Yoshihisa Kashima

University of Melbourne | MSD · Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences

People hold different perspectives about how they think the world is changing or should change. We examined five of these “worldviews” about change: Progress, Golden Age, Endless Cycle, Maintenance, and Balance. In Studies 1–4 (total N = 2733) we established reliable measures of each change worldview, and showed how these help explain when people w...

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...

Polarization in the United States and around the world is of growing concern. Polarization is about more than just differences in opinions in society. It occurs when groups increasingly diverge in either actual or perceived differences in opinion and can involve both disagreements about issues and negative views of other groups. Since most environm...

According to Western folk theory of social change, modernization of societies causes them to become less warm but more competent over time. Since WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) societies are often at the forefront of modernization (with some exceptions, most notably China), these societies may also be most prone to...

Throughout history, people have expressed the desire for an ideal society—a utopia. These imagined societies have motivated action for social change. Recent research has demonstrated this motivational effect among ordinary people in English-speaking countries, but we know little about the specific content of ordinary people’s utopian visions in dif...

Obesity has become a significant problem word-wide and is strongly linked to poor food choices. Even in healthy individuals, taste perceptions often drive dietary decisions more strongly than healthiness. This study tested whether health and taste representations can be directly decoded from brain activity, both when explicitly considered, and when...

Emerging methods for studying cultural dynamics allow researchers to investigate cultural change with newfound rigor. One change that has recently attracted the attention of social commentators is "concept creep," the semantic inflation of harm-related concepts such as trauma, bullying, and prejudice. In theory, concept creep is driven distally by...

Societal threats that face the world today seem overpowering, especially for young generations who will need to develop creative solutions. The present study examined the relationships between societal threats and social motives. Social motives function to orient individuals toward the social world and prepare them to engage socially. This adaptive...

Prior evidence suggests increased social interaction anxiety among carriers of the short (s) allele of the serotonin transporter gene polymorphism (5-HTTLPR), relative to the long (l) allele carriers. According to gene-culture coevolution hypothesis, the collectivistic norm of lower levels of relational openness (i.e., lesser inclinations to meet n...

Obesity has become a significant problem word-wide and is strongly linked to poor food choices. Even in healthy individuals, taste perceptions often drive dietary decisions more strongly than healthiness. This study tested whether health and taste representations can be directly decoded from brain activity, both when explicitly considered, and when...

Sugar-sweetened beverage (SSBs) consumption is associated with obesity and other severe negative health consequences. The present study examined the effectiveness of two types of health warning labels (HWLs) in modulating dietary choices for SSBs: specific HWLs, presenting health consequences associated with consuming SSBs, and general HWLs, presen...

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...

Low carbon readiness (LCR) is an aspect of environmental identity, an individual citizen’s willingness to reduce carbon emissions and transition to low carbon lifestyle as a personal striving. Nevertheless, individuals’ personal strivings are strongly influenced by the social context in which they are situated. We propose the social context of envi...

Utopia is a culturally constructed vision of an ideal human condition. Although its contents vary cross-culturally, utopian visions exist across cultures and therefore utopian thinking is a widespread human proclivity. When activated, a utopian vision can engage citizens with their on-going societal processes by activating a motivation to criticize...

International education provides students with an opportunity to develop new social networks while they fit in to the new culture. In a three-wave longitudinal study, we investigated how social networks and psychological adjustment coevolve within a group of international students enrolled in a coursework degree at the tertiary level. Using the Sto...

We present an integrative theoretical model that specifies social psychological mechanisms by which utopian thinking, which activates the social imagination, may enhance collective action intentions oriented toward social change and human progress. The model synthesizes complementary insights from interdisciplinary research programs on utopianism,...

What are the consequences of lay beliefs about how things are made? In this article, we describe a Western folk theory of artifact creation, highlighting how intuitive dualism regarding mental and physical labor (i.e., folk psychology) can lead to the perceived transmission of properties from makers to material artifacts (i.e., folk physics), and a...

An object's creation history plays an important role in how we perceive, value, and interact with that object, and has consequences for policy on sustainable consumption. Here, we propose that laypeople in industrialized societies have three dominant concepts of how objects can be created: art, craft, and manufacture. These concepts are differentia...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184480.].

Emotion is critical for cultural dynamics, that is, for the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time. We outline the component micro- and macro-level processes of cultural dynamics, and argue that emotion not only facilitates the transmission and retention of cultural information, but also is shaped and crafted by cultural dy...

One way in which individuals can participate in action to change the society they live in is through the pursuit of an ideal society or ‘utopia’; however, the content of that utopia is a likely determinant of its motivational impact. Here we examined two predominant prototypes of utopia derived from previous research and theory ‐ the Green and Sci‐...

