Trust: The Evolutionary Game of Mind and Society

194 Pages·2011·3.36 MB·English

by  Toshio Yamagishi (auth.)

The Science of the Mind
Series Editor
Tetsuro Matsuzawa
Inuyama, Japan
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Toshio Yamagishi
Trust
The Evolutionary Game
of Mind and Society
Toshio Yamagishi
Professor
Department of Behavioral Science
Graduate School of Letters
Hokkaido University
[email protected]
This book is based on the Japanese original, T. Yamagishi,
Shinrai no Kozo: Kokoro to Shakai no Shinka Gehmu, University of Tokyo Press, 1998
ISSN 2192-6646 e-ISSN 2192-6654
ISBN 978-4-431-53935-3 e-ISBN 978-4-431-53936-0
DOI 10.1007/978-4-431-53936-0
Springer Tokyo Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011927170
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Dedicated to my father,
the late Shunji Yamagishi, and my mother,
the late Kasumi Yamagishi, who gave me
strength to trust myself and others.
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Preface
When I published the Japanese edition of this book, there still was a widely shared
consensus that Japanese society was collectivistic in that its people sacrificed their
personal life for the prosperity of collectives such as the company they were work-
ing for. Many people, Japanese as well as non-Japanese, were convinced that this
collectivity-oriented mentality provided one of the foundations of Japan’s eco-
nomic and social success, as exemplified by a book titled Japan as Number One by
Ezra Vogel (1979). Japanese society, and Japanese business practice in particular,
was characterized as a trust-based society. As a student and a young scholar who
had been involved in the student movement while in Japan, I always felt that some-
thing was wrong with such a characterization of Japanese society. It took me almost
a couple of decades and the exposure to adaptationist ways of thinking before
I realized what that something was. That something was the lack of conceptual
distinction between trust and assurance. Predictability of social behavior controlled
by social constraints does not mean that people trust each other. I decided to write
a book to clarify this distinction.
The central message of the resulting book was that the collectivist society pro-
duces security but destroys trust. The collectivistic ways of promoting social order
reduce transaction costs within mutually committed social relations at the cost of
giving up chances to access opportunities that may be available outside the com-
mitted relations. An implication of this conclusion is that the collectivist production
of social order based on mutual monitoring and sanctioning within closed social
relations may promote social and economic efficiency insofar as the opportunity
cost of confining oneself to the currently involved social relations is relatively low.
However, I argued, Japan was facing an ever-globalizing world where the oppor-
tunity cost was becoming higher and higher; thus, trying to stick with the collectiv-
istic production of social order that once brought Japan social as well as economic
success would hamper Japan’s future success and prosperity. The social system that
once was a blessing would become a curse.
Fourteen years later, Japan is still facing the same transition problem. On the one
hand, the traditional, collectivistic social system, with so-called permanent employ-
ment and seniority-based promotion, for instance, has been gradually phased out
owing to the costs of maintaining that system. On the other hand, the mentality of
the majority of Japanese people, especially of young people, seems not to have
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changed from security seeking to opportunity seeking. I believe that the issues
I raised in the Japanese edition of this book are still, or even more, relevant now.
I also believe that people in other countries, especially Asian and Eastern European
countries, who have been used to a collectivistic social order, are currently facing
the same transition problem that Japan started to face earlier. In this sense, I believe
that the publication of an English edition is timely.
Publication of the English edition would have been impossible without the help
of my friends and colleagues. Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University
encouraged me to publish the English edition with Springer Japan and introduced
me to the editor Ms. Aiko Hiraguchi. Ms. Hiraguchi and Mr. Kaoru Hashimoto,
also an editor at Springer, have further encouraged me to pursue publication of the
English edition and to add the last chapter that summarizes recent research develop-
ments since the publication of the Japanese edition. The current English edition is
based on the Japanese edition translated by Professor Feixue Wang of Sun Yat-Sen
University and Professor Joseph Whitmeyer of the University of North Carolina.
Dr. Victoria Yeung helped me to finalize the draft. I also want to thank Professors
Uichol Kim, Young-Shin Park, and Sang-Mi Lee, who had translated the Japanese
edition into Korean earlier, and who further encouraged me to publish an English
translation.
Sapporo in beautiful snow, 2011 Toshio Yamagishi
Acknowledgments
It is well understood that a society cannot function if there is no trust between its
people. Trust is a lubricant of social relationships, making relationships possible
between people and organizations. An absence of trust will reduce greatly the effi-
ciency of interpersonal, social and economic relationships. In this sense, trust is
privately possessed social capital that enriches a person’s life, and is, at the same
time, publicly possessed social capital that makes our society a comfortable place
to live. This book is a summary of my research on trust over the past 10 years,
which has tried to connect the understanding of trust as social capital, the aspect of
trust emphasized by social scientists such as Coleman (1990), Putnam (1993a), and
Fukuyama (1995), with the understanding of trust as a form of cognition and
behavior, the view shared by psychologists and social psychologists.
I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for conducting the research presented
in this book. I take this opportunity to express my thanks to all of them. An Abe
Fellowship granted to me in 1993 for trust research provided an initial impetus.
Up until then, I had been aware of the importance of trust while working on the
issue of social dilemmas. Through results of USA–Japan comparative experiments
on social dilemmas, I had discovered a difference in the level of general trust
among Americans and Japanese in a direction opposite to the common sense view
of the two societies. The time and research funding granted by the Abe Fellowship
made me think more carefully about implications of that finding. Being a first-term
fellow, I am afraid that I too often caused extra work for the office staff. I am deeply
grateful to the staff of the Abe Fellowship office for the sincere care and warm
assistance they always extended to me.
I was very lucky that my trust research initiated by the Abe Fellowship was
accepted as a research project of the Institute for Social Systems Research, a divi-
sion of the Institute for the Nuclear Safety System, headed by the late Juji Misumi.
As a result, my research on trust became a fully-fledged research project. Without
support from the Institute, most of the studies presented in this book, especially
the USA–Japan cross-societal questionnaire survey, would not have been possible.
Here, I express my deep appreciation to the director, the late Juji Misumi, and
the associate director, Mr. Akira Yamada, of the Institute, as well as to the associate
researchers at the Institute including Mr. Yasuhiro Haruna and his colleagues.
In three international workshops on trust and additional domestic workshops, all
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