ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how the historical and geopolitical relationship between China and Japan has shaped collective psychology. Using language‐based methods across three domains—public sentiment, political discourse, and academic literature—we conducted three complementary analyses. First, word embedding techniques applied to two large‐scale Chinese text corpora show that sentiment toward Japan improved from the 1950s to 1980s before declining, a pattern that parallels Japanese sentiment toward China. Second, topic modelling of Japanese parliamentary records reveals that discussions of China over the past eight decades have been embedded in shifting global and regional geopolitical concerns, with recurring attention to war memory and maritime disputes. Third, a review of English‐language psychology literature indicates that early studies (1940s–1980s) focused on war and stereotypes; after the 1990s, research emphasized historical memory and reconciliation, and more recently, topics such as Chinese students in Japan, cross‐border mobility, and business relations—mirroring growing socioeconomic interdependence. Together, these analyses provide a multilayered view of how sentiment, identity, and historical memory co‐evolve with the geopolitical landscape in Sino‐Japanese relations.

Abstract

Cultural priming significantly enhances the internal validity of causal inferences in cultural psychology. Earlier studies showed that bicultural Hong Kongese could alternate between Chinese and Western cultural frames based on priming. However, after more than 25 years since Hong Kong's transfer from the UK to China, this assumption requires reevaluation due to substantial social and political changes. While the late 1990s studies reasonably presumed Hong Kongese were bicultural, the region has since undergone profound transformations. To reassess this, we conducted six preregistered experiments and internal mini meta‐analyses. In Experiment 1 (N = 369), we aimed to replicate the second and third of Hong et al.'s (1997) original studies of cultural priming in Hong Kong. In Experiment 2 (N = 434), we incorporated design improvements by T. K. Ng et al. (2016). In Experiment 3 (N = 330), we considered potential cohort effects and targeted a more diverse adult sample. In Experiment 4 (N = 565), we made adjustments related to the individual versus group salience in the measurement of the dependent variable. In Experiment 5 (N = 451), we increased group salience and fixed the language of the materials to English for Hong Kongese of student age. In Experiment 6 (N = 522), we increased group salience, fixed the language of the materials to Chinese, and recruited more general Hong Kong public participants. The six experiments and the mini meta‐analysis consistently failed to replicate the cultural priming effect. Potential reasons for these failed replications are discussed.

While partisan selective exposure has been robustly observed in controlled settings, its cross-national differences have been understudied. Many earlier studies were conducted in the United States (US); however, partisan selective exposure is weak outside the US. This study measured browsing behavior using comparable mock news sites in the US, Japan, and Hong Kong to probe the antecedents of cross-national differences in partisan selective exposure. Two observational studies showed that partisan selective exposure is robustly detected in the US but weak or almost absent in Hong Kong and Japan, and that affective polarization toward political out-groups partially explains the cross-national differences observed between the US and Japan, as well as between Hong Kong and Japan. Perceived media credibility and dialectical self did not explain cross-national differences. The universality of partisan selective exposure and its mechanisms are discussed.

Abstract

Anti-vaccine attitudes pose a threat to public health by impeding the development of herd immunity. However, the proliferation and politicization of anti-vaccine discourse, exacerbated by the pandemic and the rise of social media, have not been fully elucidated. This study, using Japanese Twitter data, revealed that (a) anti-vaxxers are characterized by high political interest, (b) persistent anti-vaxxers were more ideologically left-leaning and had stronger ties to existing political parties, and (c) pandemic-induced new anti-vaxxers displayed low political engagement but a greater affinity for conspiracy theories, spirituality, naturalism, and alternative health practices, which served as gateways to anti-vaccination views. Furthermore, those who turned anti-vaccine after the pandemic also exhibited an increased tendency to follow the newly emerged anti-vaccine party, potentially contributing to their political representation at the national level. These analyses show that the anti-vaccine discourse has expanded and reached a politically representative scale, strengthening its discursive network with conspiracy theories, spirituality, naturalism, and alternative health practices.

