Thinkers (page 121)

Walter Mischel, 1930 to 2018, was an Austrian-born American psychologist, latterly at Columbia University, who ran the Stanford delay-of-gratification studies from the late 1960s, universally known…

Wan Yang is a hospitality researcher and the first author, with Lu Zhang and Anna Mattila, of a 2016 Cornell Hospitality Quarterly study of how consumers react to luxury hotel price promotions…

Wayne Simmons is a customer experience practitioner and co-author, with Tom DeWitt, of The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life (Wiley, 2025). The book is the…

Weimei Sun is a researcher and first author of the 2019 Global Media and Communication paper on Singles' Day as a grass-roots holiday that became a commercial festival.

Author and sales trainer whose The Power of Consistency (2013) teaches a daily written ritual on the premise that private declarations dictate future actions.

Wendy Treynor is the first author of the 2003 analysis that split rumination into two different habits, brooding and reflective pondering. Her team stripped out of the standard rumination…

Social psychologist whose research shows that consumer habits are cued by context and held in place by stable settings rather than by attitudes.

Wenying Li is the first author, with Chen Zhen and Jeffrey H. Dorfman, of a 2020 Applied Economics paper that tested the lipstick effect on American weekly retail scanner data. This is a thin page…

Wilhelm Hofmann is a researcher and first author of the 2010 Psychological Bulletin meta-analysis of 214 studies of evaluative conditioning in humans.

Wilhelm Stekel was a Viennese physician who, as Peter Watson describes in The Modern Mind, called on Freud after reading a review of The Interpretation of Dreams, asked to be analysed by him and…

Restaurateur and author of Unreasonable Hospitality (2022), an account of building Eleven Madison Park in New York around giving guests more than they expect.

Will Storr is a British journalist and novelist and the author of The Status Game (2021). The book starts from a pairing Storr takes from the psychologist Robert Hogan: people first need to get…