Theorizing the Temporal Aspect of Ikigai or Life Worth Living among Japanese University Students: a Mixed-Methods Approach

Although cross-cultural and non-Western studies have advanced our knowledge on well-being, many studies have adopted English words including ‘happiness’ as their guiding concepts, which may have limited and biased their insight. The current study is part of a larger mixed-methods project that theorizes how Japanese university students pursue ikigai or a life worth living. The first qualitative study, based on 27 photo-elicitation interviews, generated a grounded theory of houkousei, or life directionality. Our qualitative findings suggested that when students formed explicit associations among the past, present, and future, they gained strong ikigai feelings. These associations were developed either cognitively by mentally associating existing present experiences with the past or future, or behaviourally by strategically choosing current experiences more pertinent to the past or future than alternatives. These actions resulted in two subjective states: life legacy and life momentum. Life legacy was the perception that one’s past had meaningfully contributed to his or her present experiences, life, and self. Life momentum meant the belief that one’s present experiences were helping him or her achieve the desired future. Lastly, having defining past experiences and setting clear goals both facilitated the associative actions. To further validate this theory, we collected online survey data from a national sample of 672 Japanese students. Our quantitative results, based on partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), largely supported our theoretical model. Our findings are discussed in light of the ikigai and eudaimonic well-being literatures.

     

Spontaneous goal versus spontaneous trait inferences: How ideology shapes attributions and explanations

Past research documented liberals’ greater tendency than conservatives to take situational determinants of others’ actions into account when forming causal attributions, and conservatives’ greater tendency to seek consistency. We hypothesize that liberals (vs. conservatives) should be more likely to make spontaneous goal inferences (SGIs). Conservatives, however, should tend to implicitly infer invariant rather than variant characteristics from others’ behaviors, drawing spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) rather than SGIs. Experiment 1 and 2 supported those hypotheses by illustrating differences in the type of implicit inferences formed by liberals and conservatives in a false recognition paradigm common to the STI literature. Experiment 3 revealed similar differences in conservatives’ and liberals’ goal and trait inferences when making open-ended causal explanations for others’ actions.     

Right-Wing Ideology as a Predictor of Collective Action: A Test Across Four Political Issue Domains

Despite a vast literature documenting motivations for collective action, the role of sociopolitical ideologies, including right-wing ideologies, in predicting collective action is underresearched. Literature on right-wing ideological beliefs suggests that those higher in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) or social dominance orientation (SDO) hold specific attitudes or endorse specific policies, in part, because of factors such as perceived fear-based threat or empathy. In the present research, structural equation modeling (SEM) was run on pooled data from a diverse Canadian university sample and two American adult samples (total N = 1,469). Participants completed measures of RWA, SDO, fear-based threat, empathy, and domain-specific collective action. Results showed that RWA and SDO both related positively to collective action targeting societal moral breakdown but negatively to collective action aimed at equalizing race relations or fighting climate change. Whereas the indirect effects of right-wing ideologies via fear-based threat or empathy were significant in all four domains for SDO, the indirect effect of RWA was only significant in the climate change domain. Implications are discussed.     

The role of epistemic and social characteristics in children’s selective trust: Three meta‐analyses

Over the last 15 years, researchers have been increasingly interested in understanding the nature and development of children’s selective trust. Three meta‐analyses were conducted on a total of 51 unique studies (88 experiments) to provide a quantitative overview of 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children’s selective trust in an informant based on the informant’s epistemic or social characteristics, and to examine the relation between age and children’s selective trust decisions. The first and second meta‐analyses found that children displayed medium‐to‐large pooled effects in favor of trusting the informant who was knowledgeable or the informant with positive social characteristics. Moderator analyses revealed that 4‐year‐olds were more likely to endorse knowledgeable informants than 3‐year‐olds. The third meta‐analysis examined cases where two informants simultaneously differed in their epistemic and social characteristics. The results revealed that 3‐year‐old children did not selectively endorse informants who were more knowledgeable but had negative social characteristics over informants who were less knowledgeable but had positive social characteristics. However, 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds consistently prioritized epistemic cues over social characteristics when deciding who to trust. Together, these meta‐analyses suggest that epistemic and social characteristics are both valuable to children when they evaluate the reliability of informants. Moreover, with age, children place greater value on epistemic characteristics when deciding whether to endorse an informant’s testimony. Implications for the development of epistemic trust and the design of studies of children’s selective trust are discussed.