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. Nevertheless, while the psychological and neural mechanisms of trust in the Trust Game have been revealed in numerous studies, little is known about trust in the Faith Game. In the present study, we exploratorily examined how behavioral trust in both the Trust Game and Faith Game correlates with trust-related individual characteristics (i.e., attitudinal trust, social caution, and social value orientation). The results showed that attitudinal trust is only related to the trust shown in the Trust Game, and that risk aversion and betrayal aversion are related to the trust shown in both games.

Previous studies show that the level of general trust in China is higher than in Japan, but the reason has not been explained sufficiently. In this study, I seek to explain this cultural difference in terms of trust among indirect friends and expectations of self-disclosure. I predicted that trust among indirect friends and expectations of self-disclosure would be higher in China, which would result in a higher level of general trust. Eighty-eight Chinese high school students and 63 Japanese undergraduate students completed my questionnaire. I replicated the cultural differences in the level of general trust. However, relational mobility, which explained cultural differences in the level of general trust in previous studies, did not explain my data. There were no cultural differences in trust among indirect friends, and expectations of self-disclosure were not higher in China. Ultimately, I failed to find an explanation for the cultural difference of general trust.

Family names of Japanese convey information about their family history. Although a precise inference at an individual level is difficult, an inference made in aggregation at a community level reliably captures differences in historical inflows of migrants across communities. Following an introduction of this rationale, this paper develops the Family Name Index. As anticipated, the Index was correlated with historical residential mobility across Japanese prefectures. In regions characterized by high historical residential mobility, frequent family names overlapped more with nationally frequent family names. Part 2 used the Index to illuminate regional differences in Japanese social capital. Consistent with prior research, the results indicated a negative association between the Family Name Index and social capital. That is, social capital was stronger in regions where frequent family names do not closely resemble the nationally frequent names. Implications are discussed.

Previous studies have found that trust has a positive effect on subjective well-being. However, when trust is accumulated within a community, it can create expectations of trustworthiness and consequently be transformed into shared social norms. We hypothesized that trust toward community members (i.e., community trust) would have a positive effect on well-being at the individual level. Further, we anticipated that it would have a negative contextual effect on subjective well-being at the community level, because it constrains individual freedom by constructing shared norms within a community. We mailed our survey to each household across 105 randomly-sampled communities in the Yasu River watershed in Shiga prefecture, Japan. We conducted multilevel analyses using the survey data (Nindivdual = 3,116, Ncommunity = 99). As predicted, the results showed that community trust had a positive effect on subjective well-being at the individual level and a negative contextual effect at the community level. This suggests that living in a community where residents trust each other may dampen one’s subjective well-being. Implications for studies on happiness and social dynamics are discussed.

This study investigated the characteristics of people who promoted political conversations on Japanese Twitter, and found that the way they mentioned political topics seemed to reflect their distrust of the current politics in Japan. Tweets from public accounts that promoted political conversations on the Lower House election day in 2017 were collected, and the nouns in these tweets were extracted. The tweets were then classified into ‘political related tweets’ and the others, based on the topics of the extracted nouns. The statistical analysis of the tweets and their metadata revealed that Twitter users who seem to be influential on political conversations tend to mention political topics with emotional expressions of anger rather than anxiety or positive emotional expressions, while other users tend to mention those topics with anxiety. These patterns seem to reflect the distrust of politics in the public opinion in Japan.