 |
Toshio Yamagishi, Ph.D
Professor
Graduate School of Letters
Hokkaido University
It is my great honor to announce that our proposal to
establish a research center for the study of cultural
and ecological foundations of the mind
has been approved by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture,
Sports, Science and Technology as a 21st Century Center of Excellence
(COE) Program. With this grant, we have completed a new experimental
laboratory on the sixth floor of the Humanities and Social Sciences
Building at Hokkaido University, and we are currently conducting
various experimental studies at the new facility.
Our CEFOM/21 program (Center for the Study of Cultural and Ecological
Foundations of the Mind, a 21st Century Center of Excellence) is unique
among the 20 similar programs awarded grants in the general area of
humanities nationwide. We believe that we are unique in our research
focus strategy.
Many programs share the research strategy that emphasizes "integration" of
a wide range of topics, theories, and methodologies. However, this is
not our research strategy. Rather, we focus on the issue that we consider
most
important in the area of humanities and social sciences over the next
few decades taht is the elucidation of the psychological mechanisms that
enable us to create, build and maintain a society. The myth of "tabula
rasa" that
has been the major obstacle to the development of the social sciences
for the last fifty years has been effectively eliminated, and researchers
in the humanities and the social sciences now face the tremendous intellectual
challenge of drawing a new picture of human nature based on scientific
studies. Our missions is to supply the scientific foundation
for the construction of a new, scientific conception of human nature.
We hope that the findings from CEFOM/21 projects will have a noticeable
impact on researchers in the various fields of human and social sciences
around
the world. This goal is impossible to achieve without collaboration with
and constructive feedback from our colleagues around the world, and so
we look forward to such an active exchange in the future.
The Sociality of Mind - Why now?
The social nature of the mind is an age-old
research topic. The topic has been studied repeatedly not only
in psychology but also in various other fields of human and social
sciences. Why do we address the much studied topic of "the
sociality of the mind" now? Can we discover any new understandings
of how the mind is socially-founded?
We believe we can, and we believe so because new developments in
experimental studies in the social sciences have fundamentally changed
the meaning of
the question of the sociality
of the mind. Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, social
scientists have been deprived of their intellectual creativity by the
myth of "tabula rasa."
This is a myth that human beings are born with minds resembling a blank
slate or a "tabula
rasa" on which culture draws a picture. That is, the human mind's
initial state is blank, void of any built-in "human nature," and
that it is only through experience of culture that a biological
homo sapience becomes a fully-fledged human
being with the full capacity of reason and knowledge. To be a human requires
an individual to absorb the culture into which they were born. Therefore,
human minds vary greatly
reflecting variations in the cultures internalized.
However, by the end of the twentieth century, the myth of "tabula
rasa" has been almost completely refuted by findings in psychology
and the cognitive sciences. Similarly, the idea that the human mind is
not, in fact, infinitely malleable but instead works under certain
constraints is shared among social scientists. Discarding the
myth of a mind characterized by "tabula rasa," social scientists
began to apply a new theoretical assumption: The human mind cannot be
changed arbitrarily just as people cannot arbitrarily change the number
of fingers on one hand from five to seven. Efforts to advance research
on the human mind from this new perspective are currently being expended
in several research centers around the world, including George Mason
University (USA), Zurich University (Switzerland), the Max Planck
Institute
(Germany),
the Santa Fe Institute (USA), and the University of California, Los Angels
(USA).
Researchers at these centers more or less share the basic view that humans
are capable of building and maintaining societies because we are endowed,
through evolutionary processes, with psychological mechanisms that enable
us to behave in certain social ways. Based on this view, they engage
in research to elucidate aspects of the human mind and the relationship
between the mind and society. They further attempt to apply these
new understandings of the mind and society in designing better social
institutions.
CEFOM/21 shares with the other research centers mentioned above the same
basic view of the human mind, and our projects are centered on the "fundamental
sociality" of the human mind. Yet, we are unique in emphasizing
the mutual construction of the mind and society. The human mind is
a toolbox that contains adaptive tools useful to solve social adaptation
tasks. The social environment that engenders social adaptation tasks
for our mind to solve, on the other hand, is our creation. In our effort
to solve social adaptation problems, we collectively create the very
problems that we are to solve. Answering the question of how we collectively
create and maintain the social environment that in turn provides incentives
for us to develop a particular set of psychological tools is the second
important goal of our Center.
In an effort to answer this question, we have established
an international center for experimental studies that facilitates cross-societal
collaborative experiments in which people from
different cultural/societal background interact in real time. Using this
research setting, we attempt to answer the following questions: (1)
What kinds of social institutions
emerge when people from different cultural backgrounds interact in certain
games, (2) how such changes in social institutions affect the use of
various psychological tools,
and (3) how the new use of psychological tools influence directions of
changes in social institutions?
For over a decade, scholars in the human and social sciences have rapidly
developed a new paradigm, as evidenced by the work of Daniel
Kahneman, a cognitive psychologist and one of the founders of behavioral
economics,
and Vernon Smith, one of the founders of experimental economics and
neuro-economics. This new paradigm in the human and social sciences
has so far produced the following:
- The second cognitive revolution in cognitive science that revealed
that cognition is essentially social;
- Wide acceptance of evolutionary perspectives in psychology;
- Establishment of experimental research in economics and other social
sciences; and
- Interdisciplinary collaborations among evolutionary biology, cognitive
science, and social sciences, using evolutionary game theory as a common language.
Through these events, human and social science come to speak the same
language of science while maintaining their individual disciplines. We believe that
one of the critical motivating factors driving such a movement among human and social
sciences is the realization that the human mind is essentially social, that is, the
human "mind" is an adaptive tool for the social environment.
As a vanguard of this new paradigm, we aim to establish an international
educational and research center that promotes new understandings of the
relationship between the human mind and society. We also aspire to
establish a training program for future researchers who seek ways to
assimilate
research in the human and social sciences. Focusing on the most critical
problem the aforementioned new paradigm faces---the fundamental sociality
of the human mind--we hope that we will be at the cutting-edge of
research in this new, exciting field.
The following research projects are currently being carried
out at CEFOM/21:
Return to Top
|
|
