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.

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.

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.

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.

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>

<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.

The present study examined associations of neighbourhood crime with residents' social ties and civic participation using multilevel models. We hypothesized that crime is indirectly associated with residents' low civic participation by negatively relating to their acquaintanceship ties because of fear of neighbours. By contrast, we predicted that crime is indirectly related to frequent civic participation by positively associating with more intimate friendship ties as a response to combat external threats. Additionally, we hypothesized that high crime rates in the neighbourhood increases the importance of generalized trust towards others. Therefore, we examined the interaction effects of neighbourhood crime and trust on social ties and participation. The study is based on a postal questionnaire mailed to residents aged between 20 and 69years, residing in Musashino City and Kiyose City, in Tokyo. Rates of larceny reported by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department were used as indices of neighbourhood crime. As hypothesized, our results showed that crime is positively associated with friendship ties and is negatively related to acquaintanceship ties. Through these opposing relationships, crime showed both positive and negative associations with civic participation. Moreover, we found that generalized trust buffered the adverse relationships between crime, broader social ties and participation. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

<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.

This article examines the reactivation of dormant ties in Japan and the United States. Using the institutional approach to culture developed by Yamagishi et al., it is hypothesized that respondents living in Japan will be less likely to reconnect with dormant ties when prompted than respondents living in the United States. It is further hypothesized that interaction with kin and work ties will help to explain lower levels of reconnection in Japan than in the United States. To examine these hypotheses, we developed a field experiment in which 95 adults living in Japan and 68 adults living in the United States were prompted by a smartphone application to reconnect with dormant ties. The results of this study show strong support for the hypothesis that respondents living in Japan are less likely to reconnect with dormant ties than respondents living in the United States when prompted. There is also mixed support for the hypothesis that interaction with kin and work ties helps to explain lower levels of reconnection in Japan than in the United States.

The new high-choice media environment has allowed entertainment-oriented people to avoid political news, resulting in a wider gap in political knowledge between entertainment- and news-oriented citizens. On the Internet, however, users tend to be concentrated into a handful of portal sites that offer a mixed information environment in which both news and entertainment are readily available. The simultaneous presentation of news and entertainment headlines on portal sites exposes entertainment-oriented people to the news, which may in turn narrow the knowledge gap between them and news-oriented people. To test this hypothesis, we examined the effects of exposure to major portal sites in Japan, where Yahoo! JAPAN attracts a large majority of Internet users. Two studies using self-reported exposure to portal sites (n = 838) and web browsing histories (n = 1,000) demonstrated that even entertainment-oriented people can acquire political knowledge, and thus portal sites can serve as knowledge levelers.

The tele-cocooning hypothesis posits that mobile communication increases interaction with communication rich ties, while simultaneously weakening interaction with communication weak ties. In this study, we demonstrate how smartphones can be used to mitigate tele-cocooning behavior by stimulating interaction with communication weak ties. Using a smartphone application to collect non-identifying mobile communication log data, we conducted a field experiment with 193 Japanese participants. The treatment consisted of onscreen reminders designed to stimulate interaction with communication weak ties. The results indicate that the treatment promoted the activation of communication weak ties and the acquisition of information through those ties, suggesting that smartphones can be utilized to promote access to social capital.

Citizenship eligibility has emerged as a salient issue in Japan as population diversity has increased and the political system has aligned around debates over regional security and tabunka kyōsei ('multicultural co-existence'). A predominantly Western literature suggests that sentiments toward immigrants are driven by economic self-interest and/or cultural identity. Such approaches, we argue, privilege groups as units of analysis when it is the personal attributes of immigrants that have a bearing on critical outcomes, like naturalization. This is particularly the case in Japan, where officials maintain considerable discretionary powers in assessing the worthiness of candidates for naturalization. Drawing upon a nationally representative sample of Japanese adults, we use an experimental design to assess the average citizen's willingness to grant citizenship to hypothetical applicants. The results indicate that individual applicants are viewed more favorably than their groups or nations of origin, indicating a person-positivity bias. Korean workers are, ceteris paribus, viewed more favorably than workers from China. We also find that socioeconomic status and willingness to assimilate contribute equally to the decision to award citizenship. Yet as there is general support for high-status applicants, affluent Japanese evaluate lower status applicants more negatively, undermining the expectation of labor market competition.

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.

The present study examines the tele-cocooning hypothesis in the context of general trust using a nationally representative survey of Japanese youth. We find that although frequency of texting is positively correlated with general trust, this correlation is spuriously caused by how heavy mobile texters interpret the words most people in the general trust measurement. Heavy users assume that most people only refers to friends, family, and others going to the same school. When the effect of the most people assumption is controlled, the positive association between texting and general trust disappears. Further exploration of the data shows that heavy texting nevertheless has negative implications for social tolerance and social caution, both of which are theoretically proximate to general trust.

