Situations Matter: A Q&A with author Sam Sommers

Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World is the highly acclaimed book by Sam Sommers which provide an exploration of the invisible forces influencing your life-and how understanding them can improve everything you do. I recently had a chance to connect with Sam and ask him a few questions about his insightful book.

Thanks Sam for taking time from your busy schedule to answer these questions.

Q: Why did you write Situations Matter?

A: My goal in writing the book was to bring renewed attention to just how influential context is in our daily lives: the ways in which it shapes how we think, what we do, and who we are as people. I know it seems like an obvious premise-- of course the situations we're in matter. But we don't come close to grasping the full extent to which this is the case or just how far-reaching the implications of this conclusion really are. My argument in the book is that by learning about the science of how contexts shape human nature we become more effective people across a wide range of domains, both professionally (e.g., working in groups, managing people, negotiations) and personally (e.g., parenting, social relationships, how we think about the self). So it's very much a story about the psychology of daily life, which makes it useful as well as fun-- it's an integration of behavioral science, pop culture analysis, personal anecdote, and humor, all in the effort to paint a more complete picture of what makes people tick.

Q: I know most people were recently vilifying Francesco Schettino, captain of the Costa Concordia, but I am trying to understand if he was in a situation that would better explain his behavior. Your book made me look for something that would be counter to the villian image but I have not come up with anything. Any thoughts?

A: It's a good question-- I've been pondering the same thing, as my tendency is, as you know, to try to think about the contextual factors at play.  Here's the thing, though: he was in a situation in which it's easier to act "heroic" or "altruistically" than it usually is because he's in the role of captain. 

There's an explicit expectation (actually, a law!) that he stay with the ship and supervise the evacuation.  His leaving is now being vilified, and I think rightfully so-- it'd be like a firefighter fleeing a fire, a police officer failing to help while on duty, a teacher not stepping in to help his/her students... I'm not saying it's easy to put your own safety on the line in such situations; it isn't.  And those who do so should still be feted.  But while I have a hard time working up any ire toward cruise passengers who may have run off the ship without helping others (who knows how any of us would have acted in such a situation) the captain's performance is all the more worthy of criticism given that he had to violate explicit expectations and role-based norms (and laws!) to do what he did.

I'm sure processes of self-delusion were at play in why he acted as he did.  He convinced himself the wreck wasn't so bad and the evacuation was under control so he took off-- then it becomes hard to take stock and say, this is actually a major accident and lives are in danger, etc.  So I'm sure that rationalize process happened incrementally in his head.

But like I say in the book, my objective of thinking about context is not to exonerate bad behavior, and in this case, if anything, the contextual analysis doesn't help the captain much in my mind.

Q: In the Help Wanted section of Situations Matter you discuss how our behaviors are affected when we are in a crowd by providing several tragic real life occurrences of when people within a crowd failed to come to the aid of people in need. Can you briefly explain why are we are more likely to respond to requests for help when we are alone as opposed to in a crowd?

A: Three reasons. (Actually, there's more than that, but you said briefly, so let's go with three.) First, we notice less of what's going on around us in a crowd. Being with other people is a stimulating experience, and in a crowded setting we have to put on perceptual blinders in order to block a lot of those stimuli out to accomplish the goals we've set out to accomplish. So in a busy place you filter out much of what's going on around you in order to focus on your own goals and this leaves us less likely to even notice that others around us may need our assistance.

Second, we're less likely to interpret events as in need of our intervention when we're in a crowd. Real life is ambiguous. Think about those stories about, say, the tourist who passes out on the subway and for hours no one intervenes. Well, let's say you walk into that subway car and you do get through the first obstacle to offering assistance: you notice that there's a guy slumped over. But then you look around and see that no one else seems concerned. So you figure everyone knows something you don't. You assume that if they're not concerned, it must not be an emergency, and so this inertia of inaction just continues. Same goes for non-emergency scenarios. Take innovation. Sometimes we just assume that there must not be a better way to get X done because if there were, someone would have started doing it that way already. And when we all think that way, innovation doesn't happen. Similar processes at play.

Finally, third, in crowds we allow responsibility to diffuse to other people. Think about the mass email you get and just ignore, assuming someone else will take care of the request. Or being in the crowded movie theater and waiting for someone else to go tell the projectionist that the film is out of focus. Everyone believes someone else will take care of the problem and so no one ever does. Alas, this same tendency rears its head in emergency situations as well.

Q: What surprised you most about the research findings as part of writing Situations Matter?

