Abstract
In their 2016 commentary on our theorizing about how youth withdrawal from economic and social participation in Japanese society (i.e., NEET and Hikikomori phenomena) stems from generational inequality of economic opportunities, Varnum and Kwon correctly point out that our explanation for withdrawal is yet untested. They then offered an alternative, evolutionary psychological explanation for withdrawal in which they claim that in resource-rich ecologies like Japan, the option to withdraw from participating in society is a possible life strategy, a strategy that would be much more costly in resource-poor ecologies. While we agree with this premise, we argue that this distal explanatory framework, at least in its current form, has limits in reconciling some of the more recent cross-cultural observations, as well as well-established sociological claims about the causes of withdrawal. Thus we argue that much work remains in refining and expanding the explanatory power of more distal explanations on the issue of withdrawal. Until then, the more proximal and culture-specific explanations are probably the useful and meaningful explanations for the withdrawal phenomenon.
Highlights
According to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare those who withdraw from occupational participation are called NEET (i.e., Not in Employment, Education, or Training), and those who withdraw from social participation for 6 months or longer are called Hikikomori
We found that low NEET and Hikikomori (N/H) risk Japanese participants behaved as mainstream Japanese do in: (1) being more motivated to persist on a difficult task when they received negative feedback than when they received positive feedback, and (2) being more motivated to comply to a request for the sake of maintaining social conformity than for the sake of maintaining self-consistency
We found the reversed patterns in these motives for the high N/H risk Japanese participants. We found that these differences in these motivational styles between high and low N/H risk Japanese participants were mediated by levels of personal endorsement of culturally dominant interdependent values
Summary
According to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare those who withdraw from occupational participation are called NEET (i.e., Not in Employment, Education, or Training), and those who withdraw from social participation for 6 months or longer are called Hikikomori (i.e., a social isolate or recluse). Both NEET and Hikikomori youth in Japan represent a large enough proportion of the Japanese youth population that these phenomena are regarded as a concerning social problem by the Japanese government. In our 2015 publication, we provided evidence for the predictive validity of this scale by showing that higher risk scores on this scale were incrementally associated with greater degrees of occupational marginalization, as well as lower levels of educational attainment, in a nationwide sample in Japan
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