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 paper demonstrates that citizens in seven advanced industrialized democracies generally oppose more open immigration policies, but stand ready to admit individual immigrants. Using an experimental design, we demonstrate the applicability of the "person-positivity bias" to immigration and investigate the effects of economic and cultural "deservingness" on evaluations of individual immigrants. Our results show that immigrants from professional backgrounds elicit higher levels of support than unskilled workers. The bias against unskilled workers is enlarged among immigrants accompanied by families. In comparison with occupational status and the number of family dependents, the target immigrant's cultural attributes - as measured by Middle Eastern nationality and Afrocentric appearance - prove relatively inconsequential as criteria for evaluating immigrants. © 2013 © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved.

There is widespread interest in the question of how to ensure consumer trust in the face of the social uncertainties characteristic of e-commerce. Enrichment or sophistication of a site's internal components alone does not necessarily lead to greater customer trust, indicating a need for e-commerce stores to offer consumers further external information. Based on the salient value similarity model of trust, we presented subjects with external information about salient consumer values and attributes of previous buyers and manipulated these variables to investigate their effects on trust-building processes. We found that salient consumer value similarity indirectly increased intention to buy by building trust in a site, while attribute similarity did not. This paper discusses the practical implications of these findings and the direction of future research.

A comparative study of Thailand and Japan investigated how electronic commerce (EC) in developing countries can be used to attract customers from developed countries. Thai and Japanese participants were shown language-appropriate versions of a hotel booking website in Thailand. Perceptions of and trust in the website were assessed, as was the willingness to book a room in the hotel using the website. The Thai participants tended to evaluate the quality of the website more highly and to trust it more than did the Japanese participants. Furthermore, the Thai participants tended to think that the hotel was more responsible for their hotel reservations than was the EC service, and that the content of the website was developed by the hotel rather than by the EC service. Thai participants were more likely to express willingness to reserve a room if they thought that the hotel had developed the website content, whereas the Japanese participants' willingness to book a room were greater when they thought that the EC service had developed the content. Based on these results, customization strategies for EC in developing countries to attract customers from developed countries are discussed.

Objectives. We research the political impact of human social interaction. Some scholars suggest that recreational or other informal interaction may promote political participation. Informal recreational interaction is proposed to be beneficial because it increases activity in more serious political participation. Methods. To test these ideas, we use new nationally representative survey data from seven East Asian nations using Poisson regression models. Results. We show that informal social interaction and nonpolitical voluntary activity do increase political participation. Conclusions. Even though the recreation may begin as a nonpolitical activity, we show that it may spark later political participation.

This chapter studies the central argument of Robert Putnam that applies to civic engagement in Japan. The discussion also includes two important factors that have previously been neglected, namely the Internet and gender. It presents a clearer argument on how the various kinds of Internet use have different kinds of effects. It also furthers the analysis of gender differences.

Research on the social and psychological effects of mobile phone communication primarily is conducted using self-report measures of use. However, recent studies have suggested such measures of mobile phone communication use contain a significant amount of measurement error. This study compares the frequency of mobile phone use measured by self-report questions with error-free log data automatically collected through an Android smartphone application. Using data from 310 Android phone users in Japan, we investigate the extent to which nonrandom measurement error exists in self-report responses to questions about mobile phone use and predictors of this error. Our analysis shows that users generally overreport their frequency of mobile communication and that overestimation is better predicted by proxy measures of social activity than demographic variables. We further show an example of how overreporting can result in an overestimation of the effects of mediated communication on civic engagement. Finally, the value of behavioral log data in mediated communication research is discussed. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

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.

We investigated the effect of tolerance of reputation-making norms on cooperation by conducting an evolutionary simulation with more realistic constraints than those in previous studies. Specifically, agents could make social exchanges only within their neighborhoods on the network, and could refer to the reputation of others only within two steps on the network when exchanging and rewiring. Under these constraints, we compared the effect of three reputation-making norms which varied across the levels of tolerance: i.e., image scoring, standing, and strict discriminator. The results were as follows. Under the standing norm, while social exchanges increased in number because the network became dense, cooperation was highly likely to collapse because defection tended to be more adaptive than cooperation. On the other hand, under the strict discriminator norm, while cooperation was stable, the social exchanges decreased in number because the network became sparse. These results indicate that the tolerances of reputation-making norms would affect not only the robustness of cooperation but also the structure of the social network. This implies that the intolerant reputation-making norm focusing only on level of cooperation may have negative effects on social capital by shrinking the social network as a by-product. In the second simulation, we added perceptual errors that caused agents to misinterpret another's reputation. The results showed that the cooperation was stable even under tolerant standing norm. This implies that when social exchanges are done under the constraints of the network structure and perceptual errors, even the tolerant reputation-making norm can maintain cooperation.

This paper presents an automatic question generation method for a local councilor search system. Our purpose is to provide residents with information about local council activities in an easy-to-understand manner. Our designed system creates a decision tree with leaves that correspond to local councilors in order to clarify the differences in the activities of local councilors using local council minutes as the source. Moreover, our system generates questions for selecting the next branch at each condition in the decision tree. We confirmed experimentally that these questions are appropriate for the selection of branches in the decision tree.

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.

