Getting to Know Dr. Shigehiro Oishi

Dr. Shigehiro Oishi is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Virginia and a visiting professor at Columbia University. He studies the intersections of culture, social ecology, and well-being. Dr. Oishi received SPSP's Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology for his substantial contributions to the field. 

What is your favorite thing about psychology and about your career?

My favorite thing about psychology is that there are so many topics we can inquire about. Pretty much everything is related to psychology. I think that is the greatest thing about psychology. My job, a college professor, is amazing. So much freedom and autonomy. I can schedule my courses (pretty much) the day of the week/time I want. I can work on whatever I want to work on. Chatting with students is part of the job? Incredible. On top of that, we still have a sabbatical. Affluent in terms of time.

In your career so far, what are you most proud of?

I am proud that some of the students that I (co-)supervised went on to become quite successful professors and/or very happy with their non-academic careers. Seeing many of them doing well after grad school is truly the most gratifying.

If you weren’t a social psychologist, what would you be doing?

I don't know if I was ever capable of doing these, but...a few things come to my mind. 1) I wanted to work for the Ministry of Education in Japan and change history education there; so it would have been great if I could have done that, instead of psychology. 2) I wanted to be a sports writer; it would be so much fun to watch NBA and MLB and write articles about players and teams. 3) Data analyst/statistician for a sports team, preferably baseball or basketball or 4) a Film/book critic.

What in your work so far has been the most surprising or unexpected finding or development?

When I was writing my book (The Psychological Wealth of Nations) around 2010, I did a thorough literature review on inequality and happiness. At that time, mostly cross-sectional data showed no systematic correlation between inequality and happiness. Thus, I was surprised to find a negative correlation between inequality and happiness in the General Social Surveys data (cross-temporal analysis) right after I finished my book. 

During my first sabbatical (2006-2007), I started looking for dictionary definitions of happiness from many countries. I had data from about 20 countries by 2008. Unfortunately, I had a really hard time publishing it. Finally, PSPB (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin) took it and published it in 2013. So many people told me that they loved the paper, which really surprised me, given how difficult it was to find a journal to publish it. 

What are some of the research areas or topics you plan to explore in the future?

I want to explore the role of arts and sports in human psychology. Why do we have arts and sports to begin with? What is the point of them? A related question is: What is the point of a liberal arts education? 

If you had no constraints (e.g., funding), what kind of study would you want to run?

I want 10 to 20 million people across the Globe to report every day or every week on how they are feeling, not just happiness and meaning in life, but also things like psychological richness. I also want some non-intrusive measures of their well-being (e.g., sleep), and use that data to test the effect of various new policies and natural changes in the environment (e.g., air quality, natural disasters). This type of data will allow for a large number of natural experiments that illuminate the role of environments/policies in human well-being.