examined the stake-size effect have failed to find a strong effect. Using three prisoner’s dilemma experiments, involving 479 non-student residents of suburban Tokyo and 162 students, we show here t...

Significance Is human prosociality a consequence of cognitive control of selfish impulses? Alternatively, is it a default option that most people use unless they are cognitively persuaded that a given situation does not require them to behave prosocially? Our results support the latter argument. Participants with weaker cognitive control fairly sha...

Social value orientations (SVOs) are economic preferences for the distribution of resources - prosocial individuals are more cooperative and egalitarian than are proselfs. Despite the social and economic implications of SVOs, no systematic studies have examined their neural correlates. We investigated the amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex...

General trust constitutes a critical aspect of social capital that facilitates democratic governance and economic prosperity of a society. Despite its theoretical importance, attitudinal measures of general trust often fail to predict actual trusting behavior in laboratory testing. We suspected that the failure of currently available measures of tr...

Homo economicus, a model for humans in neoclassical economics, is a rational maximizer of self-interest. However, many social scientists regard such a person as a mere imaginary creature. We found that 31 of 446 residents of relatively wealthy Tokyo suburbs met the behavioral definition of Homo economicus. In several rounds of economic games, parti...

The strong reciprocity model of human cooperation (SRM) argues that strong reciprocators, who cooperate with others and punish non-cooperators, sustain within-group cooperation. However, the assumption that altruism and punishment are products of the same psychological mechanism of strong reciprocity has not been fully verified. Second-party punish...

The strong reciprocity model of the evolution of human cooperation has gained some acceptance, partly on the basis of support from experimental findings. The observation that unfair offers in the ultimatum game are frequently rejected constitutes an important piece of the experimental evidence for strong reciprocity. In the present study, we have c...

Japanese participants in Study 1 exhibited a self‐effacing tendency when no reason for their self‐evaluation was provided. However, they exhibited a self‐enhancing tendency when they were offered a monetary reward for the correct evaluation. In Study 2, Americans, especially American men, exhibited a self‐enhancing tendency whereas Japanese exhibit...

This study tested the "city air" hypothesis, which posits that the social constraints prevalent in rural life are weaker in metropolitan areas, freeing metropolitan residents from pressure to suppress their pursuit of individual goals. To do so, we replicated Yamagishi et al.'s vignette study of pen choice. In the first study using a web-based surv...

Two laboratory experiments demonstrated that Japanese participants did not conform to the majority unless negative social implications of not conforming were clear. When their behaviour had no implications for others, they rather exhibited preference for uniqueness. Results of Study 2 further demonstrated that participants' conformity to the majori...