Yuichi Shoda

Research

Our focus on understanding each person rather than the hypothetical “average person” was very much the focus of the idiographic approach to psychology (e.g., Allport, 1937). But our lab does so quantitatively. We do so by collecting many data points from the same person, in an approach we call the Highly Repeated Within Person (HRWP) design (e.g., Whitsett & Shoda, 2014; Zayas, et al, 2019). Using this approach, we seek to identify the features or aspects of situations that are most “psychologically active” for each person. For example, based on daily diary data, we have identified what kinds of situations are most stress-inducing for each person, which we call the stress vulnerability signature (Shoda et al., 2013), and applied this approach to understanding racial microaggression (Wang, Leu & Shoda, 2011). The goal of “quantitative idiography” can be thought of as developing an evidence-based “user’s manual” for one’s mind.

More recently, we have applied the HRWP approach to examine people’s responses to statements conveying colorblind ideology, such as “I don’t see people’s race; race does not matter.” Many people of color experience such statements as offensive, because these statements ignore the experience of being a racial minority and implicitly condone racial injustice. But the same statements could also be interpreted as saying the people of different races are not fundamentally different, and as a call to recognize common, shared humanity, channeling that recognition into action for social and cultural change to eradicate racial discrimination. Our studies (Chang & Shoda, in preparation) found that one reason for the different interpretations is how people understand the word “race.” Some see it as categories of people created in the interest of those in power, to justify unequal treatment and unequal opportunity. Then saying “race does not matter” amounts to denying the social reality, asserting there is no racial discrimination any more. Others have an essentialist view of “race” as an immutable category of people (e.g., based on genetics).