Abstract

Analyzing the appearances of political figures in large-scale news archives is increasingly important with the growing availability of large-scale news archives and developments in computer vision. We present a deep learning-based method combining face detection, tracking, and classification, which is particularly unique because it does not require any re-training when targeting new individuals. Users can feed only a few images of target individuals to reliably detect, track, and classify them. Extensive validation of prominent political figures in two news archives spanning 10 to 20 years, one containing three U.S. cable news and the other including two major Japanese news programs, consistently shows high performance and flexibility of the proposed method. The codes are made readily available to the public.

Los primeros estudios experimentales sobre el uso de Internet revelaron un efecto negativo de este sobre la acumulación de capital social. Desde entonces, muchos estudios han identificado efectos positivos. Estos resultados poco concluyentes se deben a la diversidad de usos de Internet, la ambigüedad conceptual del término ‘capital social’, la falta de estudios sobre diferentes culturas, y las limitaciones metodológicas de la inferencia causal. En este estudio, aplicamos inferencia causal estadística a datos del Asian Barometer Survey para estudiar si el uso de las redes sociales para conectar con otras personas incrementa el capital social en cuatro países y territorios de Asia Oriental. Hallamos resultados dispares, sin efectos claramente positivos en el impacto del uso de las redes sociales sobre la participación en asociaciones y la confianza en general. En cambio, vemos que el uso de las redes sociales incrementa el tamaño de la red interpersonal de forma bastante consistente. También analizamos las repercusiones de estos resultados.

The Olympic Games are a typical media event and are seen as a festive occasion that monopolizes people’s attention through the mass media. The Games and their media coverage have a predetermined schedule that enhances the nation’s sense of unity by placing a temporary truce on political conflicts. Governments, especially those of Olympic host countries, tend to take advantage of this effect to garner support for their own policies. However, the effects of such media events may be weakening owing to changes in the media environment and increasing political polarization. Examining the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, this case study analyzes a large amount of Twitter data to probe Japanese social media users’ attitudes toward the Olympic Games and the relationship of these attitudinal changes with their attitudes toward the political leadership of the prime minister. The results showed that previously negative attitudes toward the Olympic Games improved as people enjoyed the event. However, this positive shift did not appear to be associated with their attitudes toward the prime minister. Users’ political predispositions strongly determined their attitudes toward the Olympic Games, indicating that the Olympic Games as a media event had limited implications for support for the administration.

Abstract

Concerns over political sensitivity bias in survey research in stable autocracies have been raised by previous studies. However, as democracy recedes worldwide, it remains unclear how pervasive such bias is in autocratizing contexts. This research note aims to demonstrate the extent of sensitivity bias in an autocratizing context using the case of Hong Kong, where political freedoms are rapidly shrinking. In doing so, we aim to detect sensitivity bias by analyzing panel survey data without relying on list experiments. Our analyses of online panel survey data collected before and after the enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law and its related political crackdown found that pro-democracy respondents subject to political repression (1) are more likely to drop out of the panel of a political poll, (2) even when they do not drop out, they falsify some potentially sensitive past behavior, and (3) pro-democracy moderates are more likely to engage in preference falsification. Theoretical implications for understanding public opinion in autocratizing contexts are discussed.

Are there significant domestic political costs for leaders who disengage from long-standing alliances, costs that discourage such disengagement? Leaders of major powers occasionally look for ways to disengage in non-crisis situations from some long-term commitments to other countries following the legal procedures laid out in the alliance treaty or commitment. However, leaders interested in disengagement from alliances sometimes fear that they will pay domestic disengagement costs, for example, a decline in domestic public support, if they try to withdraw from alliances in that manner in practice. To examine if such fears are justified, we conducted two survey experiments among representative samples of the US public investigating the effects of a presidential decision to end an alliance commitment through the legally prescribed means. We find that disengagement costs exist in general and that some characteristics of the country in question can increase their size and make them more long-lasting. For example, withdrawal from alliances with countries perceived as similar on some key criteria to the United States and as loyal allies, or widespread opposition by experts to this withdrawal, will all increase the size of the disengagement costs and make them more long-lasting. Leaving an existing alliance in peacetime will frequently be a politically losing proposition for American leaders in many plausible situations—one possible reason for the endurance of some US alliances.

