Author
Wendy Wood
The research psychologist behind the science the popular habit books repeat.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Wendy Wood is Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California and has studied habits for more than three decades. Her lab's finding that a large share of daily behavior is habitual, repeated in the same context without a decision, underpins much of what the popular books on habits describe.
Good Habits, Bad Habits, published in 2019, is her own account of that research for a general reader. It is the most rigorous of the habit books and the one most willing to say what the evidence does not support, including the idea that willpower separates people who keep habits from people who do not.
The signature
Wood's signature is context over willpower. She shows that persistence is mostly a property of the environment, friction, cues and rewards arranged so that the behavior repeats without deliberation, and that the people we call disciplined are largely people whose surroundings do the work. The tone is careful, unhurried and quietly corrective of the field's myths.