Discover the Best Books Written by Wendy Wood

Wendy Wood is a UK-born psychologist who is the Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California, where she has been a faculty member since 2009. She previously served as vice dean of social sciences at the Dornsife College of the University of Southern California. Her primary research contributions are in habits, behavior change, and the psychology of gender.

She is the author of the popular science book Good Habits, Bad Habits, released in October 2019. This book was featured in the Next Big Idea Club and was reviewed in the New Yorker. Wood completed her bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and her Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Before her current position, Wood was on the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Texas A&M University faculty as the Ella C. McFadden Professor of Liberal Arts. She was the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. 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. She served as President of the 8,000-member Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Her research has been recognized with awards, including a 2007 Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the 2021 Distinguished Contribution Award from Attitudes and Social influence, and the 2022 Career Contribution Award from SPSP. 

Her scientific research has been cited more than 42,000 times. Wood has made influential contributions in two additional research areas: the origins and maintenance of sex-related differences and similarities in social behavior and the dynamics of social influence and attitude change. In the study of sex and gender, Wood has emphasized that the behavior of women and men can be different or similar depending on individual dispositions, situations, cultures, and historical periods. 

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. Each society's division of labor is constrained by women's childbearing and nursing of infants and men's greater size and strength. Because these biological characteristics influence how efficiently men or women can perform many activities, they create uniformity across societies in the division of labor and variability across situations, cultures, and history.

Within societies, people regulate their own behavior according to their desired 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.

Wood has also researched 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. A 2014 meta-analysis testing the influence of menstrual cycles on women's mate preferences debunked the then-popular idea that women, when fertile, prefer more masculine, high-testosterone men. Considerable research has echoed this failure of the menstrual phase to affect mate preferences.