Overview of the research
1) Social dilemma studies and social psy-chology
Social issues such as environmental problems, destruction of the scenery and disorder in urban areas are mostly caused by egoistic tendencies of individuals. For instance, as a consequence of each having a desire to drive car, there are a large amount of CO2 emissions and heavy traffic congestion. This is generally called “social di-lemma with conflict between public and private inter-ests”. This research group takes psychological approaches to reveal the socio psychological mechanisms of these issues. In addition, we make an extensive effort to study countermeasures against these real issues relevant to transportation, landscape, disaster prevention and en-vironment, and to make suggestions to adopt in the real society. In more detail, we conduct in-house experiments, field tests, administration supports and so on.
2) Pragmatic social science supporting the vitality of cities and nations
Civil engineering including urban and national planning aims to improve the facilities of urban and rural areas. For that purpose, “vitality” is a key: For example, community development (Machizukuri in Japanese) can be carried out by vital, active and energetic residents. Without such active residents, many cities would be devastated. We study what actions are required to in-crease the “vitality”, which is the core source of all the improvement, taking transportation, disaster preven-tion and landscape of individual cities. Then, we make suggestions for those issues. We search for social policies to increase vitality applying psychology, sociology, folk-lore, politics and social philosophy with keywords such as: local attachment, regional charisma, altruistic be-havior, dialectics and narratives.
3) National policy theory based on social science tools
In every region or city, any economic, social or cultural activity are determined by an overall national policy for national land, economy, industry, finance and trade. From that macro perspective, this research group aims to make our country wealthier and more resilient. This process will enable all the people to obtain peace and wellbeing in their daily lives. It involves national the-ory; economic, industrial, financial and trade policy theories, as well as comprehensive social science (mac-roeconomics, sociology, political economy, social psy-chology, etc.). In particular, the study of journalism is also part of our research since it proves to have a large impact on our economy and politics.