Trust: The Evolutionary Game of Mind and Society PDF
Preview Trust: The Evolutionary Game of Mind and Society
The Science of the Mind Series Editor Tetsuro Matsuzawa Inuyama, Japan For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/10149 w w wwwwwwww 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 © Springer 2011 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Dedicated to my father, the late Shunji Yamagishi, and my mother, the late Kasumi Yamagishi, who gave me strength to trust myself and others. w w wwwwwwww 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 vii viii Preface 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 ix
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