The Low Carbon Readiness Index (LCRI) is a short measure of people’s motivation to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the home and personal travel. This chapter describes the LCRI’s design and validation as a predictor of low carbon behaviour, using self-reported behaviour and direct measures of energy consumption. It also highlights how soci...

This chapter introduces a social psychological framework for understanding the complexity of behaviour and behaviour change, with a specific focus on low carbon behaviours. We consider how personal motivations and abilities, social relationships and contextual factors contribute to people’s low carbon practices in the household, ranging from househ...

This article provides a systematic review and updated meta‐analysis of the extant literature on Rusbult's Investment Model of Commitment. This meta‐analysis aimed to determine the strength of the associations between commitment and its antecedents and to investigate potential moderators of these associations. This meta‐analysis included 50,427 part...

The problems and challenges associated with planetary health are vast and interconnected, and are therefore requiring of research which takes an all-of-society perspective. Following calls for input from behavioural scientists in discussions about planetary health, we here present a review and synthesis of recent research on utopian thinking and la...

One way in which individuals can participate in changing the society they live in is through the pursuit of an ideal society or ‘utopia’; however, the content of that utopia is a likely determinant of its motivational impact. Here we examined two predominant prototypes of utopia derived from previous research and theory - the Green and Sci-Fi utopi...

Despite its status as a prominent set of theories for explaining the elicitation and differentiation of emotions, much appraisal theory and research offer little indication of the nature of the relationship expected between appraisals and emotions. Here, we present a three‐study, multiple‐method analysis in which we examine numerous ways of testing...

The relationship between economic conditions and environmental attitudes has been hotly debated in academic and public discourse. Some contend that economic prosperity strengthens environmental attitudes, while others argue that no such relationship exists. We shed light on the economy-environmental importance relationship by incorporating both non...

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...

This paper presents a theoretical argument that low carbon strivings – personal goals to reduce carbon footprint in the household – can predict a wide range of diverse behaviours to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and reports four studies to validate Low Carbon Readiness Index (LCRI), a short, three-item measure of low carbon strivings. It is a si...

Background: Few studies have experimentally assessed the contribution of branding to the experience of smoking a cigarette, compared with the inherent properties of the product. This study examined the influence of cigarette brand name on the sensory experience of smoking a cigarette. Methods: Seventy-five Australian smokers aged 18-39 years smo...

Cross-cultural differences in social perceptions pose an intriguing puzzle. East Asians, in contrast to Westerners, tend to have the view that individuals lack coherent and thematically consistent characteristics and, therefore, are likely to exhibit cross-situationally inconsistent actions and reactions. This tendency is explained in terms of naïv...

Images of ideal societies, utopias, are all around us; yet, little is known of how utopian visions affect ordinary people’s engagement with their societies. As goals for society, utopias may elicit processes of collective self-regulation, in which citizens are critical of, or take action to change, the societies they live in. In three studies, we i...

Micro cultural dynamics are concerned with the mechanisms of transmission, retention, and modification of cultural information in social networks. When interacting individuals mutually recognize that they share psychological reactions to given cultural information, it may be grounded as an aspect of their shared reality under specifiable conditions...

Adopting successful climate change mitigation policies requires the public to choose how to balance the sometimes competing goals of managing CO2 emissions and achieving economic growth. It follows that collective action on climate change depends on members of the public to be knowledgeable of the causes and economic ramifications of climate change...

Data from Experiment 2. (SAV)

Participant instructions and additional analyses. (DOCX)

Data from Experiment 1. (SAV)

Objective To examine the effect of branding, as indicated by brand name, on evaluation of the cigarette smoking experience. Design Between-subjects and within-subjects experimental study. Participants were randomly allocated to smoke a cigarette from a pack featuring a premium brand name and a cigarette from a pack featuring a value brand name. Wi...

Climate change communication research has mainly focused on how to communicate climate change effectively to the public. By contrast, how such information is then spread through interpersonal social networks has been neglected, despite being an essential component of cultural change. Using a Facebook-like format, we examined what types of climate c...

Personal and political action on climate change is traditionally thought to be motivated by people accepting its reality and importance. However, convincing the public that climate change is real faces powerful ideological obstacles 1–4 , and climate change is slipping in public importance in many countries 5,6. Here we investigate a diierent appro...

Over the past three decades, irrigation-dependent rural communities in Australia's Murray–Darling Basin have experienced profound economic, social and environmental changes, which they are attempting to accommodate through local government policy. As a contribution to participatory policy design research, in consultation with local governments we c...

