Shigehiro Oishi

Introduction

Shigehiro "Shige" Oishi is a Japanese-American psychologist and the Marshall Field IV Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 2022. He is one of the most-cited researchers working on happiness, meaning, and culture, with more than 200 journal articles and book chapters and a citation count in the tens of thousands.

He is best known for two lines of work. The first is cultural: a long-running programme showing that what people mean by happiness, and what produces it, is shaped by the social and ecological setting they live in — by income inequality, by how often people move house, and by whether a neighbourhood is walkable. The second, and more recent, is his proposal, developed with Erin Westgate, that a good life has a third dimension alongside happiness and meaning: psychological richness, a life dense with novel and perspective-changing experiences. Their 2022 paper on the topic won the Society for Personality and Social Psychology's Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize, and Oishi's 2025 book Life in Three Dimensions brought the idea to a general readership.

Early Life and Education

Oishi was born in a small town on the island of Kyushu, in a family that had farmed the same land for generations. He left for Tokyo at eighteen to attend university, arriving in the middle of Japan's bubble economy — a period he has described as formative, because the adults around him were visibly prosperous and visibly unhappy.

He took his B.A. in psychology at International Christian University in Tokyo, then moved to the United States for an Ed.M. in counseling psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. He completed his Ph.D. in social-personality psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2000, working under Ed Diener, the pioneer of subjective well-being research. The combination of a Japanese upbringing, an American graduate education, and a mentor whose central question was what makes people happy set the agenda for everything that followed.

Academic and Professional Career

Oishi was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota from 2000 to 2004 and then at the University of Virginia, where he spent most of two decades. He moved to Columbia University from 2018 to 2020, returned to Virginia, and joined the University of Chicago in 2022.

His work has been recognised with most of the field's mid-career honours in rapid succession: the Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology in 2017, the Carol and Ed Diener Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2018, SPSP's Outstanding Achievement Award for Advancing Cultural Psychology in 2021, and the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize in 2022 for the psychological richness paper co-authored with Westgate. In 2023 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (University of Virginia announcement, April 2023), and in 2011 he was named among the most-cited personality and social psychologists in North America.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Culture and the meaning of happiness

A recurring theme in Oishi's work is that happiness is not one thing. With Jesse Graham, Selin Kesebir, and Incheol Galinha, he examined dictionary definitions of happiness in thirty nations and found that across most of the world happiness is defined primarily as good luck and favourable external conditions — something that happens to a person — rather than as an internal feeling state. The United States is the striking exception: historically it too used the external definition, but over the twentieth century the American definition shifted decisively toward pleasant inner feelings. The finding matters because it implies that cross-national comparisons of happiness may be comparing different things in different places.

Oishi has argued that well-being cannot be understood without the ecology in which a person lives. With Ed Diener and Richard Lucas he showed that there is no simple monotonic answer to whether more happiness is better: people at the very top of the happiness distribution do best in close relationships and volunteer work, while those slightly below it do best on income, education, and political participation. The "optimum" level of happiness depends on what outcome one cares about.

His work on inequality has produced two related findings. Nations with more progressive income taxation report higher average subjective well-being, and Americans report being happier in years when national income inequality is lower. More recently, he has shown that the correlation between personal income and happiness becomes stronger as income inequality rises — that is, in more unequal societies, money buys more happiness, which is precisely the pattern one would expect if relative position rather than absolute resources is what matters.

Psychological richness

The idea that made Oishi widely known outside academia is his argument, with Westgate, that the two traditional answers to "what makes a life good" are insufficient. The happy life and the meaningful life can both be monotonous. A psychologically rich life — one characterised by variety, novelty, interest, and experiences that change how a person sees the world — is a third thing, not reducible to either.

The evidence he and Westgate have assembled is that the three are correlated but structurally distinct. Students studying abroad became measurably richer over a semester while their life satisfaction and sense of meaning barely moved. People high in psychological richness report both positive and negative emotions more intensely, whereas people high in happiness or meaning report more positive and less negative emotion. Openness to experience predicts psychological richness but not life satisfaction or meaning. When people across nine countries were asked to choose a single kind of good life, the happy life won everywhere — but between seven and seventeen percent chose the rich life instead, around thirteen percent in the United States. And in a study of regret, roughly twenty-eight percent of Americans and thirty-five percent of Koreans said that undoing their life's biggest regret would have made their lives psychologically richer.

