Seminar by Prof. Tatsuya Kameda (now at Meiji Gakuin University; former at U. of Tokyo)

Date: June 19, Wednesday,

Time: 10 am- 12 noon

Venue: TR+15; NS4-05-93 at NTU

Format: In-person only

Host: Deep NeuroCognition Lab

Contact: Mengmi ([email protected])

Bio: Tatsuya Kameda is a psychologist studying human group behavior. He moved from the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Tokyo to the Faculty of Mathematical Informatics at Meiji Gakuin University in April 2024, where he is the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Informatics. Since 2006, he has been a member of Science Council of Japan. Combining behavioral and neurocognitive experiments with computational modeling, his research has revolved around social and group decision making. His current research focuses on emergence of social norms in groups and their neurocognitive and ecological basis, and on the wisdom of crowds in collective decision making. He is the recipient of the 2024 Special Award for International Contributions to Psychology from the Japanese Psychological Association, and has published over 100 papers in scientific journals including Nat Commun, Nat Rev Psychol, PNAS, Psychol Rev, Commun Biol, and Sci Rep.

Title: Reducing variance or helping the worst-off? Behavioral and neurocognitive bases for distributive norms

Abstract: Distributive justice concerns moral principles by which we seek to allocate resources fairly among the diverse members of society. Although the concept of fair distribution is one of the fundamental building blocks of human societies, the lack of clear consensus on how to achieve “socially just” distribution often leads to fruitless disputes and bitter divisions between social sectors. Inspired by anthropological fieldwork on hunter-gatherer societies, this talk argues that people’s allocation decisions for others are closely related to their risky decisions for themselves through a cognitive focus on the minimum, worst-off position. I also argue that, although often confused, people’s robust “inequality-averse” preferences in social distribution are separable into two elements: (a) an egalitarian concern about variance and (b) a maximin concern for the poorest (maximizing the minimum), and that the latter is more important to our allocation decisions than the former. I support these arguments with a series of behavioral and neurocognitive experiments combined with computational modeling. Specifically, these experiments reveal that: (1) People commonly exhibit spontaneous perspective taking of the worst-off position in allocation choices, irrespective of their distributive ideologies (utilitarian, egalitarian, or Rawlsian); (2) The dominance of this perspective emerges at a very early stage of decision making (around 500 ms after stimulus onset), suggesting that the maximin concern operates as a cognitive anchor almost instantaneously; (3) Such focus is facilitated by group deliberation, yielding more coherent and long-lasting attitude changes. These results suggest that Rawlsian maximin concern may serve as common ground for formulating distributive policies in society.