Extrinsic information, such as packaging, branding and labeling, can significantly alter our experience of food and drink through a process of ‘sensation transfer’, in which extrinsic attributes are transferred to our sensory perception of a product. The aim of this review was to summarize the literature on sensation transfer for unhealthy food and...

Campaign-stimulated conversations have been shown to increase the effectiveness of antismoking campaigns. In order to explore why such effects occur, in the current study we coded the content of naturally occurring conversations. We also examined whether the short-term effects of talking, and of different types of talk, on quitting intentions were...

Cultural dynamics can be characterized as macro-level phenomena of the stability and change in distribution of cultural information within a human population, and the micro-level mechanisms about the social transmission of cultural information that drive the trajectory of cultural formation, maintenance, and transformation. This article focuses on...

Personal and political action on climate change is traditionally thought to be motivated by people accepting its reality and importance. However, convincing the public that climate change is real faces powerful ideological obstacles1–4, and climate change is slipping in public importance in many countries5,6. Here we investigate a di�erent approach...

Quantitative consumer sensory panels, aimed at assessing foods and beverages, usually leverage questionnaires which collect scaled and verbatim responses from consumers using an hedonic scale of key sensory modalities such as appearance, aroma, flavor and texture, and overall liking and purchase intent. Latest research have shown that the majority...

Over several decades, appraisal theory has emerged as a prominent theoretical framework explaining the elicitation and differentiation of emotions, and has stimulated a great deal of theorising and empirical research. Despite the large amount of research in this area, there are many aspects of appraisal theory and research that remain unclear or pr...

Cultural dynamics were examined in an experimental setting to investigate the mechanisms of transmission of cultural practices (what people typically do) and implicit attitudes at the micro-level, and the maintenance of transmitted cultural traits at the macro-level. A cover story of a fictitious group was used to establish “microcultures” within t...

Languages differ with respect to the standard order in which subject (S), object (O) and verb (V) are arranged. Two studies, using a translation paradigm and conducted in Italian and in English, tested whether the order in which S, O and V are mentioned in active sentences will impact the causal interpretation of the described event. We hypothesize...

People’s beliefs about where society has come from and where it is going have personal and political consequences. Here, we conduct a detailed investigation of these beliefs through re-analyzing Kashima, Shi, et al.’s (Study 2, n = 320) data from China, Australia, and Japan. Kashima, Shi, et al. identified a “folk theory of social change” (FTSC) be...

There is broad consensus in the literature that affect diffuses through social networks (such that a person may "acquire" or "catch" an affective state from his or her social contacts). It is further assumed that affect diffusion primarily occurs as the result of people's tendencies to synchronize their affective actions (such as smiles and frowns)...

From a folk perspective, gossipers (individuals who talk about the behaviours of others) are considered to be immoral individuals, doing harm to those they discuss. However, this folk perspective sits uneasily with recent claims that gossipers may actually do some good. In particular, it has been suggested that gossipers who share diagnostic inform...

People tend to ascribe greater humanness to themselves than to others. Previous research has indicated that this "self-humanising" bias is independent of self-enhancement and robust across cultures. The present study examined the possible role of empathy in reducing this bias in Japan (N = 80) and Australia (N = 80). Results showed that unlike Aust...

While the case for rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is compelling, actions being taken by most senior decision makers (SDMs) in government and business compound the problem. Given the systemic reach of much senior decision making, including decisions that constrain their own actions, there is an urgent need to open up the SDM black box....

A mudança climática afetará todos os domínios das relações pessoa-ambiente. Combater este fenômeno exigirá mudanças sociais que possam ser motivadas por visões de futuro da sociedade, onde tais mudanças tenham ocorrido. Usando o modelo teórico de “futuros coletivos”, analisamos se as crenças sobre o futuro da sociedade estão relacionadas com intenç...

This article presents a meta-analysis of research on the affective compatibility effect: the relative facilitation of arm flexion and extension movements, in response to positive and negative stimuli, respectively. Across 68 effect sizes (computed on 3169 participants), a small, significant average compatibility effect emerged (ES = .118; 95% CI [....

We analyze from a semi-formal perspective the grounding model of cultural transmission, a social psychological theory that emphasizes the role of everyday joint activities in the transmission of cultural information. The model postulates that cultural transmission during joint activities depends on the context of the activity and the common ground...

Past studies have found that East Asians ascribe less consistency to individual selves than Westerners, but ascribe more consistency to social groups than Westerners. Using the concepts of naive dialecticism (i.e. the tendency to tolerate contradiction) and psychological essentialism (i.e. the tendency to attribute a fixed essence to something) as...

