Rate My Professor Alison 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 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. Professor Brooks teaches a cutting-edge MBA elective course called "TALK: How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life," an experiential course designed to help students hone four core conversational skills through practice: Topic selection, Asking questions, Levity, and Kindness. She has also taught FIELD Foundations in the MBA required curriculum, Negotiation in the MBA elective curriculum, 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 people say things they shouldn't and don't say things they should—and how emotions affect how individuals 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. She is the author of the book Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, published by Crown in 2025. Her work has received awards including the Outstanding Dissertation Award by the International Association for Conflict Management in 2013 and the Best Paper with a Student as First Author award by the same organization in 2010. Professor Brooks' contributions have advanced understanding of conversation dynamics, emotional influences in professional settings, and related topics in organizational behavior and decision making.