Wendy Wood is a UK-born psychologist who is the Provost Professor Emerita of Psychology and Business at University of Southern California, where she has been a faculty member since 2009.
As Wood has shown, and other research has replicated many times, habits can be initiated independently of intentions and can occur with minimal conscious control.
[6] Ease of repetition depends on friction, or existing barriers to performing a behavior (e.g., time, travel distance, effort).
When people experience changes in everyday contexts, such as when they move house or start a new job, then their old behaviors are no longer automatically cued.
Thus, social media is a prime context of habit formation, with frequent users automatically opening apps, scrolling, posting, sharing, and reacting.
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.
[13] 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.
[14] 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 the how efficiently men or women can perform many activities, they create some uniformity across societies in the division of labor as well as variability across situations, cultures, and history.
[15] Also, Wood has argued that hormonal, reward, and cardiovascular mechanisms work in conjunction with these social psychological processes to facilitate masculine and feminine behaviors.