Business PhD Spotlight: Shuhan Yang

Shuhan Yang is a business PhD candidate studying consumer behaviour at the Alberta School of Business. Her passion for behavioural research was inspired in an accounting lecture during her undergraduate studies.

Shuhan vividly remembers a figure presented in class, which depicted the frequency distribution of companies by reported annual earnings; notably, there was an obvious discontinuity around zero — i.e., many firms reported small profits, while few firms reported small losses. One explanation is that people are loss-averse, which motivates them to “manage” the losses away from the company's report.

“I was fascinated by how psychological motivations shape human behaviour and consequently have an impact at the aggregate level,” Shuhan says.

After earning her bachelor and master degrees in management at Peking University, Shuhan was eager to deepen her understanding of human behaviour. She believes that the Alberta School of Business is the ideal place for this pursuit.

“It is exciting to work with researchers who are highly intelligent, open-minded and supportive,” says Shuhan.

Shuhan’s recent publication in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (a top-tier journal in social psychology), coauthored with Tito Grillo and Adrien Ward, studied how marginalized people view their own experiences of discrimination. They found that when conditions improve, people tend to see their previous experiences of unfairness in a more favourable light, a phenomenon termed “fairness revisionism.” This work speaks to Shuhan’s primary research interest: how experiencing aversive events, such as being treated unfairly, affects people’s perceptions and behaviours.

“Adversity is an integral component of human life and manifests in various ways,” says Shuhan. “It can manifest as a situational experience, such as the heightened stress when dealing with extra demands at work; it also includes persistent challenges stemming from systemic and institutional factors, such as discrimination against various identities and traits.”

Working with leading behavioural scientists at the Alberta School of Business, Shuhan is exploring how marketing activities, from product design to service delivery and public communications, can improve the well-being of individuals who are experiencing or have experienced adversities.

Read more on Yang’s research in Folio’s “The fairness filter: progress skews perceptions of past discrimination”.

Shuhan Yang joined the Alberta School of Business in 2021 as a PhD student specializing in marketing. Her research supervisors are Tito Grillo and Jennifer Argo.