It has been long established that interpersonal communication underpins the existence of cultural stereotypes. However, research has either examined the formation of new or the maintenance of existing stereotypes. In a series of three studies, the present research bridges the gap between these phases by showing that newly formed stereotypes can spr...

Life satisfaction of migrants to Australia from 17 countries, assessed at 4–5 months, 16–17 months and 3½ years after arrival, was analyzed with a longitudinal, multilevel analysis. The results indicated that migrants were more satisfied, if the national average life satisfaction was higher in their country of origin, after adjustment for individua...

Global climate change will affect all domains of person-environment relations. Tackling climate change will require social change that can be motivated by people's imaginings of the future of their society where such social change has occurred. We use the " collective futures " framework to examine whether beliefs about the future of society are re...

Although applauding Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) attempt to ground language use in the ideomotor perception-action link, which provides an "infrastructure" of embodied social interaction, we suggest that it needs to be complemented by an additional control mechanism that modulates its operation in the service of the language users' communicative in...

Research has shown that people perceive themselves as more human than the average person, independent of their tendencies to self-enhance. This self-humanizing (SHN) effect has been examined in comparisons of the self with fictional or average others, but not with actual others such as a real, though unfamiliar, classmate or a friend. In Study 1, E...

Background Decisions about which antismoking advertisements should be aired are often guided by audience ratings of perceived effectiveness (PE). Given that the usefulness of PE measures depends on their ability to predict the likelihood that a message will have a positive impact on outcomes such as behaviour change, in the current study we used pr...

Few studies have examined the factors that predict information seeking by cancer patients. This study investigated the influence of different styles of adjustment to cancer, information goals and information needs on the information seeking by lung cancer patients. Lung cancer patients were recruited at their first appointment with their radiation...

We identified the active ingredients in people's visions of society's future ("collective futures") that could drive political behavior in the present. In eight studies (N = 595), people imagined society in 2050 where climate change was mitigated (Study 1), abortion laws relaxed (Study 2), marijuana legalized (Study 3), or the power of different re...

Many rural communities are vulnerable social-ecological systems (SES) that must do more than become resilient to future environmental and social shocks; they must transform to achieve sustainability. The aims of this paper are, first to conceptually explore the proposition that SES characteristics (identity, feedbacks, structure and functions) nece...

Goals are a central feature of narratives, and, thus, narratives may be particularly potent means of goal priming. Two studies examined two features of goal priming (postdelay behavioral assimilation and postfulfillment accessibility) that have been theorized to distinguish goal from semantic construct priming. Across the studies, participants were...

the development of a new App using biometrics sensory information informing data collection for food and beverages

The authors investigated how different cultures understand what it means to be human, focusing on whether people essentialize human nature and conceptualize it in accordance with the culture’s dominant form of self-construal. Seventy-nine European Australian, 76 Japanese, and 97 Korean university students were asked to rate a set of personality tra...

The present research explores cultural understandings of what it means to be human. We used open-ended responses to examine whether the most culturally salient aspects of humanness are captured by two theoretical dimensions: human uniqueness (HU) and human nature (HN). Australians, Italians, and Chinese (N = 315) showed differences in the character...

The reconciliation movement in Australia aims to build mutually respectful relationships between indigenous and other Australians by eliminating ‘gaps’ in health and well-being, educating about Indigenous history and culture and addressing social disadvantages based on false beliefs and stereotypes. Psychological literature has much to offer to the...

Four studies examined how people perceive entitativity of small and large social networks based on the graphical information of interaction among individuals. Participants rated social network graphs on entitativity while controlling for the number of individuals and connectivity of social relationships. Overall, network connectivity corresponded t...

Social contexts that invoke sociality may be more relational in Asian cultures and for women in general but more collective in Anglo-European cultures and for men in general. Study 1 tested this notion by priming Australians and Asians in Australia with four contextual primes: individual, relational (interpersonal), collective (out-group), and cont...

Although typically high, the need for information varies between cancer patients. Few studies, however, have examined the factors that predict patient information needs. This study investigated the influence of different styles of adjustment to cancer on information needs. It was proposed that adjustment styles can be defined in terms of goal pursu...

The interplay of culture and self has been one of the most active areas of research in self and identity. It has provided a number of theoretical concepts and research methodologies that have advanced the psychological understanding about self processes. This paper provides a concise review of the field’s underlying assumptions, and points to its c...

This study provides an update on ethnic stereotypes in Australia and Japan. It measured the differences between the auto‐ and heterostereotypes held by Anglo‐Australians and Japanese for themselves and each other, respectively, particularly as they related to perceived status and solidarity. It compared these with heterostereotypes held by these tw...