Situations Matter

by Sam Sommers

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1. - WYSIWYG

  Chapter 2. - HELP WANTED

  Chapter 3. - GO WITH THE FLOW

  Chapter 4. - YOU’RE NOT THE PERSON YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE

  Chapter 5. - MARS AND VENUS HERE ON EARTH

  Chapter 6. - LOVE

  Chapter 7. - HATE

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

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  Copyright © 2011 by Sam Sommers All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sommers, Sam.

  Situations matter : understanding how context transforms your world / Sam Sommers.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-55379-4

  1. Context effects (Psychology) 2. Decision making. I. Title.

  BF714.S

  155.9—dc23

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses

  at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors,

  or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over

  and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my colleagues, from Allport to Zimbardo,

  for work so engaging that its story almost tells itself.

  For Saul and Steve, for introducing me to that story

  with such enthusiasm and accessibility.

  And, mostly, for the enduringly lovely Sommers Ladies, M, A, & S,

  for providing distractions unfailingly enjoyable,

  regardless of the convenience of their timing.

  PROLOGUE

  MAMA SAID THERE’D BE DAYS LIKE THIS. BUT SHE FAILED to mention that mine would keep happening at the Newark airport.

  We were on our way from Michigan to Massachusetts for a wedding. Still graduate students, my wife and I were blessed with a flexible schedule but burdened by a fixed income. In other words, we were the perfect guinea pigs for one of those travel websites that offers low fares in return for your relinquishing control over airlines and flight times. So I had typed in our travel dates, agreed to the terms and conditions, and hoped for the best.

  Instead, I got Newark.

  To be fair, I have nothing against the city proper—my only visits have come in the form of airport layovers. And I suppose my repeated experiences of long lines, longer delays, and inexplicable cancellations have had more to do with the airlines I’ve flown than the airport itself. But it sure feels like every time the word Newark pops up on my itinerary, the fates conspire against me in new and creatively malevolent ways.

  On my previous visit, misfortune had arrived in the form of a last-minute cancellation followed by two equipment-related delays. I ended up on the floor of an overcrowded gate for hours, squeezed between a dozen Hasidic Jews who passed most of their time in prayer. The only silver lining was my corresponding reassurance that God would never let anything bad happen to the plane once it did take off, my own spotty record of synagogue attendance notwithstanding.

  But that was then. This time, my problems started with a website itinerary that left just forty minutes to make our connection in Newark. High winds that had briefly delayed our first flight narrowed this time window even further. And, of course, our airline just had to be the one to spread out its gates over multiple terminals, forcing us through a gauntlet of monorails, food courts, and moving walkways on the way to our second flight. When it became clear that the success of the mission might hinge on mere seconds, I decided to dash ahead of my wife, determined to get to the gate and hold the plane for us before the agents closed the boarding door.

  Because, as we all know, once they close that door, there’s no going back. No, that’s nonnegotiable and irreversible. To reopen that door—that modern incarnation of Pandora’s box—would be unthinkable. Doing so would undermine the very fabric that holds our society together, not to mention disrupt the space-time continuum as we know it. Clearly, you can’t reopen that door under any circumstance. Not even when the plane is still parked right outside and it’s eight minutes until the posted departure time and there isn’t another flight from Newark to Boston until late the following morning right around the same time as that wedding you’re supposed to attend.

  It was demoralizing to see our plane through the window but hear that we were too late to board. Still sweating from my impromptu sprint, I waited for my wife to arrive and then we both dragged ourselves over to the airline’s customer service desk along with the other aggrieved passengers who’d also stumbled on a surprise New Jersey overnight. Exhausted, our focus shifted from irritation to simply wanting to find out how to get to the hotel where the airline would be putting us up for the night.

  But we were in for another surprise. Things in the customer service line weren’t going so well, either. The first passenger to the desk was a heavyset man with sunglasses perched backward on his enormous shaved head. As his conversation grew increasingly animated, the glasses staring back at the rest of us began to bob up and down rhythmically. He became apoplectic—the glasses speeding up to a discolike tempo—when he learned that there’d be no hotel voucher because the delays to his first flight had been caused by weather. He stormed off in a huff, still cursing under his breath as he headed toward the bar.