<title>Abstract</title>To examine conservative–liberal differences in the extent to which partisan tweets reach less partisan moderate users in a nonwestern context, we analyzed a network of retweets about former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The analyses consistently demonstrated that partisan tweets originating from the conservative cluster reach a wider range of moderate users than those from the liberal cluster. Network analyses revealed that while the conservative and the liberal clusters’ internal structures were similar, the conservative cluster reciprocated the follows from moderate accounts at a higher rate than the liberal cluster. In addition, moderate accounts reciprocated the conservative cluster’s following at a higher rate than they did for the liberal cluster. The analysis of tweet content showed no difference in the frequency of hashtag use between conservatives and liberals, but there were differences in the use of emotion words and linguistic expressions. In particular, emotion words related to the propagation of messages, such as those expressing “dislike”, were used more frequently by conservatives, while the use of adjectives by conservatives was closer to that of moderate users, indicating that conservative tweets are more palatable for moderate users than liberal tweets.

Abstract

Does political repression extinguish public support for opposition demands? Protest emerges as a consequence of grievances and political preferences expressed as demands. Although the literature on the repression–dissent nexus has primarily focused on whether repression effectively deters dissenting behavior, a limitation is that researchers do not often distinguish between behavior and preferences. One possible implication is that although the observable protest behavior can be reduced by repression, underlying opposition demands may remain intact or even be strengthened. Hence, the question of why repression should alter public preferences remains theoretically under-investigated, because there is limited micro-level evidence that captures changes in opposition preferences induced by a repressive episode. We fielded comparable conjoint experiments before and after the enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law in June 2020. Support for the demands was largely stable despite the sweeping powers of the law to curb protests, although some moderation of demands was observed. We outline avenues for future research on mechanisms and implications entailed by the effects of repression on preferences.

With increasing concern over online misinformation in perspective, this study experimentally examined the cognitive as well as the affective consequences of online search. Results of the two experiments using widely shared, prejudiced misinformation about an ethnic minority in Japan indicated that (a) online search reduces on average the likelihood of believing the misinformation, (b) the magnitude of the effect is larger among those who are predisposed to believe the misinformation, (c) cognitive correction is observed whether searchers are motivated to achieve a directional goal or an accuracy goal, and (d) online search deteriorates affective feeling toward the target groups of the misinformation. Theoretical implications are discussed in relation to the robustness of confirmation bias in online search and the “belief echo” in which exposure to negative misinformation continues to shape attitudes even after the misinformation has been effectively discredited.

Although most democratic theories assume that political participation other than voting constitutes an essential input to the political process, little is known about the cultural universality of this assumption. Drawing on cultural psychology findings derived from the widely shared framework of collectivism versus individualism, the present study tests the hypothesis that political demonstrators in collectivistic countries are socially avoided because they are perceived to be a threat to harmonious interpersonal relationships. A cross-national experiment in eight countries (US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, China, South Korea, and India) and one region (Hong Kong) indicated that political demonstrators are socially avoided, and this tendency was significantly stronger in collectivistic countries. Moderated-mediation analyses suggested that the social avoidance of political demonstrators in collectivistic countries is mediated by the perception that they are a threat to harmonious interpersonal relationships. The cross-cultural validity of democratic theory is discussed.

<p>A panel sample provider is a service that acts as an intermediary between a researcher and a survey monitor supplier in a web-based survey, and earns a transaction fee by providing the supplier with information on the survey that the researcher has registered and set up. In this report, we focused on LUCID (https://luc.id/), the world's largest panel sample provider and conducted a simple experimental online survey using LUCID in Japan, the U. S., the U. K., and China and examine participants' tendency to engage in satisficing when they do not pay due attention to the survey and its effect on their tendency to respond to an experimental task of “false consensus effect.” The percentage of satisficers who violated the instructions both times was high for both tasks in JP and CN. The effect sizes of one's own choice for satisficers were relatively smaller (though not absolutely small) than those for compliers and converts. These results show both the possibility that satisficing biases experimental results and the possibility that it can be corrected in a more appropriate direction by alerting.</p>