A: Just how pervasive this influence of situations really is. Consider something like gender differences, a lot of which we really believe are these inborn, immutable distinctions. But what's amazing is that when you think about domains for which we expect (or have learned) that there are reliable gender differences--physical aggression, spatial skill, certain tendencies in mate preference--even those turn out to be remarkably context dependent. You can reduce, eliminate, or sometimes even reverse traditional gender differences by simply reframing the task. Or making performance anonymous. These tiniest of changes to context or framing make huge differences, and again, that's not something we really think about on our own without the science pushing us there.

Q: In my opinion, the chapter on Hate is the most important in the book. Can you describe how we associate traits to people differently based on whether they are on our ‘ingroup’ or ‘outgroup’?

A: It's surprisingly easy to nudge people into Us vs. Them thinking. As I detail in the chapter, even when you draw group distinctions totally at random, you can elicit ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation. So in one set of studies researchers show respondents images comprised of dozens of dots, instructing them to estimate how many dots they see. In reality, no one cares how many dots they see-- at random, researchers tell half the respondents they are chronic dot "overestimators" and the other half are chronic "underestimators." And that's enough to get these individuals to allocate resources more generously to fellow overestimators (or underestimators, as the case may be), offer more charitable explanations for their fellow group members' negative behaviors, etc. Again, all this happens after a group assignment made on totally arbitrary criteria, so just imagine what goes on in the real world when we have meaningful group distinctions based on nationality, religion, organizational department, sports team affiliation, and so on.

Here's how powerful group affiliation is: it literally changes memory. It's a well-documented finding in eyewitness research that we are better able to identify a person we've seen previously when that individual is of the same racial/ethnic group as we are. Some of this has to do with the fact that we tend to have more experience with looking at and remembering similar others. But much of it has to do with categorization. Show White people a photograph of an individual of ambiguous racial background but provide a demographic label of "White" for the photo, and they'll remember that face better than the exact same face presented with the label of a different racial group (and it's not just White respondents; this seems to be a pretty universal tendency). Something happens when we label a group as "Us." We process the face more holistically and remember it better. We're also more likely to give that person the benefit of the doubt when they behave questionably, to be generous with that person, and right on down the line.

Q: Is there a story or finding from your research that was not included in Situations Matter that may be of interest to readers?

A: A lot of my current research examines how we think, communicate, and interact in interracial settings. So, for example, there's a lot of talk about diversity these days, in higher education, corporate America, and beyond. There's this assumption among many companies, organizations, and industries that diversity will have positive effects on group performance. And here I don't just mean racial diversity, but also heterogeneity of experience, skillset, age, and so on. There is some support for this assumption in the literature: diversity has been found to have a positive impact on problem-solving, flexible thinking, and other performance-related outcomes. But research also tells us that diversity can come at the expense of a group's morale or cohesion, especially at the outset of group interaction. And people know from daily experience that sometimes interracial interaction can be anxiety-producing. So how do we reconcile these competing findings regarding diversity?

Once again, we need to turn to context. In research with a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts, Laura Babbitt, we had pairs of students complete a series of problem-solving tasks. Some pairs were all-White and others were racially diverse. For some of the pairs we told them the focus of the study was on performance-- that there were correct responses to these tasks and their job was to do as well as they could on them (and, in fact, that we would offer them a financial reward for top performance). Other pairs were given the exact same tasks but told that they were "icebreakers" and that they would later be asked a series of questions regarding their experiences working with their partner. In other words, these folks were given a social focus. What we found was that with an explicit instruction to focus on the social aspects of the relationship, this was when diverse pairs performed worse than homogeneous pairs. Judges rates the diverse pairs as less "in synch" than the homogenous pairs, and the individuals in the diverse pairs enjoyed the interaction less and exhibited signs of being mentally drained afterward. Why? Because they spent the whole time worrying about what not to say or how the other person felt about them. But the diverse pairs instructed to focus on task performance not only performed better, they also had a more pleasant experience during the interaction itself. They were more in synch with their partners; they showed no signs of being mentally depleted afterward. Focused on performance, they actually made a better impression in the process, and diversity led to improved performance for the pairs. So that's one example of the type of research on which I'm currently working.

Q: How can readers learn more about your work and the Situations Matter book?

A: The website for the book-- including reviews, video book trailer, table of contexts, excerpt-- is here: www.samsommers.com. Readers can also find me on twitter (@samsommers) and facebook (http://www.facebook.com/sam.sommers.author). In addition, I blog regularly for Psychology Today (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-small-talk) and Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-sommers).

 Q: What is the last you book you read or are currently reading?

A: I'm going to go really intellectual on you here... we took a vacation recently and my beach read was Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by James Miller and Tom Shales. Brought back happy memories of when watching the Dan Patrick/Keith Olbermann Sports Center was a regular part of my nightly routine.