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Every one of us is installed with a mind: a system which allows us to make sense of the social realm and accordingly navigate our actions. What kind of a model would represent such a mental system? Moreover, what would those models imply about the nature of us, humans?
To find out, our lab conducts research on people’s social judgments regarding the self and others, as well as on self-regulatory behaviors. Each specific research project seeks to identify critical situational and individual-level determinants of social judgments/ behaviors, and to provide integrative explanations for the psychological processes underlying those relationships.
Furthermore, social judgments and behaviors are shaped by certain sets of values. Justice, virtue, fairness – people generally show strong respect toward these morally-charged values and are motivated to realize them. That is, people possess a fundamental inclination to be a Moral Agent. Based on such premise, our research aims to model the mind of an individual as a Moral Agent. We do so through the lens of social psychology, and in a joint endeavor with adjacent disciplines (e.g., philosophy, cognitive sciences), in a unified pursuit of the same ultimate goal-exploring what it is to be a human being.

Latest News

2024/12/10

A new paper by Kudo, Shimizu & Karasawa has been published by Frontiers in Social Psychology ("Do negative attitudes toward

older adults vary by occupation? Focus on the stereotype content model").

2024/11/11

A new paper by Shimizu, Kudo & Karasawa has been published by Acta Psychologica ("Are older adults perceived as morally

better than middle-aged persons? Focus on the stereotype content model.").

2024/11/07

A new joint research with Hitachi has been published online. Click here for the details.

2024/09/27

A new paper by Shimizu, Komoto, Manome & Karasawa has been published by International Journal of Psychology ("Reducing

benevolent sexism: Focusing on its harm against women and pervasiveness").

2024/08/16

A new paper by Karasawa et al. has been published by Nature Communications ("Dimensions of wisdom perception

across twelve countries on five continents").

2024/07/10

We make a presentation at the 33rd International Congress of Psychology (July. 21-26).

2024/07/04

A new paper by Karasawa et al. has been published by Noûs ("A puzzle about knowledge ascriptions").

2024/01/31

A new paper by Numata et al. has been published by Frontiers of Computer Science ("Young and old persons' subjective

feelings when facing with a non-human computer-graphics-based agent's emotional responses in consideration of differences in

emotion perception.").