Observational studies have found that the frequency of mobile communication with close ties increases in times of emergency. However, the mechanisms underlying such increases are not well understood. Drawing upon terror management theory, this study predicted that increased mortality salience due to disaster promotes mobile voice calling to close ties. By analyzing digitally traced behavioral data, Study 1 found that mobile voice calls to close ties increased after the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, especially in areas where there were severe tremors. Study 2 employed a field experiment and demonstrated that psychologically priming respondents to recall the earthquake led to an increase in the number of outgoing mobile voice calls to close ties, but not to non-close ties. The theoretical implications for mobile communication in time of disaster are discussed.

Despite the concern that partisan selectivity in the political use of social media leads to mass polarization, the empirical evidence is mixed at best. Given the possibility that these inconclusive findings are attributable to moderators in the process that have not been adequately studied, this article elaborates the roles played by different forms of social identities. By analyzing three datasets collected in Hong Kong, where Chinese and Hong Kongese identities are constructed in a nonmutually exclusive way, this study demonstrates that (1) partisan selectivity in media use is reliably detected among those with single Hong Kongese identity, but not among those with dual identities of Hong Kongese and Chinese, (2) the political use of social media polarizes the attitudes and affects of single identifiers, whereas it has depolarizing effects on dual identifiers, and (3) these contrasting effects on polarization between single and dual identifiers have downstream consequences for political participation.

<title>Abstract</title>
The effectiveness of public diplomacy is now increasingly the subject of scientific measurement and testing by researchers in the field of International Relations. While there are variety of empirical efforts to uncover the power of public diplomacy, extant studies have mostly focused on the activities initiated by the ministries in charge of external relations. In this article, rather than external relations ministries and agencies, we focus on the effectiveness of public diplomacy by the military. Specifically, we argue that figures, pictures and indeed videos created by military forces have power in changing perceptions among the receivers of the information. In this particular study, we show that a 38 second video made by the US military induces positive feelings for cooperation which would otherwise be difficult to sustain between South Korea and Japan — two countries which have suffered highly fractious relations, yet which are indispensable allies to the US in countering the rising threat from North Korea.

Abstract

Survey satisficing in online data collection biases the estimation of treatment effects in many ways. Extending the findings of a previous study, which demonstrated that satisficing biased the estimation of main treatment effects, this study also shows that satisficing distorts the estimation of moderation effects. Targeting Japanese adults’ attitudes toward food, this study tests how the effect of country of production (Japan vs. China) is moderated by preexisting ethnocentric attitudes. The results show that while nonsatisficers predictably adjust their attitude toward food based on their preexisting ethnocentric attitude, satisficers stick to their initial stereotypical response. That is, the theoretically predicted moderation effect was observed among nonsatisficers, but not among satisficers, which indicates that satisficing biases not only the estimation of a treatment effect but also that of a moderation effect.

For voters with bounded rationality to emulate the formation of policy preferences under full information, party cues provide effective heuristics. Although the effect of party cuing has been robustly established in US-centered studies, the literature indicates that the characteristics of modern US politics, such as political polarization, magnify the effect of party cues. Therefore, the effect of party cues has been subject to only lenient empirical scrutiny, as empirical evidence exists primarily for the US. The present study aims to test the generalizability of the effect of party cues by focusing on Japan, where the ideological positions of parties have become increasingly vague. Furthermore, in light of the fact that the media system in Japan is more stable and ideologically polarized than its party system, we also test whether press cues (i.e. newspaper names) serve as substitutes for party cues. A survey experiment demonstrates that the effects of party and press cues in Japan are muted, and therefore these two types of cues do not serve as effective shortcuts in forming policy preferences. These results indicate that issue voting based on cognitive heuristics is difficult under an unstable multiparty system. Therefore, the extant literature on party cues that presupposes the US-style party system cannot be easily generalized to other political contexts.

