A WEB-BASED GROUP EXPERIMENT SYSTEM FOR CROSS-SOCIETAL STUDIES.

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The goals of this study were (1) to construct a system for international collaborative experiments over internet, (2) to conduct a series of experiments with the newly constructed internet experiment system, and (3) to assess problems and difficulties in conducting cross-societal experiments over the internet. The first goal was mostly achieved during 1999, when a prototype of the experiment system was constructed. In 2000 and 2001, cross-societal experiments were conducted using the newly constructed system, first between Japan (Hokkaido University) and Australia (La Trobe University) and then between Japan and the United States (Cornell University). We encountered a series of problems with unstable communications via internet, especially, problems of delayed and interrupted communications. Since then, technical improvement was introduced to the system, and we encountered much less problems in the Japan-US experiments. Besides having developed a system that can be widely used for cross-societal experiments, we obtained following major findings from the series of cross-societal experiments. (1) Stereotype contents and historical contexts heavily influence Japanese participants' inter-group behavior, whereas Australians' inter-group behavior was much less influenced by those factors. The findings were interpreted in terms of differential conception of groups in the two societies. (2) An option to determine the level of risks participants are willing to take improves the process of building mutually trusting and trustworthy relationships either among American participants or Japanese participants, and yet, the positive effect of being able to choose the levels of social risks was much stronger among Americans than among Japanese participants.