[3] In 1995 he co-authored with Walter Mischel a paper presenting the "cognitive-affective system theory of personality", stating that people's behavior changes across situations, but behind the change, something important about the person is unchanged.
These relatively unchanging qualities include the person's "meaning system", including the categories and concepts through which she or he experiences the social world, and the belief and value networks that guide responses to specific social situations.
[4][5] Throughout his career, Shoda’s work focused on improving the methods and practice of behavioral science.
He co-developed the “null regions” framework for statistical inference to solve the persistent problems of the traditional null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) that has been a mainstay of statistical inference for almost a century,[6] proposed that Constraints of Generality (COG) be explicitly stated in all empirical papers,[7] and developed the Highly Repeated Within Person (HRWP) methodology to identify within-person effects and person-to-person differences in such effects without needing to first identify relevant individual difference variables.
[8][9][10] From 2012 to 2015, Shoda served as an Associate Editor of Social Psychological and Personality Science, and from 2016 to 2020, he served as an Associate Editor of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.