Relational Mobility: A socio-ecological approach to human social behavior and psychology
We humans are “social animals,” who create societies on our own. Then, how do the characteristics of such “societies” affect how we think, feel, and behave? We attempt to answer this question, by specifically focusing on the effect of a socio-ecological variable we call “relational mobility.”
Relational mobility refers to the degree to which there is an availability of options in a given society or social context regarding interpersonal relationships and social groups. There are abundance of opportunities for people to meet strangers and freedom to select whom to associate with in in societies high in relational mobility (a typical example is the United States). In societies low in relational mobility (a typical example is Japan), on the contrary, people tend to create long-standing and exclusive relationships and group memberships, and there is less chances for them to select and change whom to relate to. Importantly, relational mobility differs not only between countries, but also between regions within a country (such as between metropolitan and rural areas), social spheres (face-to-face communications and the internet), and times (medieval times and now). Our project aims to discover simple principles that people under high versus low relational mobility environments differentially think, feel, and behave, and why.
To date, research by ourselves and by others has shown that relational mobility has profound effects on broad range of psychological and behavioral phenomena, such as the levels of trust in strangers (Yuki, et al., 2007), self-enhancement (Falk, Heine, Yuki, & Takemura, 2009), self-disclosure (Schug, Yuki, & Maddux, 2010), reward and punishment toward cooperators and defectors (Wang & Leung, 2010), proneness to shame (Sznycer et al., 2012), pursuit of uniqueness (Takemura, 2014), determinants of happiness (Sato & Yuki, 2014; Yuki, Sato, Takemura, & Oishi, 2013), and social anxiety (Sato, Yuki, & Norasakkunkit, in press).