Wendy Wood

Who they are

Wood's USC Dornsife page describes her as Emerita Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at USC. In 2009 she and David Neal argued in the Journal of Consumer Psychology that consumer habits are responses cued by contexts that have repeatedly gone with them, quick to activate and slow to change, and that time pressure, distraction and depleted self-control increase reliance on them.

In 2011 Neal, Wood and two colleagues found that habitual cinema popcorn eaters ate about as much stale popcorn as fresh, barely moved by hunger or liking, but only in the cinema and only with their dominant hand. In 2006 Bas Verplanken and Wood argued that interventions aimed at beliefs rarely change habits, and that the best moments to intervene come when settings change, as when people move house or change jobs.

Key papers

Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2009). "The habitual consumer." Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19(4), 579-592. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2009.08.003.

Neal, D. T., Wood, W., Wu, M., & Kurlander, D. (2011). "The pull of the past: when do habits persist despite conflict with motives?" Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(11), 1428-1437. doi:10.1177/0146167211419863.

Verplanken, B., & Wood, W. (2006). "Interventions to break and create consumer habits." Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 25(1), 90-103. doi:10.1509/jppm.25.1.90.

Key ideas

What builds a routine is repetition in a stable setting; the calendar is a by-product. See The Habit Loop.

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