The fourth research project aims to produce a theoretical framework that can elucidate dynamic interactions between the mind and society/culture. To gain a basic understanding of this issue, we first create experimental markets involving either "collectivistic" or "individualistic" social institutions. Using such experimental settings, we let participants experience specific forms of social adaptation tasks within a certain social institution. We then examine whether participants come to exhibit certain psychological tendencies. Cultural psychologists maintain that "analytic thought" is a psychological process representative of the "individualistic" mind, which originated in Greek civilization. They go on to assert that "holistic thought" is a psychological process representative of the "collectivist" mind, which can be traced back to the ancient Chinese civilization. The results of preliminary experiments conducted in 2002 suggest that such tendencies in thought could be formed in the minds of participants after engaging in transaction tasks for only a few hours. This point is consistent with that of our second research project that maintains that cultural variations in the mind can be traced back to differences in social intelligence that works as an adaptive tool to the social environment. Using experiments and computer simulations, this project further aims to elucidate how such differences in the mind facilitate the formation of different types of social institutions, as well as how, through this process, different types of social adaptation tasks are generated. We hope that the work of this project will show that social institutions mediate the interaction between mind and society. We expect that worldwide collaborative experiments using Internet connections, in which both the Japanese and people from other cultures simultaneously participate, will play an important role in shedding light on this issue.

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The generation of norms | Mind and culture mediated by social institutions