Residential mobility and walkability

Oishi's social ecology programme treats features of the built and social environment as psychological variables. His work on residential mobility found that people who move frequently develop broader but shallower social networks, favour friendships based on shared interests over those based on shared community, and report weaker attachment to place. He has also studied walkable neighbourhoods, finding that the design of a place shapes the quantity and quality of the social contact available in it.

Major Publications

Oishi, S., Diener, E. & Lucas, R. E. (2007). "The optimum level of well-being: Can people be too happy in a good way?" Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 346–360.
Oishi, S. (2010). "The psychology of residential mobility: Implications for the self, social relationships, and well-being." Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(1), 5–21.
Oishi, S., Schimmack, U. & Diener, E. (2011). "Progressive taxation and the subjective well-being of nations." Psychological Science, 23(1), 86–92.
Oishi, S., Graham, J., Kesebir, S. & Galinha, I. C. (2013). "Concepts of happiness across time and cultures." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(5), 559–577.
Oishi, S. (2012). The Psychological Wealth of Nations: Do Happy People Make a Happy Society? Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Oishi, S. & Westgate, E. C. (2022). "A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning." Psychological Review, 129(4), 790–811.
Oishi, S. (2025). Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life. New York: Penguin Random House.

Impact and Legacy

Oishi's standing rests on having made culture and ecology central to the study of well-being at a time when the field was dominated by individual differences and laboratory manipulations. The dictionary study, the taxation and inequality findings, and the residential mobility programme each redirected attention outward from the person to the setting, and all three have generated substantial follow-up literatures.

The psychological richness proposal is his most consequential idea and also his most contested, in part because it is young.

It may not be a third thing at all. The strongest empirical objection is that psychological richness overlaps substantially with openness to experience, and that what distinguishes rich lives from happy ones may be a personality dimension that was already well characterised. Oishi and Westgate's own multi-method work — showing that openness predicts richness but not life satisfaction or meaning — is evidence for distinctness, but the same result is consistent with richness being the well-being consequence of being high in openness. Whether richness is a dimension of a good life or a description of what a life looks like when someone high in openness lives it is not a question the current data settles.

Most of the evidence is correlational. That obituaries describing harder lives also read as richer does not establish that hardship builds richness rather than that people narrate difficult periods in richer terms. Similarly, the study-abroad finding is persuasive because it is longitudinal, but many of the supporting studies are cross-sectional self-reports, and self-reports of how rich one's life has been are themselves a form of storytelling subject to reconstruction.

The popular uptake has outrun the evidence. Psychological richness has been widely picked up in self-help and media coverage as licence to seek out difficulty, and Oishi and Westgate have explicitly cautioned against that reading: richness is produced by novelty and perspective change, not by suffering, and it can arrive through a novel or a short excursion. The gap between a contested research construct and a piece of widely repeated life advice is a genuine hazard here, and it is not one the authors created but one the framing invites.

The inequality findings sit inside an unsettled debate. The claim that the income–happiness association strengthens as inequality rises is embedded in a much larger and still-unresolved argument about money and happiness, in which Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton's satiation account, Richard Easterlin's relative-income account, and Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers's no-satiation reanalysis have all been defended with credible data. Oishi's contribution is a moderator rather than a resolution, and it inherits the uncertainties of the literature it sits in.

Causal direction is ambiguous in the mobility work. Whether moving house weakens social ties or whether people with weaker ties and particular temperaments move more often is not cleanly separated by the existing designs, and the same ambiguity applies to the walkability findings, since people partly select into the neighbourhoods they live in.

What is not in dispute is the scale of his empirical output and the reach of his central claim: that well-being is not merely something a person has, but something that a setting affords or withholds.

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References

Oishi, S. (2010). The psychology of residential mobility. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(1), 5-21.