Norms and Development : Interdisciplinary Approach

1. Norms and Development : Interdisciplinary Approach Week 12 Social Norms in Dynamic Interactions III: Institutional View of Culture

2. Closed Society: A World of Assurance • Punishment is costly and may not be feasible. • Commitment formation is an individually adaptive strategy  Out-for-Tat (OFT; Hayashi & Yamagishi, 1998). It is cheap and efficient alternative which is feasible in wide range of situations. • Once OFT is adopted, people establish long-term relationships and closed society is created.

3. Open Society:A World of Uncertainty AND Opportunities • Commitment formation creates opportunity costs. You may lose an opportunities to establish much more beneficial relationships with new partners. • Trust is an adaptive cognitive bias when opportunity costs are high.  In Hayashi & Yamagishi(1998)'s computer simulations, it was found that OFT is not adaptive anymore when opportunity cost is introduced. Another strategy, which has a positive bias in estimating the benefit that will be obtained from interaction with strangers, outperformed OFT.

4. Coevolution of Trust and Social Intelligence • High-trusters are good at detecting cheaters!  They are more accurate in predicting the behaviors in PD after 30 min. discussion with the others (Yamagishi et al., 1999; Kikuchi et al., 1997). • High-trusters are more sensitive to the information indicating untrustworthiness! When received a piece of negative information, high-trusters evaluated the target more negatively than low-trusters (Yamagishi et al., 1999; Kosugi & Yamagishi, 1998).

5. Closed and Open Societies: Multiple Equilibriums in Dynamic Systems • In a closed society, where people establish long-term relationships, opportunity costs are low just because one is less likely to find a new partner. • In an open society, where people don't hesitate to interact with strangers, opportunity cost is high because one is more likely to find a new partner.  Thus, two societies are two different equilibriums in adaptive dynamic systems.

6. Institutional View of Collectivist Culture:Perfect Version • People don’t trust unknown people. • Distrustful people cooperate only when they are “assured” that the other will cooperate. Assurance (but not trust!) is provided under institutions which make cooperation rational. • Commitment formation is individually rational strategy and provides assurance. People want to stay in relationships for avoiding being cheated. • Commitment relationships reduce opportunity costs in a society and makes trust less adaptive (a).

7. Two Routes in Macro-to-Micro Transition • Institutional: People acquire adaptive traits (behavioral and psychological) that makes themselves adaptive in a given social structure. • Psychological: People acquire psychological and behavioral patterns via imitation or teaching. These traits are directly transmitted.  The distinction may not be solid and, undeniably, both are important. It seems to be the case, however, that psychologists have paid attentions only to the second process, isn’t it?

8. "By methodological necessity, most psychological research focuses on fixed slices of this inherently dynamic process, and culture often is conceptualized in static terms, thus reinforcing stereotypical images of a certain culture. To understand more fully the relations between psychology and culture, however, it is necessary to focus more explicitly on this dynamic interactions. (Lehman, Choi & Schaller, 2004, p.703, Ann. Rev. Psych.)"

9. Capitalism Economic behavior Values Coleman Boat:The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Protestant religious doctrine

10. From the Boat to the Fleet Copied from Kanazawa (2001)