Employing a comparative experimental design drawing on over 18,000 interviews across eleven countries on four continents, this article revisits the discussion about the economic and cultural drivers of attitudes towards immigrants in advanced democracies. Experiments manipulate the occupational status, skin tone and national origin of immigrants in short vignettes. The results are most consistent with a Sociotropic Economic Threat thesis: In all countries, higher-skilled immigrants are preferred to their lower-skilled counterparts at all levels of native socio-economic status (SES). There is little support for the Labor Market Competition hypothesis, since respondents are not more opposed to immigrants in their own SES stratum. While skin tone itself has little effect in any country, immigrants from Muslim-majority countries do elicit significantly lower levels of support, and racial animus remains a powerful force.

Shedding light on an apparent inconsistency between the conditional political learning model, which predicts a widening knowledge gap between news and entertainment seekers in high-choice media environments, and the evidence of inadvertent learning from major online outlets, we conducted a field experiment in a real-world setting that exogenously manipulated the relative proportions of news and entertainment in the headline section of a major portal site. Our 3-month experiment produced clear evidence of inadvertent learning among entertainment seekers. Entertainment seekers do not switch from a portal site to other websites, even when the choice of news is boosted, which in turn facilitates inadvertent learning and narrows the knowledge gap between news and entertainment seekers. Longitudinal analysis using a follow-up survey not only demonstrated that the inadvertent learning effect persisted even after 2 months of the experiment but also suggested that the effect spilled over to new learning opportunities.

<p>In order to explore differences in news frames regarding controversial historical and territorial issues between Japan and Korea, the contents of four Japanese and Korean newspapers were analyzed by using topic models. Specifically, all the articles on the first page of Yomiuri, Asahi, Donga, and Hankyoreh newspapers during the two years from 2012 to 2013 were analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Results indicated that in Japanese newspapers, the territorial issue related to Takeshima (Dokto) was framed as a part of a broader international security topic, whereas in Korean newspapers it was more closely associated with historical issues that are unique to the relationship between Japan and Korea. The issue of comfort women was framed in Japanese newspapers as an aspect of domestic politics surrounding the statements made by Toru Hashimoto, the former mayor of Osaka city, whereas in Korean newspapers, it was more distinctively framed as a historical issue. The potential consequences of different news framing between Japan and Korea, as well as the usefulness of using LDA for content analysis are discussed. </p>

Iyengar et al. (1984, The Evening News and Presidential Evaluations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46(4): 778-87) discovered the media priming effect, positing that by drawing attention to certain issues while ignoring others, television news programs help define the standards by which presidents are evaluated. We conducted a direct replication of Experiment 1 by Iyengar et al. (1984, The Evening News and Presidential Evaluations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46(4): 778-87) with some changes. Specifically, we (a) collected data from Japanese undergraduates
(b) reduced the number of conditions to two
(c) used news coverage of the issue of relocating US bases in Okinawa as the treatment
(d) measured issue-specific evaluations of the Japanese Prime Minister in the pre-treatment questionnaire
and (e) performed statistical analyses that are more appropriate for testing heterogeneity in the treatment effect. We did not find statistically significant evidence of media priming. Overall, the results suggest that the effects of media priming may be quite sensitive either to the media environment or to differences in populations in which the effect has been examined.

Though survey satisficing, grudging cognitive efforts required to provide optimal answers in the survey response process, poses a serious threat to the validity of online experiments, a detailed explanation of the mechanism has yet to be established. Focusing on attitudes toward immigrants, we examined the mechanism by which survey satisficing distorts treatment effect estimates in online experiments. We hypothesized that satisficers would display more stereotypical responses than non-satisficers would when presented with stereotype-disconfirming information about an immigrant. Results of two experiments largely supported our hypotheses. Satisficers, whom we identified through an instructional manipulation check (IMC), processed information about immigrants' personality traits congruently with the stereotype activated by information provided about nationality. The significantly shorter vignette reading time of satisficers corroborates their time-efficient impression formation based on stereotyping. However, the shallow information processing of satisficers can be rectified by alerting them to their inattentiveness through use of a repeated IMC.

