Two Studies Suggesting Changes in Cultural Norms in Japan

Abstract

During my 2-month stay at Kyoto University from June 10, 2019 through August 7, 2019, I collected data for two related studies with my collaborator, Professor Yukiko Uchida at the Kokoro Research Center and gave two lectures, one about each of the studies. The first study was titled, "Can marginalizing situations cause individuals to become culturally deviant in their values and motives?" The second study was titled, "Explaining Cultural Variance in the Perceived Severity of ASD-Like Symptoms: Theory of Mind, Cultural Tightness, and Opacity of Mind Norms." The first study included a replication of a previous study to test whether Japanese participants were motivated to maintain consistency with their in-group members more than with their own past behaviors (i.e., motivation to maintain self-consistency), a pattern that would be more typical of a relatively more collectivistic culture. Specifically, after particpiants were ask to complete a marginalization risk scale, they were randomly assigned to either consider their willingness to comply to the request assuming that they have already complied to a similar request in the past (motivation to be self-consistent condition) or consider their willigness to comply to a request if all of their clasmates have complied to a similar request (motivation to conform to in-group condition). The second study tested our expectations that people in a relatively tighter culture, which has previously been characteristic of the Japanese cultural context, would perceive culturally deviant behaviors as more problematic than in a relatively looser culture, such as the North American culural context. Specifically, participants were asked rate the severity of ASD-like behaviors (i.e., culturally deviant behaviors) under one of three conditions: 1) explicit information is given that there is no underlying cognitive deficit to explain the deviant behaviors; 2) explicit informaiotn is given that there is an underlying cognitive deficit to expain the deviant behaviors; 3) no explicit information about an udnerlying cognitive deficit was given. Both studies revealed that previous patterns of behaviors in Japan can no longer be replicated, thereby sugggesting changing cultural norms in Japan, characterized by increasing individualistic norms and cultural looseness