Wendy Wood

Wendy Wood is the Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at University of Southern California, where she has been a faculty member since 2009. She also serves as Vice Dean of Social Sciences at the Dornsife College of the University of Southern California. Her primary research contributions are in habits and behavior change, along with the psychology of gender.

Wood completed her Bachelor's degree at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1975 and her Ph.D. degree at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1980.

Prior to her current position, Wood held faculty positions at University of Wisconsin−Milwaukee, Texas A & M University as the Ella C. McFadden Professor of Liberal Arts, and Duke University, where she was the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience.

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. 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 has made influential contributions in three areas: the origins and maintenance of sex-related differences and similarities in social behavior, the formation and change of habits, and the dynamics of social influence and attitude change. Her contributions have received more than 11,000 citations as index in Google Scholar.

In the first of these areas, Wood has emphasized that the behavior of women and men can be different or similar, depending on individual dispositions, situations, cultures, and historical periods. In her biosocial theory, this flexibility reflects the central importance of a division of labor between women and men that is not static but is tailored to local ecological and socioeconomic conditions. This division of tasks is facilitated by socialization practices directed toward children. These practices, combined with sex differences in child temperament, foster differing psychologies in boys and girls that are tailored to the tasks that they will likely carry out as adults who participate in their society's division of labor.

Although each society's division of labor reflects its local conditions, Wood argues that it is also constrained by the biological endowment of the sexes in the form of women's childbearing and nursing of infants and men's greater size and strength. Because these biological characteristics influence the how efficiently men or women can perform many activities, they underlie central tendencies in the division of labor as well as its variability across situations, cultures, and history. The division of labor exists in a society at a particular point in time is fostered by gender roles, which are the shared beliefs that develop concerning the traits of women and men. These gender role beliefs track the division of labor because people infer these traits from observing the social behaviors of women and men. In other words, people think that women and men typically possess the traits that enable them to undertake their usual activities. Moreover, people essentialize these traits by regarding them as inherent in the biology or social experience of women and men. These gender role beliefs tend to be consensual—that is, stereotypical of each sex—within cultures and influence people's personal identities to the extent that they internalize these beliefs.

In the biosocial theory of sex differences and similarities, these gender roles affect behavior through proximal social psychological and biological processes. Specifically, other people encourage gender-typical behavior, and individuals regulate their own behavior according to their own gender identities. Wood's research has illuminated the self-regulatory processes by which gender identities affect the behaviors of women and men. Also, Wood has argued that hormonal, reward, and cardiovascular mechanisms work in conjunction with these social psychological processes to facilitate masculine and feminine behaviors. This theory, in its several iterations, is often featured both in textbooks and in websites and blogs pertaining to gender and sexuality. In Wood's research on the effects of habits on behavior, she has defined habits as response dispositions that are automatically activated by the context cues that accompanied the responses in the past. Because habits are cued by the context in which they formed, they can be quite rigid. As Wood has shown, habits can be initiated independently of intentions and can occur with minimal conscious control. Many of the actions of everyday life are habitual and thus can be difficult to change. Changing habitual behavior often relies on introducing new contexts that do not cue the behavior. Intentions, instead of habits, are more likely to guide behavior when strong habits have not already been formed. Finally, Wood and her colleagues have shown that self-regulation of habitual behaviors is possible but requires considerable self-control resources. This important work on habits has many practical applications, and its implications for addictions have been featured on NPR. Wood has also undertaken research on several aspects of attitudes and social influence. Her work on minority influence has clarified the conditions under which people are influenced by the opinions of those who are in the minority in groups, compared with those who are in the majority. She has also examined the influence processes that occur in close relationships. Her attention to attitude change processes includes the effects of forewarnings of impending influence on the extent to which persuasion is effective.

Wood's work has typically combined primary research and meta-analytic integrations of all of the available evidence. She has thus produced numerous highly authoritative meta-analyses of social psychological phenomena.