Toshio Yamagishi

Toshio Yamagishi was born in January 1948 in Nagoya, Japan. He completed a master’s degree at the Graduate School of Sociology in Hitotsubashi University in 1972, and was enrolled in the PhD program of the same school. It was then he married his lifelong partner, Midori Yamagishi in Tokyo. Then in 1975, he enrolled in the doctoral program in the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington, where he worked with his mentors, Drs. Richard Emerson and Chuck Hill, and fellow students Karen Cook and Mary Brinton. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1982. In 1981, he joined the Faculty of Letters at Hokkaido University as an associate professor. After shifting to Washington once as an assistant professor in 1985, he returned to Hokkaido in 1988 and was soon promoted to professor. During his term at Hokkaido University, he established a new Center for Experimental Research in Social Sciences in 2007, which he founded with the then groundbreaking aim to promote experimental research in social sciences. He also launched and served as the leader of two “21st Century COE” (Center of Excellence) programs on “Cultural and Ecological Foundations of the Mind” and “Sociality of Mind.” After retiring from Hokkaido in 2012, he held positions at the Institute for Brain Science (Tamagawa University), the Research Center for Evolutionary Cognitive Sciences (University of Tokyo), and the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, and Graduate School of Business Administration (Hitotsubashi University). He passed away in May 2018.

Toshio was a pioneer and an innovator who tackled the fundamental questions in social sciences—broadly defined—using new theories and methods. Particularly, he put much effort into solving the complex “micro-macro” relationships between the social environment and human psychological processes.

His first significant contribution was in social exchange theory. In the early 1980s, he was the first to implement laboratory experiments to study social exchange networks, which had previously been studied mostly theoretically. In particular, he examined how power relations between individuals are defined by the network structure in which people are embedded in laboratory settings.

His second noteworthy contribution was to the research on social dilemmas. Social dilemmas are situations in which each individual’s self-interests run counter to those of others, either in dyadic relationships, or in groups. In the early 1980s, Toshio found that people's decision-making in this context is influenced by their expectation of whether or not other people will cooperate. He also pointed out that the use of sanctioning (i.e., punishing non-cooperators), which had previously been thought of as a solution to social dilemmas, has critical limitations. In addition, his newly proposed selective play paradigm, where actors can choose their interaction partners, was groundbreaking because previous theories assumed that relationships and interactions between actors were permanent.

Emerging from the above research was his new research on trust in the 1990s. Notably, his "Emancipation Theory of Trust" integrated traditional questions in economics and psychology in a unified theory that explained why people in some societies trust strangers more than those in other societies. Toshio’s theory-based explanation focused on how different societies have different opportunity costs (missed chances to engage in profitable social exchange with a new partner) versus the risk of being cheated in this new relationship. This interdisciplinary research had a significant impact on diverse social sciences such as sociology, economics, political science, and anthropology, going far beyond the traditional scope of social psychology.

Later, in the 21st century, his research went further beyond the social sciences to include such areas as biology and neuroscience, aiming to establish a “unified human social science.” First, he incorporated the perspective of evolutionary psychology into the study of social dilemmas. He conducted a series of studies that revealed that humans have a social exchange heuristic as a psychological mechanism, which allows them to cooperate. The question of whether human cooperative behavior is heuristically determined or the result of deliberation has been the subject of debate in recent years in popular scientific journals such as Nature, Science, and PNAS, and involves researchers from diverse fields across the social and biological sciences. He also examined the relationship between brain structure and cooperative behavior and found that individual differences in brain morphology are related to whether a person cooperates due to heuristic or deliberative decision making.

His other innovative research line was the perspective of humans as social niche constructors. He proposed that a human mind is a device for adaptation to social life and that society is constructed through the interaction of people with such adaptive minds. He applied this paradigm to explain various cultural differences in psychological tendencies between the East and West. Although these differences had been traditionally explained in terms of different preferences and values, he re-interpreted them as differences in psychological mechanisms that bring about adaptive behaviors within the given social environment formed by enduring social exchange partners sharing a social location (or niche).

Toshio won several prizes that recognized his significant contributions to understanding the complex relationships between humans and the societies they inhabit. Among the major awards were the Nikkei Economic Book Award (1998), the International Special Prize of the Japanese Psychological Association (2013), and the Misumi Award of the Asian Association of Social Psychology (2013 and 2015). He was also honored with two medals from the Japanese government, the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2004 and the Cultural Merit Award in 2013.

