Local communities have several desirable functions. Simultaneously, the weakening of community ties in Japan has made sustaining these functions a major challenge. To address this challenge, municipalities should encourage residents to participate in community activities and provide management support. To promote such measures appropriately, we require a comprehensive understanding of the extent to which people participate in each activity and how they perceive them. Therefore, we conducted a survey of 454 Japanese participants, asking about 26 types of community activities (14 community-wide, seven around the home, and five among neighbors). For each activity, the participants were asked about their participation frequency and motivation to engage. In addition, regarding community-wide activities, we asked about their implementation status. The results revealed that for almost all activities, both participation frequency and motivation were substantially below the midpoint of the scale. Cluster analysis of participation frequency and motivation identified four clusters: “both moderate,” “both slightly low,” “both low,” and “both very low.” Most community-wide activities fell into the “both very low” cluster. Therefore, to revitalize local communities, it may be more effective to encourage participation in activities around the home or among neighbors before promoting community-wide activities. Our findings offer guidance to municipalities for determining which community activities should be promoted.

Groups frequently encounter situations where someone must "take one for the team"-that is, one member must undertake a task for the benefit of the group. When such tasks recur, how should the burdens be shared? This question becomes particularly complex when the cost of performing the task varies among members, creating a trade-off between efficiency and equity. For instance, always assigning the task to the member who can complete it at the lowest cost is efficient but inequitable. Our research examines how this trade-off is managed, using the framework of social dilemmas, specifically volunteer's dilemmas. Across three main experiments and three supplemental experiments (N = 1,789), we find that when participants imagine these situations, they prefer equitable (but inefficient) burden-sharing (Study 1). However, when they actually face these situations, their actions often deviate from this preference, with some members taking on more burdens than necessary to achieve equity (Study 2). Further investigation reveals that the main obstacle to equity is the difficulty of coordinating who takes on the task and when (Study 3). These findings contribute two key insights to research on fairness. First, they provide initial evidence that individuals tend to prefer equity when sharing indivisible burdens, contrasting with previous studies on distributive justice and social preferences, which have focused on divisible resources (e.g., money). Second, they highlight the critical role of coordination in achieving equitable burden-sharing-an aspect overlooked in prior research, which has focused on the role of coordination in group productivity rather than fairness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Efforts to measure citizen Well-Being (WB) and integrate the results into policymaking have gained momentum globally. In this study, we evaluate the domains comprising WB indicators based on three dimensions—fulfillment, importance, and contribution to overall WB—to effectively apply these findings to policies and urban development strategies. An online survey of 1394 Japanese adults (630 women, 764 men) was conducted to analyze the rankings of the 24 domains (comprising 46 items) of the Liveable Well-being City indicator, a widely used framework in Japan, across these three dimensions. The analysis revealed that items in domains related to Life Environment ranked highest regarding fulfillment, whereas domains related to Living Authentically or Life Environment ranked highest in importance. Meanwhile, items in the domains associated with Community Relationships or Living Authentically tended to rank higher in contribution to overall WB; however, this was not statistically significant. These results suggest inconsistencies in evaluation across dimensions and highlight the necessity of incorporating three-dimensional evaluations into policymaking and policy improvement. Furthermore, the findings indicate that strategies targeting Community Relationships could be particularly effective in enhancing WB and providing actionable policy design and implementation guidance.

When multiple ways of deciding are laid out side-by-side, which does one favor? We conducted experiments in 12 countries (N=3,517; 13 languages; two Indigenous communities), with adults choosing among four decision strategies—personal intuition, private deliberation, friends’ advice, or crowd wisdom—when working through six everyday dilemmas. In every society, self-reliant decisions (intuition or deliberation) were most commonly preferred and considered the wisest. Expectations for fellow citizens, however, were mixed: advice from friends was expected about as often as self-reliant routes. The self-reliance tilt was strongest in cultures and individuals high in independent self-construal and need for cognition, and weakest where interdependence and self-transcendent reflection were salient. The same patterns emerged when examining ratings of each strategy’s utility, and oral protocols with Indigenous groups. Self-reliance appears the modal preference across cultures, but its strength is predictably tempered when cultures—and individuals within them—construe the self in relational rather than autonomous terms.