<p>In this paper, we introduced a method of causal inference for arbitrary treatment regimes. We first expounded the generalized propensity score (Imai & Van Dyk, 2004) that extended the propensity score for binary treatments, and then causal inference with this generalized propensity score. Furthermore, we reanalyzed the data of relations between mass media and politics from a previous study, and discussed the usefulness of causal inference using generalized propensity scores.</p>

This study focuses on" satisficing" (answering behaviors in which participants do not devote appropriate attentional resources to the survey (Krosnick, 1991)) in an online survey and aims to investigate, via various indices, to what extent these behaviors are observed among students whose participation was solicited by the researchers in their universities. This study also aims to explore effective techniques to detect individuals who show satisficing tendencies as effciently and accurately as possible. Online surveys were carried out at nine universities. Generally speaking, the predictive capability of various types of detection indices was not high. Though direct comparison with online survey panels was impossible because of differences in measurement methodology, the satisficing tendencies of university students were generally low. Our findings show that when using university students as samples for a study, researchers need not be "too intent" on detecting satisficing tendencies, and that it was more important to control the answering environment, depending on the content of the survey.

In this article, monitor attitudes during online surveys were empirically examined, focusing in particular on satisficing (when survey participants do not fully engage their efforts). At first, the extent to which the satisficing tendency was dependent on personal traits was examined. We observed participants' behavior in an online survey setting that required them to view video stimulus material consisting of news footage, and measured the length of time each participant spent viewing the footage. The results revealed that respondents who had satisficed (half-heartedly read) the scale items in a prior study (Miura &amp
Kobayashi, 2015) were much more likely to satisfice the video footage. Then, agenda-setting and media-priming effects were used to examine the impact of satisficing during online surveys (including experimental manipulation) on empirical findings. Both examinations indicated the strong possibility that data pertaining to participants who satisficed could serve to distort empirical findings.

This study focused on satisficing in online surveys-behavior in which panels do not devote an appropriate amount of attentional resources when answering questions. It carried out questionnaire surveys that could not be answered properly without closely reading the instructions and questions to empirically investigate the prevalence and patterns of satisficing. To detect satisficing tendencies, a screening survey was conducted with questions that necessitated a close reading of the instructions, while the main survey used questions that required a close reading of the item content. Identical surveys were carried out at two different survey companies, and results showed that satisficing due to skipping instructions occurs very frequently. Furthermore, while satisficing due to skipping scale items appears to be relatively rare, trends in satificing differed between the survey companies. These results indicate one method for preventing satificing, which was discussed in relation to the merits and demerits of screening respondents with satificing tendencies.

This study investigated the effects of reputation-making norms on personal network size. Someone who behaved cooperatively/non-cooperatively toward a "bad" person is denoted as C to B/D to B. Reputationmaking norms are then defined by a combination of the assessment of C to B and the assessment of D to B. We hypothesized that (1) those who judge C to B negatively would form smaller personal networks than those who judge C to B positively, and (2) those who judge D to B negatively would form smaller personal networks than those who judge D to B positively. We used scenarios to assess the internalized reputationmaking norms as an independent variable and investigated their effects on the size of participants' support networks as a dependent variable. Results indicated that the size of the support networks of participants following a norm which does not permit C to B was smaller than that of participants following a norm which does permit C to B. These findings suggest that using reputation made by norms which do not permit spoiling narrows the size of cooperative relationships.

This study is designed to analyze the national pension premiums for contributors subscribing to the national pension program. It has been found that the non-payment rate is high in people who do not know much about the full pensions they may be entitled to receive. In a Web-based questionnaire survey, the respondents were divided into two groups. One group received a notice as to their pension benefits, and the other group did not. The purpose of this experiment is to investigate the difference in payments between the two groups, and the highest possible amount of payments allowable for national pension premiums were also examined in both groups. The results indicate that (1) the notice of pension benefits decreased the potential limit of pension payment for those who expected higher pension benefits, and (2) the notice had a positive effect on raising the potential limit of pension premiums.

