Neuro-Psychological and Socio-Institutional Foundations of Pro-Social Behavior.

A Research Project Funded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

The First International Workshop

We have assembled in the Shiba Park Hotel, in the centre of Tokyo, for an intense two-day workshop, starting with the presentations of their previous work and interests by all guests, and followed by a day of trying to decide how to most efficiently start this international collaboration. After a short orientation from Toshio Yamagishi, the participants were exchanged ideas on a variety of different subjects that will need to be resolved in the course of the project. The questions we have most concentrated on are: what exactly do we mean to achieve by working together, especially on an intercultural level, and how to go about organizing ourselves. While many hurdles remain, some that we have touched upon in this initial discussion, but could not resolve on the spot, and some that we have not even envisioned yet, we have established some general principles that will guide our progress, and decided to first and foremost create a forum where a continuation of this idea-exchange is possible.

Goals and Agenda

The goal of this research project is to ascertain the limit of the social preference approach to understanding human pro-sociality, especially in the context of experimental games. Experimental researchers are finding out that their participants behave in pro-social manners in their experiment. The most straightforward explanation of such pro-social behavior in experimental games is that humans are evolutionary, culturally, and institutionally endowed with pro-social preferences. However, explaining pro-social behavior in experimental games by pro-social preferences faces a challenge of how to explain the situation-specific nature of pro-social behavior. For example, many people give some money to another participant in a one-shot dictator game even when complete anonymity of their behavior is guaranteed. However, not too many people voluntarily give money to a pan-handler. Furthermore, we know that how to frame the experimental situation affects participant behavior greatly. As a first step toward understanding the situation-specific nature of human pro-sociality, this project compares participants behavior in various types of experimental games and examine the pro-social preferences can explain the consistency and the lack of it across these games.

International collaboration constitutes an important aspect of this research project. Replication, especially cross-cultural and cross-societal replication, plays a critical role in experimental research on human behavior. This is because a specific finding in a specific experiment can be strongly affected by the particular research methodology used in the experiment and the particularity of the experimental participants. The primary goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different countries and cultures to plan a general strategy for the international collaboration.

• Research Activities Planned in NSFPSB

  • Comparison of behavior across different types of games. We will let the same set of participants play different games and examine how their behavior changes over those games. Do pro-socials behave in pro-social manners in PD, DG, TG, FG, and so on?

    Agenda 1: Which games should be used?

  • Development of psychological measures that explains consistently pro-social behavior across different types of games.

    Agenda 2: In addition to measures of SVO, what are candidates of such psychological measures?

  • What are neuro-scientific correlates of the pro-social preferences that consistently affect behavior in different types of games?

    Agenda 3: What can we gain by collaborating with neuro-scientists?

• How to organize international collaboration

  In addition to discussing the above topics, we will discuss how to organize the international collaboration. The types and levels of collaboration are preferred will vary from researcher to researcher, and we thus faces a challenge of how to accommodate individual preferences for collaboration.

  Agenda 4

Participants

Winton W. T. Au (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Su Lu (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Karin S. Moser (Department of Psychology, Roehampton University), Timothy Shields (Economic Science Institute, Chapman University), Eric Schniter (Economic Science Institute, Chapman University), Ramzi Suleiman (Haifa University), Ying-yi Hong (Nanyang Technological University), George Christopoulos (Nanyang Technological University), Mark Khei (Nanyang Technological University), Pontus Strimling (Stockholm University, Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution), Dorota Markiewicz (The Robert B. Zajonc Institute of Social Studies, University of Warsaw / Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University), Mike Kuhlman (University of Delaware), Chad Forbes (University of Delaware), Gokhan Karagonlar (University of Delaware), Adam Stivers (University of Delaware), Enrique Fatas (University of East Anglia), Brent Simpson (University of South Carolina), Xiao-Ping Chen (University of Washington), Carolyn Dang (University of Washington), Paul A.M. van Lange (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam), Daniel Balliet Vrije (Universiteit, Amsterdam), Jelte ten Holt Vrije (Universiteit, Amsterdam), Niels van Doesum (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam), Toshio Yamagishi (Hokkaido University), Masamichi Sakagami (Tamagawa University Brain Science Institute), Alan Fermin (Tamagawa University Brain Science Institute), Toko Kiyonari (Aoyama Gakuin University), Nobuhiro Mifune (Kobe University), Yutaka Horita (Sophia University), Nobuye Ishibashi (Hokkaido University), Yang Li (Hokkaido University), Arisa Miura (Hokkaido University), Dora Simunovic (Hokkaido University)