| Position | Professor |
|---|---|
| Faculty | Social Psychology |
| Graduate School | Social Psychology |
| Department | Social Psychology |
Career
| August 2000: | Northern Illinois University (Ph. D. in Psychology) |
| April 2021: | Appointed to the Faculty of Letters, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo |
Research Area
Social Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology
1) Reconciliation
He studies reconciliation based on apologies and forgiveness from the evolutionary perspective. He has shown that costly apologies communicate apologizers’ sincere intention to restore the endangered relationship; thus foster victim forgiveness. He applied this idea to interpersonal and interstate reconciliation processes.
2) Reputation and Cooperation
He is interested in honest signals of cooperative intention. He employs evolutionary game analyses, agent-based simulations and game experiments to investigate how costly or non-costly signals can stabilize cooperation.
Yohsuke Ohtsubo applies evolutionary game analyses to the study on human social behaviors and emotions. Evolutionary games are used to analyze strategic interactions between players. He conceptualizes reconciliation as strategic interactions between transgressors (often apologizers) and victims, in which the transgressors decide whether to make an apology and the victims decide whether to forgive them. Reputation-based cooperation can be conceptualized as strategic interactions between players who both decide whether to cooperate with a specific partner and whether to invest in their own reputation. Evolutionary game analyses show an evolutionary stable strategy (or often a set of such strategies) in the specific interaction. He tests whether people employ such strategies in their everyday social interactions. For example, he has tested whether people apologize in a costly manner to maintain their valuable relationships and whether the recipients find costly apologies more sincere. He has also tested whether people are willing to invest in their reputation of cooperativeness, and, if so, whether others choose such “investors” for their partners of cooperative ventures.
