Psychological Variables Underlying Cooperative Behavior for Local Communities: The Case of Regional Charismas in Japan

Many empirical findings have shown that local communities can be improved if at least one altruistic person engages in cooperative behavior for the benefit of the community as in the case of The 100 charisma ambassadors of tourism in Japan This paper conducted a multilevel analysis to elucidate the psychological variables underlying such cooperative behavior CB A questionnaire survey was conducted using items previously proposed for measuring determinant factors of CB The respondents were the 100 charisma ambassadors of tourism n 95 residents living in the same region as the charismas n 400 and residents living in other regions n 500 By comparing different groups personality and environmental factors promoting CB were examined The results indicate that Schwartz s norm-activation factors contribute to the personality characteristics of the charismas and that feelings of sympathy among residents contribute to the environmental characteristics of the locality of the charisma

Extremism, knowledge, and overconfidence in the covid-19 restriction times

Public response to restriction policy against the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) can polarize into two extremes: one absolutely in favor of restrictions for the sake of human life and health, and other absolutely against the restrictions for the sake of human rights and daily life. This study examines psychological nature of extremism regarding individuals’ self-restraint from social behavior, which was and has been encouraged by the Japanese government as restriction measures, as well as possible measures to mitigate this extremism. We hypothesize that people with more extreme views on self-restraint tend to have less knowledge of this virus, and, nevertheless, tend to be more overconfident in the sense that they falsely believe they understand COVID-19 and the effects of self-restraint. It is also postulated that overconfidence can be reduced by asking them to explain how self-restraint works. To test these hypotheses, we conducted an online experiment on the Japanese adults (n = 500) to measure the extent of their knowledge of COVID-19 and to examine the effect of explanation task on their understanding regarding COVID-19 and extremism. The results indicate that the extreme attitudes were associated with insufficient knowledge about the symptoms, risks, and characteristics of COVID-19. Moreover, their extreme attitudes tended to moderate through this experimental study to an extent that they realized they did not understand COVID-19 including the effects of self-restraint. This suggests that people with extremism may have been overconfident in their own understanding of the COVID-19 restrictions

Discourse Analysis of Public Debates Using Corpus Linguistic Methodologies

The aim of this study is to develop a computational method of discourse analysis based on corpus semantics. The objective is to achieve an accurate understanding of the debate content and structure through hypotheses generation. As for verifying the hypotheses, the topic extraction and semantic similarity evaluation from the public debate minute corpus is examined by using a multimethod which includes TFIDF, T-VSM, and MDS. The main issue of public debate and the inconsistency level between participants’ utterance could be described by using the method. The methodology presented in this study is applied to a case example. Finally, the applicability of the proposed methodology to practical debates is discussed