Kiri Kuroda

Kiri Kuroda

Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Biography

I am a researcher specialising in social psychology. I study human social and group decision-making at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, using behavioural experiments and cognitive modelling.

For details, please see my curriculum vitae.

Interests
  • Group decision-making
  • Decision under uncertainty
  • Speed–accuracy tradeoff
Career
  • Visiting Researcher, 2023–Present

    Max Planck Institute for Human Development

  • PhD (Social Psychology), 2023

    The University of Tokyo

  • MA (Social Psychology), 2018

    The University of Tokyo

  • BA (Social Psychology), 2016

    The University of Tokyo

News


Papers

Majority rule can help groups solve difficult tasks even when confident members opt out to serve individual interests

When sharing a common goal, confident and competent members are often motivated to contribute to the group, boosting its decision performance. However, it is unclear whether this process remains effective when members can opt in or out of group decisions and prioritize individual interests. Our laboratory experiment and cognitive modeling showed that confidence, competence, and a preference for risk motivated participants’ opt-out decisions. Whereas the majority decisions by voters who remained in the group were inferior to individual decisions by loners who opted out in an easy task, this was reversed in a difficult task. Bootstrap-simulation analyses decomposed these outcomes into the effects of group size and bias in the distribution of the voters’ accuracy accruing from the opt-in/out mechanism, demonstrating how these effects interacted with task difficulty. Our results suggest that the majority rule still works to tackle challenging problems even when individual interests are emphasized over collective performance.

Behavioral and neuro-cognitive bases for emergence of norms and socially shared realities via dynamic interaction

SCImago Journal & Country Rank

In the digital era, new socially shared realities and norms emerge rapidly, whether they are beneficial or harmful to our societies. Although these are emerging properties from dynamic interaction, most research has centered on static situations where isolated individuals face extant norms. We investigated how perceptual norms emerge endogenously as shared realities through interaction, using behavioral and fMRI experiments coupled with computational modeling. Social interactions fostered convergence of perceptual responses among people, not only overtly but also at the covert psychophysical level that generates overt responses. Reciprocity played a critical role in increasing the stability (reliability) of the psychophysical function within each individual, modulated by neural activity in the mentalizing network during interaction. These results imply that bilateral influence promotes mutual cognitive anchoring of individual views, producing shared generative models at the collective level that enable endogenous agreement on totally new targets–one of the key functions of social norms.

Halo effect of faces and bodies: Cross-cultural similarities and differences between German and Japanese observers

According to the halo effect, person perceptions are globally biased by specific traits or characteristics. Attractive people are attributed positive traits like prosociality, health, and dominance. However, due to a strong focus on facial stimuli it remains unclear whether this effect can also be found for bodies. Furthermore, most studies involved observers from individualistic cultures. This preregistered study explored the cross-cultural consistency of halo effects for men’s faces and bodies. Facial photos and 3D body scans of 165 German men were judged separately for attractiveness, prosociality, health, and dominance by 123 German and 100 Japanese observers. Results were mostly cross-culturally consistent and revealed strong attractiveness halo effects for faces and bodies, and a dominance halo effect for bodies, but not faces. Further predictions of the one ornament hypothesis were supported. This study provides new insights on halo effects as cross-culturally consistent cognitive biases in person perception for faces and bodies.

Inequality biases third-party evaluation of decision-making for others

People often need to make risky decisions for others, especially in policymaking, where a single decision can affect the welfare of a number of people. Given that risky decisions can yield variable outcomes and that people often evaluate policies after knowing the outcomes, the same risky policy can be evaluated differently depending on its outcome. Nevertheless, very little is known about how people make third-party evaluations of risky policies. Because people are sensitive to inequality among others, we predicted that the same policy would be evaluated more negatively if it leads to inequality rather than other outcomes. To examine this, we conducted a scenario experiment on risky and sure policies and investigated whether people’s distributive preferences moderated policy evaluation. We show that participants rated the risky policy lower when it yielded unequal situations between the recipients. Interestingly, participants did not evaluate the risky policy higher than the sure policy even when the risky policy yielded more desirable outcomes. In addition, participants who preferred sure distributions as decision makers or recipients showed the inequality aversion, whereas participants who preferred risky distributions showed no such pattern. Our results suggest that policy evaluation may be susceptible to the risks and inequality of outcomes among recipients.

Investor's pessimistic and false belief about trustworthiness and stake size in trust decision

SCImago Journal & Country Rank

Trust is a vital element of any society. Previous studies using trust games have provided insight into understandings of trusting behavior. However, investors' behaviors can be confounded by their risk preferences in the game, and little is known about the relationship between stake size and beliefs of others' good intentions underlying trust. We thus used a variant of the trust game and conducted two experiments to examine how stake size affects investors' beliefs about receivers' trustworthiness, with model‐based analyses. We showed that, when holding all else equal, investors trusted more, but their expectations of reciprocation declined as stake size increased. However, actual receivers' reciprocation rates showed the opposite trend to investors' pessimistic beliefs. Furthermore, following previous studies in social psychology, we hypothesized that investors' social preferences (social value orientation) moderated the beliefs underlying trust, but they had no explanatory powers in investors' expectations of reciprocation. These results suggest that peoples' naive beliefs about stake size play a more important role in trust decisions than expected.

