Beware of Your Bad Behavior

By Susan Andrews on November 24, 2009 7:53 AM

Like it or not, people all have standard patterns of behavior - good and bad habits - that are difficult to change even if they are fortunate enough to recognize them.

Wendy Wood, the Provost Professor of Psychology and Marketing and one of 20 new faculty members at USC College, is a social psychologist who studies patterns and behavior.

Wood, in collaboration with research assistant professor David Neal, recently completed a study on eating habits.

The researchers showed movie trailers in a theatre to two groups of people — one group got fresh popcorn and the other got stale, week-old popcorn.

After the trailers, the researchers collected the popcorn containers and weighed them. The results showed that participants with a movie-popcorn habit ate the same amount of popcorn whether it was fresh or stale. This was especially striking because the participants acknowledged that they didn’t really like the stale popcorn.

“What this shows is that these people ate in response to being in a movie theatre. Although we might think that we eat because food tastes good, we sometimes eat habitually,” Wood explained. “We’re in the same place with the same food as in the past, and we are cued to eat.”

Along with her colleagues, she brought popcorn into a lab where people were watching music videos. This time, participants with movie-popcorn habits ate little of the stale popcorn, indicating that being in an environment that did not cue popcorn eating produced a different outcome.

Wood also conducts research on gender differences in behavior with a focus on their evolutionary origins.

“This issue is hotly debated in science right now,” Wood noted.

Along with her colleague and former graduate adviser Alice H. Eagley, a USC College Distinguished Visiting Professor in Social Psychology, they have been working on a theory of the origins of gender differences in behavior.

The crux of their ideas is that men’s and women’s roles in societies are a dynamic product of the sexes’ biological attributes — men’s greater size and strength and women’s reproductive activities of pregnancy and lactation — and local cultures and ecologies.

In this view, humans have evolved to respond flexibly to local circumstances, and this flexibility is evident in how men’s and women’s roles vary across societies.

Wood will teach an introductory social psychology course in the spring. “I look forward to this class that offers most students their first exposure to thinking about people in a social context,” she said. “The class will cover aggression, health and behavior, personal perception and stereotypes, as well as what makes people good partners and fall in love with each other.”

Earlier positions held by Wood included director of the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University.

She also was the associate vice president for research at Texas A&M University, where she was charged with integrating faculty research and graduate and undergraduate courses across the university in social and behavioral sciences. In particular, she established several common methods classes and promoted the idea of faculty working together across disciplines.

Wood was attracted to USC for its reputation as a top research and teaching institution and for the great people she met on campus. She also accepted the position for personal reasons: “I love California; my parents live here and my husband is an urban planner — and you need him here.”

Wood is a founding member of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology. Since the 1980s, she has employed a research technique called meta-analysis, a statistical method of integrating individual findings across whole literatures. Next year, she plans to teach a class in meta-analysis.

Wood, a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society, also will teach consumer behavior courses at the USC Marshall School of Business.

TAGS: humanities, research

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