Google Scholar: LINK
GitHub: YNakawake
ResearchMap: LINK [in Japanese]
Lab website: https://sites.google.com/view/nakawakelab/english
I am a psychologist working on the cultural evolution of material and oral cultures such as projectiles or folktales.
Previously, I was working on a project examining the coevolution of religion and morality. I am interested in the cultural evolution of social norms, folktales and prosocial religion and addressing these using a combination of approaches. Specifically, I seek to combine fieldwork studies, statistical analysis of cultural materials, and developmental research focusing on child-parent interaction.
I am also affiliated with Oxford (Centre for the Study for Social Cohesion)
Current Interest:
cultural evolution
folktale
morality
religion
technology
technology and religion
interaction of technological and religious development
ecology and culture
measuring cultural diversity with a method in ecology
ecological and geographical factors on cultural diversity
Publication
Nakawake, Y., & Kobayashi, Y. (in press). Exploring new technologies for the future generation: Exploration-exploitation trade-off in an intergenerational framework. Royal Society Open Science.
Shibasaki, S., Nakadai, R. & Nakawake, Y. (in press). Biogeographical distributions of trickster animals. Royal Society Open Science.
Nakawake, Y., Honda, N., & Suyama, M. (in press). Night parade of one hundred demons: Exploring counterintuitiveness of Japanese monstrous beings. Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science.
Nakawake, Y., Kubo, K., Kakinuma, M., & Sato, K. (2024). Cultural evolution of stories: Perspectives from adaptive functions and cognitive foundation. Cognitive Studies: Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society. 31(1) 110–127 [PDF]
Kakinuma, M., Ando, J., & Nakawake, Y. (2023). Preference for normative information over social information: A vignette Experiment testing content bias at three phases of transmission. Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science, 14(2), 53-57. https://doi.org/10.5178/lebs.2023.110 [PDF]
Ikari, S., Sato, K., Burdett, E., Ishiguro, H., Jong, J., & Nakawake, Y. (2023). Religion-related values differently influence moral attitude for robots in the US and Japan. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 54(6–7), 742–759. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220221231193369. [LINK] [request via ResearchGate]
Meng, X., Ishii, T., Sugimoto, K., Nakawake, Y., Moriguchi, Y., Kanakogi, Y., & Watanabe, K. (2023). Children attribute higher social status to people who have extraordinary capabilities. Cognition, 239, 105576. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105576 [PDF]
Nakadai*, R., Nakawake*, Y. & Shibasaki*, S. (2023). AI language tools risk scientific diversity and innovation. Nature Human Behaviour. 7, 1804-1805. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01652-3 [LINK] [request via ResearchGate]
Miyajima, T., Nakawake, Y., Meng, X., & Sudo, R. (2023). Ordinance influences individuals' perceptions towards prospects of social circumstance but not the status quo: An experimental field study on sexual minorities issues in Japan. Asian Journal of Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12568 [PDF]
Nakawake, Y.*, & Ishii, T.* (2022). The rationality of religion as adaptive heuristics. Cognitive Studies: Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society. 29(3), 433-445. https://doi.org/10.11225/cs.2022.035 [in Japanese] [PDF]
Burdett, E., Ikari, S., & Nakawake. Y. (2022). British Children’s and Adults' Perceptions of Robots. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 3813820. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/3813820 [PDF]
Nakawake, Y., & Kobayashi, Y. (2022). Negative observational learning might play a limited role in the cultural evolution of technology. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 970. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-05031-2 [PDF]
Yamada, J., Nakawake, Y., Shou, Q., Nishina, K., Matsunaga, M., & Takagishi, H. (2021). Salivary oxytocin is negatively associated with religious faith in Japanese non-Abrahamic people. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.705781 [PDF]
Meng*, X., Nakawake*, Y., Hashiya, K., Burdett, E., Jong, J., & Whitehouse, H. (2021). Preverbal infants expect agents exhibiting counterintuitive capacities to gain access to contested resources. Scientific reports, 11(1), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89821-0 [PDF] equal contribution
Nakawake*, Y., & Sato*, K. (2019). Systematic quantitative analyses reveal the folk-zoological knowledge embedded in folktales. Palgrave Communications, 5(1), 1-10. [PDF] *equal contribution
Meng, X., Nakawake, Y., Nitta, H., Hashiya, K., & Moriguchi, Y. (2019). Space and rank: infants expect agents in higher position to be socially dominant. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 286(1912), 20191674. [PDF]
Willard, A. K., Nakawake, Y., & Jong, J. (2018). The evolution of the shaman's cultural toolkit. Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 41, e89. [Link]
Krockow, E. M., Takezawa, M., Pulford, B. D., Colman, A. M., Smithers, S., Kita, T., & Nakawake, Y. (2018). Commitment-enhancing tools in centipede games: Evidencing European-Japanese differences in trust and cooperation. Judgment and Decision Making,13(1), 61–72. [PDF]
Kavanagh, C., & Nakawake, Y. (2016). Developing the field site concept for the study of cultural evolution: the promise and the perils. Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution, 7(2), 273-280 [PDF]
Horita, Y., Takezawa, M., Kinjo, T., Nakawake, Y., & Masuda, N. (2016). Transient nature of cooperation by pay-it-forward reciprocity. Scientific reports, 6. [PDF]
Watanabe, T., Takezawa, M., Nakawake, Y., Kunimatsu, A., Yamasue, H., Nakamura, M., Miyashita, Y., & Masuda, N. (2014). Two distinct neural mechanisms underlying indirect reciprocity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(11), 3990-3995. [PDF]
Preprint
Nakawake, Y., & Takezawa, M. (preprint). The robust beauty of the majority rule by a small number of selected members. https://osf.io/3axpj/
Nakawake, Y., & Stanford, M. (preprint). Following Majority Rule versus Deferring to Elders: Educational Background Shapes Group Decision Preference in Burmese Children. https://psyarxiv.com/jm3dr/
Reserach Method/ Exeperience
interactive network group experiment
text mining/ analyzing cultural materials
economic/cognitive lab experiment
(economic game / decision making / priming / joint action / etc)
computational modeling
(group decision making / cultural evolution / etc)
model fitting analysis on experimental data / GLMM
quasi-experiment on the field
cross-cultural study
biological markers
developmental studies
Programming:
main use: c++ / z-tree / R / Visual Basic / Matlab
currently learning: python
not much in use: java / html / mathematica