The present research examined the effects of perceived entitativity on attitudes toward elderly people stereotyped as “warm but incompetent.” Previous research demonstrated that “warm but incompetent” stereotypes elicit active facilitation and passive harm and emotions mediate these links. Extending previous research, we predicted that entitativity would moderate these effects because of its polarizing effect. In a study (N＝74), we manipulated the perceived entitativity of elderly people and a relative salience of stereotypes (e.g., a relative salience of their warmth) by presenting scenarios. The results showed that when perceived entitativity is high, warmth elicits active facilitation and lack of competence elicits passive harm. Furthermore, admiration mediates warmth and active facilitation. On the other hand, when perceived entitativity is low, stereotypes and behavioral intentions are not associated. The findings suggest that entitativity determines the process by which stereotypes elicit behaviors.

Recent studies find that political talk influences political participation. However, as of yet, there has been no clear demonstration of how political talk translates into increased political participation. This study proposes a bridging effect, which reduces the perceived psychological distance between citizens and politics. In order to test this explanation, we collected panel data on an online national volunteer sample in November 2012 and January 2013. Findings suggest that the direct relationship between political talk and participation in governmental politics may be mediated through perceived psychological distance to politics. These findings support the bridging effect explanation.

This study investigated how social norms are maintained in societies with different degrees of relational mobility. We hypothesized that (1) in high relational mobility societies, where they need to present their attractiveness to be chosen as a relational partner, people would follow social norms when they thought it would earn them a positive reputation from others; (2) in low relational mobility societies, where they need to avoid isolation in closed relationships, people would follow social norms when they thought they would be rejected by others if they did not. We also examined to what extent their reputation estimation was accurate. In particular, normative aspects of participation in community activities were investigated using a social survey. As we predicted, the more the respondents in low relational mobility societies feared rejection by others, the more they followed norms regarding participation in community activities. They tended to assume that others would give a lower evaluation to a nonparticipant than they do, which means that they may maintain the norms as a result of “pluralistic ignorance.” On the other hand, we did not find a significant interaction effect between perceived relational mobility and expectation of a positive reputation. This was explained by the respondents’ tendency to underestimate the possibility of earning a positive reputation by participating in community activities.

This study investigated the effects of imagining others on cooperation in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game. There are two ways to imagine others’ perspectives: “imagining the other” or considering how the other person feels, and “imagining the self” or projecting oneself onto the other person. Participants were assigned to one of three conditions: a) the imagining-other condition, b) the imagining-self condition, and c) the control condition (thinking about a landscape). Participants played a one-shot PD game and completed the social value orientation (SVO) scale, which measures one’s cooperative tendency. Results showed that the cooperation rate was higher in the imagining-other condition, and participants in the imagining-other condition expected that the partner would cooperate and that the partner thinks they would cooperate. In contrast, in the imagining-self condition, no significant differences were observed about these variables. Furthermore, the cooperation rate increased mediated by two-way expectations in the imagining-others condition, while it was not observed in imagining-self conditions. These results show the importance of imagining others not as a reflection of self, in increasing expectation of mutual cooperation and promoting cooperation.

This study focuses on “satisficing” (answering behaviors in which participants do not devote appropriate attentional resources to the survey (Krosnick, 1991)) in an online survey and aims to investigate, via various indices, to what extent these behaviors are observed among students whose participation was solicited by the researchers in their universities. This study also aims to explore effective techniques to detect individuals who show satisficing tendencies as efficiently and accurately as possible. Online surveys were carried out at nine universities. Generally speaking, the predictive capability of various types of detection indices was not high. Though direct comparison with online survey panels was impossible because of differences in measurement methodology, the satisficing tendencies of university students were generally low. Our findings show that when using university students as samples for a study, researchers need not be “too intent” on detecting satisficing tendencies, and that it was more important to control the answering environment, depending on the content of the survey.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether preference for cooperation and competition with others differs across individuals, depending on one’s cultural self-construal. In this study, 35 pairs of Japanese students first completed an Implicit Association Test to measure their cultural self-construal (interdependent vs. independent). They then performed a creativity test assigned to either a cooperative or a competitive condition and rated their preference for the task. The results showed that individuals who scored relatively more for interdependence were more likely to report that they would like to repeat the task in the cooperative condition than in the competitive condition, whereas individuals who scored relatively more for independence were as likely to rate their preference for the task in the competitive condition as for one in the cooperative condition. We discuss the relation between implicit–explicit cultural self-construals and competitive and cooperative goals in Japan.