There are examples of governments and companies providing citizens with opportunities to interact with people in local communities. This study aimed to examine the individuals who should be provided with opportunities to interact with others in a community. We tested four hypotheses: people with greater sense of community (H1) and need to belong (H2) will have more need for provided opportunities for interaction, and people with greater sense of community (H3) and need to belong (H4) will have more positive interaction expectancy (i.e., prediction of self-perceptions improved through provided opportunities for interaction with people in the local community). By examining this outcome variable, we can better assess the potential impact of government- or company-led initiatives that provide opportunities for interaction on improving citizens' wellbeing. We conducted two online surveys with Japanese adults. The results showed that in both Studies 1 and 2 (N = 980 and 983, respectively), participants with a higher sense of community and need to belong were more likely to desire opportunities provided to interact with people in local communities (supporting H1 and H2). In addition, Study 2 showed that participants with a higher sense of community and a need to belong believed that such provided interaction opportunities would make them hold more positive self-perceptions (supporting H3 and H4). Additionally, in both surveys, individuals with more negative self-perceptions in interpersonal relationships had a lower need to belong. This study suggests the importance of considering people's views toward opportunities for intra-community interaction, and provides preliminary data contributing to the discussion of whether and how such opportunities should be implemented in local communities.

What is involved in understanding the concept of remembering? According to the CausalTheory, the most popular analysis of remembering in philosophy, someone can be said toremember if and only if (1) the remembered event occurred (Factivity), (2) one has hadpersonal experience of the event (Prior Experience), and (3) there exists an appropriate causalconnection between one’s current memory and one’s prior experience of the event(Causality). We tested whether this way of understanding remembering is shared by nativeEnglish speakers more widely (Experiment 1) and by native speakers of nine other languagesaround the world (Experiment 2). We asked participants to judge (a) what beliefs are entailedby someone’s subjective judgment of remembering, and (b) what conditions have to hold forsomeone to “actually” remember. Our results suggest that the folk concept of rememberingacross our samples largely falls in line with the analysis provided by the Causal Theory,while also showing significant cross-linguistic variation. These results have implications forhow we should think about the scientific and philosophical objects of memory research aswell as for the question of whether “remembering” and its translations express a culturallyuniversal concept.

Virtual agents (computer-graphics-based agents) have been developed for many purposes such as supporting the social life, mental care, education, and entertainment of both young and old people individuals. Promoting affective communication between young/old users and agents requires clarifying subjective feelings induced by an agent's expressions. However, an emotional response model of agents to induce positive feelings has not been fully understood due to differences in emotion perception between young and old adults. We investigated subjective feelings induced when facing with a non-human computer-graphics-based agent's emotional responses in consideration of differences of emotion perception between young adults and old adults. To emphasize the differences in emotion perception, the agent's expressions were developed by adopting exaggerated human expressions. The differences in their emotion perception of happy, sadness, and angry between young and old participants were then identified through a preliminary experiment. Considering the differences in emotion perception, induced feelings when facing with the agent's expressions were analyzed from the three types of emotion sources of the participant, agent, and other, which was defined as subject and responsibility of induced emotion. The subjective feelings were evaluated using a subjective rating task with 139 young and 211 old participants. The response of the agent that most induced positive feelings was happy when participants felt happy, and that was sad when participants felt sad, regardless emotion sources in both young and old groups. The response that most induced positive feelings was sad when participants felt angry and emotion sources were participant and the agent, and that was angry when the emotion source was other. The emotion types of the response to induce most positive feelings were the same between the young and old participants, and the way to induce most positive feelings was not always to mimic the emotional expressions, which is a typical tendency of human responses. These findings suggest that a common agent response model can be developed for young and old people by combining an emotional mimicry model with a response model to induce positive feelings in users and promote natural and affective communication, considering age characteristics of emotion perception.

Philosophers have argued that stakes affect knowledge: a given amount of evidence may suffice for knowledge if the stakes are low, but not if the stakes are high. By contrast, empirical work on the influence of stakes on ordinary knowledge ascriptions has been divided along methodological lines: "evidence-fixed" prompts rarely find stakes effects, while "evidence-seeking" prompts consistently find them. We present a cross-cultural study using both evidence-fixed and evidence-seeking prompts with a diverse sample of 17 populations in 11 countries, speaking 14 languages. Our study is the first to use an evidence-seeking prompt cross-culturally, and includes several previously untested populations (including indigenous populations). Across cultures, we do not find evidence of a stakes effect with our evidence-fixed prompt, but do with our evidence-seeking prompt. We argue that the divergent results reveal a tension within folk epistemology: people's beliefs about when it is appropriate to ascribe knowledge differ significantly from their actual practice in ascribing knowledge.