Blogs have become an important medium for people to publish their opinions and ideas on the Web. However, it is still not clear whether we can analyze political public opinions from blogs. There have been some recent work on political viewpoint classification, but most only classified political blog entries or sites into opposing viewpoints such as conservative/liberal or Israeli/Palestinian. However, to predict a broader range of political opinions, we need to analyze a wide variety of blogs. Therefore, we constructed a dataset of general blogs that are connected to political poll results. With the dataset, we conducted experiments to predict political poll results by using the blog entries. Our prediction methods are based on a supervised learning algorithm, Support Vector Machines (SVM), with features in blog sites. We also attempted manual prediction with three human subjects as the upper bound of the system performance, and found that such a task is rather difficult even for humans and that the system performance can outperform that of humans. © 2012 IEEE.

The recent trend and prospect of media effects research is reviewed from the viewpoint of social psychology and communication research. In the former, transformation of mass media and its effects is discussed by focusing on the diversification of news content and outlets promoted by the rise of entertaining soft news, and the diffusion of Cable TV. Moreover, recent research on cognitive process in news exposure is introduced by focusing on the synthesizing trend of framing, agenda setting, and priming effects. In the latter, the possible ineffectiveness of traditional media effects theories and models is discussed in regards to the rapidly changing media environment through the diffusion of the Internet. Lastly, the emerging role of mobile phones and social media in political communication as well as methodological progress in media effects research is briefly reviewed.

This study aims to contribute to effective system design of lifelog management. We conducted a random assignment experiment and investigated how variations in lifelog type and incentives of either monetary rewards or lifelog-based services affected subjects' willingness to disclose lifelog. © 2011 IEEE.

This article examines the democratic potential of online communities by investigating the influence of network heterogeneity on social tolerance in an online gaming environment. Online game communities are potential sources of bridging social capital because they tend to be relatively heterogeneous. Causal analyses are conducted using structural equation modeling with survey data collected in a three-wave panel of online game players in Japan. Results show that the heterogeneous composition of online community causally enhances social tolerance toward community members within the online gaming setting. Furthermore, results show that enhanced social tolerance toward online community members is generalized to offline settings. This causal process suggests that online communities provide access to bridging social capital by gathering heterogeneous populations around shared contexts.

Until the middle of the last century, the primary paradigms in mainstream science had been either experimental science or theoretical science. Starting in the 1950s, computational science began its rise to equal prominence and this change resulted in the realization of complex, large-scale numerical calculations and simulations. Now, scientific research is continuing to evolve with further innovative changes brought by the advent of the Internet and related technologies. Thanks to the technology used in these sophisticated information systems, most of the hardware and sensors used to gather information are linked to these networks. Information distributed in digital form technically allows anybody to access it anytime and from anyplace. The empirical scientific research method based on complex large-scale data collected through these networks is called "Data-centric science." The "Knowledge Circulation" infrastructure, which creates new value by projecting concrete information from our society into cyber space, analyzing and simulating it on the web, and enabling feedback from the web to real people and objects, will be one of the major pillars of future socio-informatics. In this paper, we describe the trends in methodology of data-centric science developed in various academic disciplines, and the possibility of these types of developments in socio-informatics. Further, we discuss the data sharing/collaborative research infrastructure that may result in breakthroughs in socio-informatics achieved through sharing vast amounts of data collected from throughout society and utilizing information science.

（映像情報メディアの未来ビジョン論文特別賞受賞）

We describe a web-based survey to assess how to evaluate a reputation by referring to his or her history of actions and taking account of his or her opponent's reputation. The analysis indicates that there is a distinction between possible actions with an opponent having bad reputations. That is, cooperative action with opponents that have bad reputations is less favorable than cooperative action with someone with an average reputation, and defection against opponents that have bad reputations is more favorable than defection against someone with an average one. Evaluation of actor with opponents that have bad reputation are found to depend on two evaluation factors, intimacy and social desirableness, because evaluation words extracted from the respondents' questionnaires could be classified with these two dimensions. This finding indicates that the norm of reputation making is more complex than the intuitive one-dimensional mechanism. © 2010 IEEE.

