Humans think, communicate, and behave to adapt to a particular social ecology, and by doing so they collectively create, maintain, and change the very ecology (i.e., social niche) they adapt to. The niche construction approach to culture analyzes how people induce each other to think and behave in particular ways by behaving in particular ways themselves. The best support to this approach is found when cultural differences in cognition and behavior that are regularly observed in everyday life disappears in a social vacuum – in a situation in which people are rid of any social concern about implications of their behavior and can express their thoughts and behave free of any social concern. Examples of such experimental manipulations are presented and discussed.

We conduct experiments of a cheap-talk game with incomplete information in which one sender type has an incentive to misrepresent her type. Although that Sender type mostly lies in the experiments, the Receiver tends to believe the Sender's messages. This confirms "truth bias" reported in communication theory in a one-shot, anonymous environment without nonverbal cues. These results cannot be explained by existing refinement theories, while a bounded rationality model explains them under certain conditions. We claim that the theory for the evolution of language should address why truthful communication survives in the environment in which lying succeeds.

This paper investigates face-to-face lying and beliefs associated with it. In experiments in Sweden and Japan, subjects answer questions about personal characteristics, play a face-to-face sender-receiver game and participate in an elicitation of lie-detection beliefs. The previous finding of too much truth-telling (compared to the equilibrium prediction) also holds in the face-to-face setting. A new result is that although many people claim that they are good at lie-detection, few reveal belief in this ability when money is at stake. Correlations between the subjects' characteristics and their behavior and performances in the game are also explored.

We present the experimental results of cheap-talk games with private information. We systematically compare various equilibrium refinement theories and bounded rationality models such as level-k analysis in explaining our experimental data. As in the previous literature, we find that when interests between sender and receiver are aligned, informative communication arises frequently. While babbling equilibrium play is observed more frequently in conflictive interest cases, a substantial number of players show a tendency to choose truth-telling and credulous play. We also find that level-k analysis outperforms equilibrium refinement theories in explaining this phenomenon. Our results also confirm the existence of the “truth bias” and “truth-detection bias” reported in communication theory.

本研究の目的は日本人の集団主義的行動の背後にあるメカニズムを明らかにすることにある。本研究では日本社会の 構造的特徴を集団の閉鎖性にあると仮定した上で、日本型社会構造を抽象化した村八分ゲームを日本人の参加者にプレイさせ、彼らの相互協調的自己呈示の変化 を調べた。実験では、39名の参加者を、相互協調性尺度への回答が他者に知らされる自己呈示条件と、そのような教示をしない自己知覚条件の2条件に割り振 り、村八分ゲームの前後での相互協調性を測定した。実験の結果、自己呈示条件では村八分ゲーム後に相互協調性の尺度得点が上昇し、自己知覚条件では相互協 調性が低下した。この結果は、日本人の自己認識は必ずしも集団主義的ではないが、集団からの排除を回避する為の社会的適法方略として謙虚な自己呈示をする ということを示唆している。