Shigehiro Oishi

During his fellowship year, Shigehiro Oishi will explore the classic social psychology topic of conformity with a modern twist: occupational herding. Why do so many students today pursue the same popular majors and careers? So far, in a 76-country study and a follow-up experiment, he has found that income inequality was associated with more occupational herding. Occupational herding is likely to generate more person-job misfits, more dissatisfied workers and burn-outs. While at CASBS, Oishi would like to think about psychological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon (e.g., status anxiety, perceived competitiveness, zero sum belief), run a longitudinal study on dream jobs and academic majors among 1st year college students, and learn from sociologists, political scientists, economists and others how they think about occupational herding and its sociological, political, and economic implications, and collaborate with them on this project.

Oishi is a personality-social psychologist by training and the Marshall Field IV Distinguished Service professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. His lab is interested in well-being (e.g., what is a good life?) from cultural and socio-ecological perspectives.

For more information, please visit: Shigehiro Oishi | Department of Psychology