Alison Wood Brooks

Alison Wood Brooks is the O'Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration and Hellman Faculty Fellow in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches a cutting-edge course in the MBA elective curriculum called "How to talk gooder in business and life," an experiential course designed to help students hone four core conversational skills through practice (TALK): Topic selection, Asking questions, Levity, and Kindness. She has also taught FIELD Foundations in the MBA required curriculum (RC), Negotiation in the MBA elective curriculum (EC), Micro Topics in Organizational Behavior in the PhD curriculum, and is affiliated with the Behavioral Insights Group at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership.

In her research, Professor Brooks studies the psychology of conversation--why we say things we shouldn't and don't say things we should--and how emotions how we think and interact with others, particularly in the workplace. Her research has been published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Psychological Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Economic Times, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American.

Professor Brooks holds a Ph.D. in Decision Processes from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor's degree in Psychology and Finance from Princeton University.