Finally, one should not forget that Toshio’s superhuman efforts were behind these outstanding achievements. No student of his is unaware that the 15 hours between 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m. was Toshio’s working time in his office. At the same time, Toshio always recognized the value of working with others, including his mentors, collaborators, and students. He was also a voracious adopter of new technologies. Not only was he a pioneer in conducting computer-based group experiments back in the early 1980s, but he also conducted fMRI and eye-tracking research in recent years. He even increased the pace of his research after reaching the age of 60, actively discussed his ongoing experiments and a new book plan just before he passed away. Toshio was a challenger in every sense, and his impact on the social sciences will be felt for ages to come.

Tributes

Toshio Yamagishi had that rare combination of rigorous intellect and cultural curiosity, that enabled him to achieve academic excellence that combined hard science with culture-inclusiveness. I was fortunate to have co-authored 5 papers with Toshio over the course of the past decade-and-a-half, beginning in 2008, and ending with his last posthumous publication in 2021. These involved other colleagues, and several of our students, many of whom shared our affiliation with the Asian Association of Social Psychology. Toshio was the most hard-headed rationalist I have ever met in my academic life. We began our collaboration by arguing about the relative merits of social identity theory and realistic conflict (or rational choice) theory in understanding intergroup relations. Toshio amazed me with his steadfast commitment to rational choice theories, combined with his willingness and desire to publish results, even if they did not support his cherished theory of bounded reciprocity (see Romano et al., 2017). This taught me much about how a true scientist should react to a failure to confirm a hypothesis.

I am very sorry he left us too soon, because I believe he had much more to offer. His thinking was always advancing, even after his nominal retirement from Hokkaido University. Toshio’s research was characterized by a focus on rationality and rational choice, not in individualistic isolation, but conditioned by social relationships and the local, and perhaps institutionalized social norms that govern them. He had little patience for “counter-intuitive” and clever phenomena characteristic of experimental social psychology of the 1970s and 80s, instead preferring to contribute to a social science deeply rooted in a science of evolution with a focus on the interplay between biological and cultural evolution. His work on social niches (Yamagishi & Hashimoto, 2016) is among the best illustrations of this point of view.

Toshio was a reliable and enthusiastic contributor to the Asian Association of Social Psychology. We had many deep conversations about history and identity, in particular, the history and identity that divided East Asians as a consequence of all the events leading up to World War II, and the future perils this involved for humanity. One of our first projects revolved around the complexities of the triangle of trust between mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan that had emerged as a consequence of the history of conflict between them (Liu et al., 2011). In the context of this work, I recall visiting Toshio in Hokkaido, where I remember his telling me about the eruption of a volcano on the island (perhaps Komagatake in 1942?) that was suppressed because it was an inauspicious event during war.

We also loved to talk about the Three Kingdoms (三國) period of Chinese history, and the equally rich stories of the three daimyos (Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu) who unified Japan, ending the Sengoku period (戦国時代). Toshio had an encyclopedic knowledge, and an affinity for story-telling that complemented his rigorous scientific mind. He had exquisite taste. The best French meal I ever had was with him and Midori in Sapporo. He loved to work hard more than anyone else I have known. Sometimes, I felt sorry for his students, who had to maintain the same punishing hours as a consequence. But I’m sure that they, as I, learned much from him, and will miss his spirit, that hopefully lives on, through us, and in our work.

– James Hou-fu Liu

I have been forever grateful for Toshio because he took a chance on me to work at Hokkaido when I was a graduate student. I had the privilege to receive his valuable support and mentorship as a junior colleague and often join in enthusiastic argument until late in the evening.

Toshio usually provided a tough but fair critique with my research, which still encourages me to think critically about culture and the mind through the process of micro-macro interactions. Thank you very much Toshio for your guidance.

– Keiko Ishii

Toshio taught me how important it is to learn theories seriously. He showed me that theories help us think deeply. He also taught me how important it is to be free even from the theories one has learned. For me, he has been a symbol of freedom.

– Kosuke Takemura

Toshio was not just an intellectual giant but also an extremely generous mentor for all his students, myself included. He spent a huge amount of time interacting with us. (Sometimes his graduate seminars lasted from 9 am into the evening!) As his research came to be widely known in Japan, his lab naturally attracted more grad students than before, which certainly required him to spend more time on education.

However, he did not seem worried about this situation. I still remember that he once even said "fortunately, I don't have a personal life." Maybe he did not have a personal life in the ordinary sense, but I like to think his research and education were two sides of an extremely productive—quite extraordinary—personal life.

– Yohsuke Ohtsubo