Contrary to traditional cultural psychological theories, cross-cultural studies have found that East Asians are not more interdependent than North Americans. Addressing this anomaly, Hashimoto and Yamagishi (2013) proposed that, from an institutional approach, cross-cultural differences should exist in rejection avoidance rather than harmony-seeking tendencies. They argue that this is because, in low relational mobility societies like Japan, where the cost of social exclusion is high, it is adaptive to be attentive to possible negative reputation and behave in a manner that accommodates other people’s expectations through the use of rejection avoidance tendencies. However, it has not been confirmed empirically whether or not cultural differences in relational mobility and the expectation of negative reputation underlie these differences in rejection avoidance. We conducted three online surveys in the US and Japan to test this hypothesis. Results showed that, consistent with our predictions, lower relational mobility among Japanese, compared to Americans, was associated with higher negative reputational expectation, and higher negative reputational expectation was associated with higher rejection avoidance tendencies.

This study aims to investigate how the number of choices affects regret in the context of multiple-choice questions. We hypothesized that regret would be stronger when people failed on a question with fewer choices than when they failed on a question with more choices, and that the effect of choice would be mediated by perceived closeness to success. In both Experiment 1 (a scenario experiment) and Experiment 2 (a laboratory experiment), participants rated the degree to which they experienced regret when they failed to choose the correct answer option in a quiz with a prize. The number of alternatives presented in the quiz was manipulated (2 vs. 8). The results showed that in both experiments, a failure when choosing from a small number of alternatives produced more regret than when choosing from a larger number of alternatives. However, no mediating effect of perceived closeness to success was observed. The effect of the number of choices on regret was discussed.

Sensitivity bias (SB) is a common issue when survey respondents falsify their attitudes and behaviors in response to sensitive questions. The list experiment is an indirect measurement method that aims to circumvent SB by asking respondents to report the number of applicable items among multiple items, rather than by asking about their agreement on a sensitive item directly (DQ). Moreover, SB can be evaluated by defining it as the difference between the estimates obtained through the list experiment and DQ. Despite the methodology of list experiments being well established, little attention has been paid to the different formats of DQ. This study addresses this gap by conducting three experiments. The findings show that the selection rate of sensitive items is significantly lower when DQ is measured with the multiple-answer format (MA) compared to the single-answer format (SA). However, there is no significant difference between the selection rate with single and multiple SA. These results highlight the importance of the DQ format in evaluating SB using list experiments.

This study investigated in which group tasks (disjunctive/additive) the “80/20 rule” was observed. The “80/20 rule” refers to an empirical rule where a group or organization is composed of some active members and many inactive members. The situation that follows the process of the “80/20 rule” is little known in human social behavior. Thus, we examined whether the behavioral equilibrium according to the “80/20 rule,” where the workload of a few active members increases and that of other inactive members decreases, could be observed using two types of group tasks. Seventy-five undergraduates participated in an experiment. They completed five trials of a mathematical task in groups of four or five. The participants were told that the experimental reward would be determined either by the score of the group member who solved the most answers (disjunctive task) or by the average of the scores of all members (additive task). The results showed no behavioral equilibrium following the “80/20 rule” in both tasks. The limitations of this study were discussed.

In assessing the endorsement of conspiracy theories, researchers often employ a general approach by measuring adherence to abstract statements rather than specific, concrete conspiracies. One commonly used measure is the Conspiratorial Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ, Bruder et al., 2013). The present study aimed to develop a Japanese version of the CMQ (CMQ-J) and examine its factor structure, construct validity, and test-retest reliability. The results of this study revealed that the CMQ-J demonstrated high internal consistency and temporal stability. It also exhibited positive correlations with existing measures of conspiracy theory, as well as authoritarianism and paranoia, while showing a negative correlation with trust in institutions. These findings indicate that the CMQ-J is a reliable and valuable tool for assessing general inclinations towards conspiracy theories. However, the factor structure of the scale differed from the original version, suggesting a need for future research.