Psychologists play an important role in helping people make positive changes to their lives—but breaking old patterns isn’t easy. Wendy Wood, PhD, a professor emerita of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, studies habits. Her work suggests much of human behavior is driven by automatic routines shaped by context rather than conscious intention (Annual Review of ...
Wendy Wood helps people apply the science of habits in everyday life
The Habit Lab at the University of Southern California explores how we form habits and how we can change unwanted ones.
Wendy Wood, PhD, discusses the research on how habits drive our behavior, why habits are so difficult to break, and how we can harness the power of habit to make the behavioral changes we want.
How the science of habits can help us keep our New Year’s resolutions ...
Habits are response dispositions that are activated automatically by the context cues that co-occurred with responses during past performance. Experience sampling diary studies indicate that much of everyday action is characterized by habitual repetition. We consider various mechanisms that could underlie the habitual control of action, and we conclude that direct cuing and motivated contexts ...
Students can learn to recognize how the human brain is designed to automate thoughts, behaviors, and actions in order to be more efficient. This can be a double-edged sword that promotes efficiency and productivity, but when it comes to negative habits it can contribute to unproductive or unhealthy patterns of behavior. Once a negative habit has been established it’s very difficult to change ...
Why do we act on habit even when we intend to do something else? The answer lies in habit memories, or context-response associations, that form when people repeat rewarding actions in stable contexts. Although habits can form as people pursue goals, once habits develop, the perception of the context directly activates the response in mind. Because habit activation does not depend strongly on ...