(2009 special award for thesis &quot;Future Vision of Image Information Media&quot;)

（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 effect of Internet use on political information exposure is investigated using representative survey data from japan and the USA. Internet users can simply choose political information that is consistent with their political attitudes. This selectivity in information exposure via the Internet might have serious consequences on the democratic social system, such as fragmentation of shared information and a decrease in political tolerance. Three research questions were empirically investigated as to the presence of selective exposure in political web browsing, the effect of political web browsing on political tolerance, and the contingencies on which selective exposure occurs. Multivariate quantitative analyses show that web browsing, as a form of Internet use for seeking political information, facilitates exposure to arguments that are consistent with one's attitudes, However, selective avoidance, which suppresses exposure to heterogeneous arguments, is not empirically supported. Moreover, although Internet use as a source of infarmation facilitates exposure to homogeneous arguments under certain conditions, it does not have a negative effect in political tolerance. This is because selective exposure to homogeneous arguments takes place if and only if the perceived issue's importance is high. That is, even if selective exposure has an effect on a few issues perceived as highly important, there is no such bias in other less-important issues, which attenuates the effect of selective exposure on the homogeneity of the information environment surrounding each person. It is concluded that the fear of a fragmented society due to selectivity in using the Internet seems to be empirically groundless.

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.

The effect of Internet use as a mediating variable on self-efficacy as it relates to the cognition of network-changing possibility (i.e., connecting people or groups with different social backgrounds) was examined. The results showed that Internet use (i.e., the frequency of sending e-mail, friends made on the Internet) had a positive effect on the cognition of network-changing possibility. The cognition that it is possible to connect people with different social backgrounds by using the Internet also had a positive effect on self-efficacy. On the other hand, the cognition that it is possible to find people or groups who share beliefs and interests by using the Internet negatively affected self-efficacy. Hence, it was found that the effect of Internet use on self-efficacy was different as a function of cognition of network-changing possibility. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2007.

This paper examines the extent to which Japanese adolescents use mobile phone e-mail to bond, bridge. and break with their social ties. Although existing literature shows that adolescents use mobile phone e-mail to bond with intimate strong ties, the fluid nature of social networks during adolescence suggests that mobile phone e-mail may also be used to bridge to new ties and to break with old ties. Drawing oil a stratified random sample survey of 501 high school students living in Tokyo, we find that mobile phone e-mail is used both to bond and bridge, but not to break with ties. We also find that the intensity with which Japanese adolescents use mobile phone e-mail is more fundamentally a result of bridging than bonding. These findings apply both to typical users and heavy users. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The effect of PC e-mail usage on social tolerance was investigated by analyzing representative survey data collected from electorates in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. The results showed that PC e-mail usage had a positive effect on social tolerance because it allows for mediating communications with heterogeneous others. These results are a clear-cut contrast to previous research, which showed that mobile-phone e-mail usage had a negative effect on social tolerance because of the increasing homogeneity of personal networks. The results indicated that while the technological limitations of mobile phone e-mail usage selectively strengthen communications with homogeneous others through the exchange of short messages, PC e-mail usage facilitates communications between heterogeneous people, because it is suitable for the exchange of the longer messages necessary for sharing the assumptions made during correspondence. From the viewpoint of nourishing "bridging" social capital, it is suggested that the promotion of PC e-mail should be encouraged by establishing appropriate policies and that the functional development of the use of the Internet on mobile phones should be empirically investigated.

Based on longitudinal data collected from a random sample panel survey, the present study found that different types of Internet usage are differentially related to social networks. The more social ties people have, the more likely they are to use personal computer (PC) email, and the use of PC email increases social ties. The results also show that the more supportive ties people have, the more they tend to use mobile phone email; however, it does not prove the use of mobile phone email increases supportive ties. However, participation in an online community is not related social networks. These findings suggest that PC email may increase the size of personal social networks, whereas mobile phone email is useful in maintaining existing strong ties which provide social support.

While the determinants of political participation have long been scrutinized by scholars, their consequences are not well known. In this article we examine how macro-environmental factors-specifically, how distinctive political choices are from one another-affect the cognitive consequences of political participation. Although there are two possible causal directions between political participation and cognitive factors, we instead focus on how this macro-environmental factor affects the association between these two variables. We hypothesize that political participation promotes the efficacious feeling that participation makes a difference by improving the cognitive articulation of the political system. We find support for this hypothesis through our analysis of 22 countries in the CSES dataset using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Additional analysis shows that political participation has a compensatory effect on political efficacy for those who do not feel that their political position is well represented by the current party system. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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 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.

This article puts the democratic potential of using the Internet into perspective through an analysis of how collective uses of the Internet promote social capital. Research results reveal that social capital online (i.e. trust and reciprocity) is enhanced by involvement in collective use of the Internet such as participation in online communities and use of the Internet among informal groups in everyday life. This process could counter negative aspects of Internet use. Further, accumulated online social capital can be a powerful predictor of online political participation, i.e. online reciprocity has a positive effect on intention to participate in online civic discussion. Finally, the authors' analyses indicate the possibility of a spillover of online social capital into offline arenas. It is concluded that collective use of the Internet can be a lubricant for democracy. © 2006 Taylor &amp
Francis.

(The Japanese Society of Social Psychology Year 2007 encouraged paper award)

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.