Shigehiro Oishi

Shigehiro "Shige" Oishi is a Japanese psychologist and author. He is the Marshall Field IV Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Oishi is considered a foremost authority on happiness, meaning, and culture. Oishi's research program is distinctive in its methodological range and ingenuity as well as its broad theoretical reach. He has published 200+ journal articles and book chapters across his career with over 100,000 citations. He is the author of the popular books, Life in Three Dimensions and「幸せを科学する」"Doing The Science of Happiness."

He has been awarded two major mid-career awards in social psychology: The Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 2017 and the Diener Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2018. In 2021, he also received the Outstanding Achievement Award for Advancing Cultural Psychology from SPSP. His research has been featured in major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times.

Biography Oishi received his B.A. in Psychology at the International Christian University in Tokyo. He immigrated to the United States to receive his Ed. M in Counseling Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. Oishi taught at the University of Minnesota (2000–2004), Columbia University (2018–2020), and the University of Virginia (2004–2018; 2020–2022) before joining the University of Chicago in 2022.

Research Throughout his career, Oishi has conducted extensive research on subjective well-being. which explored the cultural and historical variations in concepts of happiness. Using dictionary definitions from 30 different nations, the study found that happiness was most frequently defined as good luck and favorable external conditions. While this was the case as well in the United States historically, over time, this definition was replaced by definitions focused on favorable internal feeling states.

Oishi has published a number of articles on the relationship between money and happiness. Oishi et al. (2022) found that the income-happiness correlation grew stronger as income inequality increases. Moreover, nations with more progressive taxation on income had higher levels of subjective well-being (Oishi, Schimmack, & Diener, 2011).

While happiness has many benefits, Oishi, Diener, & Lucas (2007) investigated optimum levels of happiness and whether there might be such thing as too much happiness. The study found that people who experience the highest levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of close relationships and volunteer work, but that those who experience slightly lower levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of income, education, and political participation.

Oishi has also conducted research on meaning in life. His student, Michael Steger, developed the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, which has been cited over 6,500 times. While psychological science has typically conceptualized a good life in terms of either hedonic (happiness) or eudaimonic (meaning) well-being, Oishi proposed psychological richness as a third dimension of a good life. A psychologically rich life is characterized by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences. Oishi's research on a psychologically rich life has garnered academic acclaim His research investigated the impact of moving as a child into adulthood, finding that the more times a child moved, the lower their well-being levels were as an adult. However, personality also played an important role; introverts had a tougher time handling childhood moves, an effect explained by a lower number of close social relationships. Residents of stable communities purchased a "critical habitat" license plate to support preservation of the environment in their home state more often than did residents of mobile communities. Oishi et al. (2007) found that home game baseball attendance was less dependent on the team's record in stable cities than in mobile cities, a finding that was replicated in Japan (Oishi et al. 2009). Oishi et al. (2007) found that this increase in helping can arise quite quickly, even in a one-time laboratory setting. Across four tasks, participants were randomly assigned to either remain together and work on all tasks throughout the study or to switch to a new group after each task. People in the "stable community" condition were more likely to help their struggling companion than were people in the "transient" group condition. His research on socioecological psychology investigates humans' cognitive, emotional, and behavioral adaption to physical, interpersonal, economic, and political environments. For example, he found that walkability of the city a child grew up in predicted their likelihood of achieving the American Dream. This effect of walkability on upward mobility in part was explained by sense of belonging; higher levels of belonging were reported in more walkable cities.

Oishi received a NIMH grant to research felt understanding and misunderstanding. Oishi, Lun, & Sherman (2013) found that a higher sense of understanding enabled participants to have higher tolerance for pain (keeping their hand in ice-cold water for longer amounts of time). Mallett, Akimoto, & Oishi (2016) found that cross-race interactions generated lower levels of positive affect than same-race interactions, but similar levels of negative affect. This difference in positive affect was explained by length of acquaintanceship.