As the world's population is aging, it is necessary to create societies in which older adults and young people can live together comfortably. Reducing young people's negative attitudes toward older adults is a pressing issue. Given the unique characteristics of older adults, which most people will eventually become, we focused on how long people believe it will be before they become older adults (i.e., the subjective time of becoming older). To examine our hypotheses, we performed a Bayesian analysis, which has attracted considerable attention in psychological research in recent years. In Studies 1 and 2, even after controlling for variables such as youth identity and aging anxiety, those with a longer subjective time of becoming older had more negative attitudes toward older adults and lower advocacy for policies to support older adults. In Study 3, we examined the effect of shortening the participants' subjective time of becoming older by presenting an explanatory text on the stereotype embodiment theory and several related empirical findings. We observed decreased negative attitudes toward both the young-old and old-old groups and increased advocacy for policies to support older adults. In the supplemental experiment, the experimental manipulation used in Study 3 reduced participants' aging anxiety. Future studies should elaborate on the negative attitudes toward a broad subgroup of older adults, and examine the perceived relative importance of policies to support older adults compared with policies in other areas.

Stereotype Embodiment Theory (SET) implies that people who hold negative attitudes towards the elderly are more likely to experience a decline in various cognitive/physical functions themselves. Anti-elderly discriminatory attitudes, which negatively affect the elderly's health status, could be reduced by communicating the contents of SET to non-elderly people. To weaken anti-elderly discriminatory attitudes, in Study 1, we had participants read about SET and related empirical findings (SET intervention), which intended to increase their self-interested motives for avoiding anti-elderly discrimination. In Study 2, we conducted an 'integrated intervention' containing a SET intervention and one selected aspect of educational intervention (i.e., presenting some information about some commonly misunderstood aspects of the elderly). Consequently, the integrated/SET interventions reduced participants' anti-elderly discriminatory attitudes and these effects persisted for at least 1 week. Our new interventions will be useful for those who work with the elderly.

The “volunteer's dilemma” (VoD) is a group situation in which one member needs to incur a volunteering cost to provide public goods to the group. Considering that efficiency conflicts with equality in the VoD, we investigated how dispositional and situational variables regarding equality affect volunteering behavior in the VoD (specifically, in repeated VoD). We conducted an online VoD game comprising a new “lever-pulling paradigm,” and participants were grouped with two other participants to play the game iteratively. The results showed the effects of the dispositional factor (i.e., justice sensitivity; JS); those sensitive to suffering from inequality (i.e., those high in JS-Victim) were unlikely to volunteer, whereas those sensitive to benefiting from inequality (i.e., those high in JS-Beneficiary) were likely to volunteer. We also found the effect of the situational factor (i.e., previous relative volunteering rate); those who had volunteered more than others became less inclined to volunteer, and vice versa. This research shows that both dispositional and situational factors regarding equality play a crucial role in repeated VoD, while posing future questions and directions to understand their interaction effects.

In everyday life, we often face a “volunteer’s dilemma (VoD)”—a group situation in which one member has to incur the cost of providing a public good. In the VoD, members of a group may wait for each other to volunteer, and thus, the group may fail to achieve the public good. Previous research has examined the probability of this failure and found that it was lower than theoretically expected. This discrepancy may have been because only material (e.g., money) and not social rewards (e.g., favourable evaluations) were considered in the theoretical expectations. To investigate whether and how people gain social rewards or are evaluated favourably by others in the VoD in everyday life (specifically in workplace contexts), we conducted a scenario‐based experiment (N = 582). The results showed that people were evaluated as more moral and competent when they volunteered than when they did not. Furthermore, this was the case especially when all the other group members shirked and when the evaluator was also willing to volunteer. These findings contribute to our current understanding of the way people perceive volunteers and shirkers in the VoD. They also have an implication on people’s motivation to incur a cost for their group in such a situation.

Handicapped people have faced discriminatory attitudes from the non-handicapped. This often deprives them of fundamental human rights and can exacerbate mental illness. Symbolic ableism is one of the key forms of discriminatory attitudes toward the handicapped, and this is regarded as a cause of disagreement with policies to support the handicapped. The propensity of symbolic ableism can be measured by the Symbolic Ableism Scale (SAS; Friedman & Awsumb, 2019), which divides symbolic ableism into four components: individualism, lack of recognition of continuing discrimination, lack of empathy for disabled people, and excessive demands. Although this scale is necessary for understanding people’s attitudes toward the handicapped, it is not available in Japanese. This study was conducted to develop a Japanese version of SAS (SAS-J) and examined its reliability and validity. The result showed that SAS-J was divided into two components (i.e., individualism and lack of recognition of current condition), which is different from the original version. We discussed possible explanations of this difference, the reliability and validity of SAS-J, and future directions of symbolic ableism.