Career

 
 
 
 
 
Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Visiting Researcher
Jul 2022 – Present Berlin
Host researchers: Prof. Dr. Ralph Hertwig, Dr. Ralf Kurvers
 
 
 
 
 
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
JSPS Overseas Research Fellow
Apr 2023 – Present Tokyo
 
 
 
 
 
Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo
Teaching Fellow
Dec 2022 – Jan 2023 東京
Teaching Development in Higher Education
 
 
 
 
 
Center for Research and Development of Higher Education, the University of Tokyo
Completion of UTokyo Future Faculty Program
Apr 2022 – Jul 2022 Tokyo
Certified as an excellent participant
 
 
 
 
 
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
JSPS Research Fellow (DC2)
Apr 2021 – Mar 2023 Tokyo
As a supplementary prize of the 11th JSPS Ikushi Prize
 
 
 
 
 
Faculty of Letters, The University of Tokyo
Teaching Assistant
Oct 2020 – Jan 2021 Tokyo
Research Method in Social Psychology IV
 
 
 
 
 
Faculty of Letters, The University of Tokyo
Teaching Assistant
Oct 2019 – Jan 2020 Tokyo
Research Method in Social Psychology IV
 
 
 
 
 
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
JSPS Research Fellow (DC1)
Apr 2018 – Mar 2021 Tokyo
 
 
 
 
 
Faculty of Letters, The University of Tokyo
Teaching Assistant
Oct 2017 – Jan 2018 Tokyo
Research Method in Social Psychology
 
 
 
 
 
Faculty of Letters, The University of Tokyo
Teaching Assistant
Oct 2016 – Jan 2017 Tokyo
Laboratory Course in Experimental Social Psychology (1)

Talks

  1. 黒田起吏. 相互作用を通じた共有現実の創発を支える行動・認知神経基盤. 第29回KG-RCSPセミナー, 関西学院大学, 2023年2月9日(口頭・招待).
  1. 小倉有紀子, 黒田起吏, 小川昭利, 為井智也, 池田和司, 亀田達也. 「共有現実」の社会的創発の認知・神経基盤. 日本人間行動進化学会第15回大会, 北海道大学, 2022年12月10–11日(口頭).

  2. Yukiko Ogura, Kiri Kuroda, Akitoshi Ogawa, Tomoya Tamei, Kazushi Ikeda, & Tatsuya Kameda. Behavioral and neuro-cognitive bases for the emergence of a shared reality through social interaction. The 45th Annual Meeting of the Japan Neuroscience Society (Neuro 2022)Okinawa Convention Center,June 30th–July 3rd, 2022 (Oral).
  1. 黒田起吏・髙橋茉優・亀田達也「自信のないメンバーによる投票バイアスが集合愚を生む」日本心理学会第85回大会,オンライン開催,2021年9月1日–8日(優秀発表賞受賞).

  2. 髙橋茉優・黒田起吏・亀田達也「格差是正と再分配意思決定に関する実験的検討」日本心理学会第85回大会,オンライン開催,2021年9月1日–8日(優秀発表賞受賞).

  3. 黒田起吏・髙橋茉優・亀田達也「自信のないメンバーの投票による多数決の精度の低下」日本社会心理学会第62回大会,オンライン開催,2021年8月26日–27日.

  4. 髙橋茉優・黒田起吏・亀田達也「格差是正と再分配意思決定に関する実験的検討」日本社会心理学会第62回大会,オンライン開催,2021年8月26日–27日.

  5. Yukiko Ogura, Kiri Kuroda, Akitoshi Ogawa, Tomoya Tamei, Kazushi Ikeda, & Tatsuya Kameda. Behavioral and neuro-cognitive bases for formation of a shared reality through social interaction. The 27th Annual Meeting of Organization for Human Brain Mapping, online, June 21st-25th, 2021 (Poster).

  6. Kiri Kuroda, Mayu Takahashi, & Tatsuya Kameda. Unconfident voters undermine the accuracy of majority decision-making. The 15th Conference of European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, online, March 24th-27th, 2021 (Oral).

  7. 黒田起吏「Speed-accuracy tradeoff状況における社会情報の認知処理過程」令和2年度育志賞研究発表会,オンライン開催,2021年3月10日.
  1. 黒田起吏・髙橋茉優・亀田達也「自信のないメンバーの投票による集合愚の発生」第13回日本人間行動進化学会,オンライン開催,2020年12月12日–13日(最優秀発表賞受賞).