The use of web-based surveys has expanded rapidly during the past few years as the number of Internet users increased. However, lack of representativeness cause hesitation in utilizing data collected via the internet as compared to more conventional sampling methodology. This paper analyses the problem of non-representativeness in open online surveys using a passive sampling method, taking as an example the results of the ANU Internet Opinion Poll (ANU Poll) conducted in research on the 2004 Australian federal election. It clarifies that the sampling bias in online polls causes inaccurate statistical inferences.

Though most observers agreed that pension was the biggest issue in the 2007 Japanese Upper House Election, how people viewed this issue has not been fully discussed in electoral studies. This research examines the structure of the election issues as well as the meaning of the pension issue for Japanese society using 3 types of text data: 1) diet member's statements, 2) coverage of newspapers, and) people's answers to open-ended questions about the election issues. Analysis of text data possesses the advantage of avoiding preconceived notions about the meaning of the issues, since it uses spontaneous remarks from people. The results show that though political elites mainly discuss the pension system and the media focuses on the opinion of parties about the pension issue, ordinary voters' views did not depend on attitudes toward the pension system itself but on their evaluation of the policies and the performance of the government of that period.

The effect of mobile phone e-mailing on young people's social tolerance was investigated by analyzing survey data of high school students in Japan. The results show that mobile phone e-mailing had a positive promoting effect on the homogeneity and a negative effect on the heterogeneity of personal networks. This in turn had a negative effect on social tolerance toward others. Mobile phone e-mailing enables students to select homogeneous others as companions of communication and thus brings a bias of homogeneity into their personal networks. This homogeneity bias in turn had a negative effect on the development of social tolerance in the socialization process by reducing the chance of interaction with heterogeneous others.

The development of social capital in an online community was investigated by creating survey data of online game players. The results showed that the frequency of collective communication, the homogeneity of members, and the openness of the online community had positive effects on trust, while the size of community and community hierarchy had negative effects. This shows that participation in online communities can create social capital. Furthermore, the results showed that online social capital influences real-life behavior. For example, reciprocity online facilitated offline social participation, even after controlling for offline social capital and other real-life determinants. These results demonstrate the positive contribution of collective online communication to a democratic social system.

(The Japanese Society of Social Psychology Year 2006 encouraged paper award)<br />
The rapid spread of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enables people to maintain ties with friends and relatives who are physically distant, and to establish new ties through the Internet. To examine the social consequence of using ICTs at the macro level, we extended Latane&#039;s DSIT simulation model by adding interaction with distant agents. The results show that the largest and the mean cluster sizes of minority were smaller than Latane&#039;s model, but the number of minority clusters increased. Even if they are surrounded by others of different opinions, people can keep their o...

The rapid spread of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enables people to maintain ties with friends and relatives who are physically distant, and to establish new ties through the Internet. To examine the social consequence of using ICTs at the macro level, we extended Latane's DSIT simulation model by adding interaction with distant agents. The results show that the largest and the mean cluster sizes of minority were smaller than Latane's model, but the number of minority clusters increased. Even if they are surrounded by others of different opinions, people can keep their opinions unchanged through ties with distant others. Such ties decrease the relative effects of adjacent neighbors. As a whole, people can form the homogeneous networks that are free from physical restriction to some degree. Consequently, minority opinions are able to survive.

情報ネットワークの普及により,ネットワークコミュニケーションが一般化し,ネットワークコミュニティが形成されてきた.これにともない,ネットワークコミュニティの社会科学的研究がさかんになってきている.本論文で説明するネットワークコミュニティ分析支援システムCMINERは,ネットワークコミュニティの典型的メディアの1つであるウェブ掲示板を対象として,その社会科学的分析を支援するソフトウェアシステムである.本システムにより,ウェブ掲示板のログデータを収集し,ログ分析の基本的指標に加えて,基本的な社会ネットワーク分析を自動的に一貫して行うことができ,その結果はグラフにより視覚化できる.従来ソフトウェアとの比較実験による作業の効率化も確認した.