This work and its implications for addictions have been featured on NPR. ![]() Unless they have strong intentions to continue the behavior, they are unlikely to do so. Context changes thus disrupt automatic repetition and force people to make decisions. When people experience changes in everyday contexts, such as when they move house or start a new job, then their old behaviors are no longer automatically cued. Habit performance thus depends on context cues. Rewards activate the release of dopamine in the brain, which help to forge habit memory traces. Thus, listening to podcasts while exercising is a reward that helps to build an exercise habit. Rewards for a behavior can be intrinsic or extrinsic, but importantly should be experienced during performance. Illustrating how even subtle friction influences behavior, people were less likely to take an elevator and more likely to use the stairs when researchers slowed the elevator door closing by 16 seconds. Friction is low when behaviors require little time, travel distance, or effort. Ease of repetition reflects friction, or few barriers to performing the behavior. People are most likely to form habits when contexts promote easy repetition and when the behavior itself is rewarding. A signature finding is that 43% of people's everyday actions are performed in a habitual way. Many of the actions of everyday life are habitual and thus can be difficult to change. Wood's research has focused on how and why people fall back into old habits, how good habits help people meet their goals, how to change unwanted habits, habits of social media use, and how interaction habits lead to discrimination in social groups. As Wood has shown, and other research has replicated many times, habits can be initiated independently of intentions and can occur with minimal conscious control. ![]() Habits are thus mental shortcuts that reduce decision making and make it easy to repeat what we have done in the past. After enough repetition, the habitual response is automatically activated in mind when people are in that context. ![]() Each time a behavior is repeated in the same context (location, time of day) for a reward (meeting a goal, feeling good), connections form in memory between the context and the rewarded response. Habits are cognitive associations that people learn through repeated experience. Wood's primary research focuses on the nature of habits and their influence on behavior. Her scientific research has been cited more than 42,000 times. Her research has been recognized with awards including a 2007 Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the 2021 Distinguished Contribution Award from Attitudes and Social influence, as well as the 2022 Career Contribution Award from SPSP. She served as President of the 8,000 member Society for Personality and Social Psychology. She has also served as associate editor of Psychological Review, American Psychologist, Personality and Social Psychology Review, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Wood is a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, American Psychological Society, and Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and a founding member of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology. Duke Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. McFadden Professor of Liberal Arts, and Duke University, where she was the James B. Prior to her current position, Wood was on the faculty at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Texas A&M University as the Ella C. ![]() at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Wood completed her bachelor's degree at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and her Ph.D. This book was featured in the Next Big Idea Club and was reviewed in the New Yorker. She is the author of the popular science book, Good Habits, Bad Habits, released in October 2019. Her primary research contributions are in habits and behavior change along with the psychology of gender. She previously served as vice dean of social sciences at the Dornsife College of the University of Southern California. Wendy Wood is a UK-born psychologist who is the Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at University of Southern California, where she has been a faculty member since 2009.
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