  2. 髙橋茉優・黒田起吏・亀田達也「経済格差の大小は再分配意思決定に影響するか」第13回日本人間行動進化学会,オンライン開催,2020年12月12日–13日.

  3. 黒田起吏・伊藤真利子・大槻久・亀田達也「Speed–accuracy tradeoff状況下で社会情報はどのように処理されるか」日本社会心理学会第61回大会,オンライン開催,2020年11月7日–8日.

  4. 黒田起吏・伊藤真利子・大槻久・亀田達也「Speed–accuracy tradeoff状況における社会情報処理の認知過程」日本心理学会第84回大会,オンライン開催,2020年9月8日–11月2日(特別優秀発表賞受賞).
  1. 黒田起吏・伊藤真利子・大槻久・亀田達也「Speed–accuracy tradeoff状況における社会情報処理の認知過程」第12回日本人間行動進化学会明治学院大学,2019年12月7日–8日 (ポスター:若手発表賞受賞).

  2. 黒田起吏・伊藤真利子・大槻久・亀田達也「Speed-accuracy tradeoff状況における二者の意思決定プロセス」日本社会心理学会第60回大会立正大学,2019年11月9–10日(口頭).
  1. 黒田起吏・大槻久・亀田達也「Speed–accuracy tradeoff状況における二者の意思決定プロセス」第11回日本人間行動進化学会高知工科大学,2018年12月1日–2日(口頭).

  2. 黒田起吏・亀田達也「リスク下の社会的採餌における協力的な分業の創発 認知–生理–行動実験による検討」日本社会心理学会第59回大会追手門学院大学,2018年8月28–29日(口頭).

  3. Daniel Freund, Tobias L. Kordsmeyer, Atsushi Ueshima, Kiri Kuroda, Tatsuya Kameda, & Lars Penke. Cross-cultural perceptions of facial prosociality, attractiveness, health and dominance. The 30th Annual Human Behavior and Evolution Society Conference, the University of Amsterdam, July 4th–7th, 2018 (Oral).

  4. Kiri Kuroda & Tatsuya Kameda. Emergence of cooperative division of labor in dyadic foraging under risk. The 30th Annual Human Behavior and Evolution Society Conference, the University of Amsterdam, July 4th–7th, 2018 (Oral).
  1. 黒田起吏・亀田達也「2者のリスクモニタリング状況における協力的な分業の創発:認知–行動実験による検討」第10回日本人間行動進化学会名古屋工業大学,2017年12月9日–10日(口頭).

  2. 黒田起吏・亀田達也「信頼と裏切り回避:自他間の資源分配に関する選好と信頼行動の関係」日本社会心理学会第58回大会広島大学,2017年10月28–29日(口頭).

  3. 黒田起吏・爲井智也・池田和司・亀田達也 「二者の相互作用による知覚傾向の収束:心理物理的技法による検討」科学研究費基盤(S) ワークショップ「集合知の認知・神経・生態学的基盤」久留米ビジネスプラザ,2017年9月23日(ポスター).

  4. 黒田起吏・爲井智也・池田和司・亀田達也「二者の相互作用による知覚傾向の収束:心理物理的技法による検討」日本心理学会第81回大会久留米シティプラザ,2017年9月20日–22日(ポスター).
  1. 黒田起吏・爲井智也・池田和司・亀田達也「二者の相互作用による知覚傾向の収束:心理物理的技法による検討」第9回日本人間行動進化学会金沢市文化ホール,2016年12月10日–11日(口頭)

  2. 黒田起吏・亀田達也「信頼は自己投影的な他者推論に支えられる:Social Value Orientationと裏切り回避の関係」第10回新・社会心理学コロキウム東京大学,2016年11月25日(ポスター).

  3. 黒田起吏・亀田達也「信頼は自己投影的な他者推論に支えられる:Social Value Orientationと裏切り回避の関係」第20回実験社会科学カンファレンス同志社大学,2016年10月29日–30日 (ポスター:最優秀ポスター賞受賞).

  4. 黒田起吏・爲井智也・池田和司・亀田達也「二者の相互作用による知覚傾向の収束:心理物理的技法によるSherif実験再訪」日本社会心理学会第57回大会関西学院大学,2016年9月17日–18日(口頭).
  1. 黒田起吏・爲井智也・池田和司・亀田達也「集合知の発生条件を探る:共通の反応関数の形成」第8回日本人間行動進化学会総合研究大学院大学,2015年12月5日–6日(ポスター).

  2. 黒田起吏・爲井智也・池田和司・亀田達也「集合知の発生条件を探る:共通の反応関数の形成」第19回実験社会科学カンファレンス東京大学,2015年11月28日–29日(ポスター).

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