  Next up was a well-dressed woman who seemed just a bit too made-up for the airport. She related her tale of woe, voice trembling with tearful sincerity. She needed to get to Boston to see her sister before surgery, her plans were now ruined, and she demanded a hotel room as well as a full refund. No dice. Marta, as the desk agent’s bewinged name tag read, wasn’t biting, not even when the passenger’s quiet sniffling devolved into a full-fledged tantrum. After continued hysterics, she finally moved to the side and began furiously punching buttons on her cell phone.

  Now it was my turn. Obviously, I needed a different strategy. Yelling wasn’t working with Marta. Neither was crying. My wife had grown so discouraged that she had already left the line for the comfort of a nearby bench, taking out a magazine from her carry-on to pass the time.

  And that’s when I saw the light.

  Right at tha
t moment, it dawned on me that I was uniquely equipped to figure out how to successfully navigate this interaction. After all, this is what I’d been studying as I worked toward my Ph.D.: the nature of situations. Of course, not this exact situation, involving angry passengers or stoic airline agents—then, as now, my research examined the ways in which we think and act differently in contexts that are racially diverse, as well as how people make decisions in legal settings like the courtroom. But the basic principle still applied to this, the most mundane of circumstances:

  To understand human nature, you must appreciate the power of situations.

  I took a figurative step back from the counter to assess as objectively as I could the context I was in, something that I’m pretty sure sunglasses guy and makeup lady hadn’t done. They simply saw Marta as the enemy—the flesh-and-bones representation of the faceless airline that had screwed us. And make no mistake: the airline had screwed us. They knew that a dozen of us were in the airport, making our way to the gate from another terminal. They knew this was the last flight out. Yet they still closed the boarding door ten minutes before the posted departure time, and then had the nerve to tell us we were on our own for the night.

  So I understood my fellow passengers’ anger, and I could see why, in their minds, Marta deserved our wrath. Who else was there to take it out on?

  But I also knew there was more to this situation. And besides, the whole righteous indignation bit didn’t seem to be working too well. The setting called for more than just a knee-jerk emotional response. This was a social puzzle waiting to be solved.

  From the wide-lens view of the situation, Marta didn’t look to me like a heartless automaton. In her mid-to-late thirties, she wore a wedding band and a heart-shaped locket—at least somebody somewhere found her lovable. She looked haggard; she had probably spent a full day being berated for gate decisions she hadn’t made and policies she hadn’t created, and the job was becoming even more difficult as the night grew long and the passengers more agitated. She was the airline’s sacrificial lamb, designated to stand there and absorb our abuse so that the rest of the company didn’t have to. Accordingly, she eyed me warily, resigned to the verbal and emotional onslaught that I would inevitably bring as the next person in line.

  I recognized that I needed to shake things up, to exaggerate the contrast between my approach and that of the passengers before me. I started by acknowledging the unpleasant circumstances in which we both found ourselves. “Hi, how are you?” I asked in the friendliest voice I could muster. “Look, I know that this isn’t your fault and that you’re having just as long a night as we are.”

  Marta blinked, unmoved. She said nothing.

  “But put yourself in my shoes, too,” I continued. “The airline gave us an itinerary with a tight connection. They knew our first plane was a few minutes late and that this was the last flight out, and they still made a conscious decision not to hold the plane. Fine. I get that.”

  Marta’s eyes widened just a bit. She looked confused by the direction the conversation was taking.

  “I really do,” I said calmly. “It costs money each minute the plane is at the gate, so it’s cheaper to pull away than to wait for a handful of passengers. We came out on the short end of the financial analysis, and I can live with that. But now the airline has to deal with those of us on the short end, right? I’m not asking for a refund. Just a hotel room. It’s the right thing to do and the airline still comes out ahead.”

  “Mr. Sommers,” Marta interjected as if on cue, “the issue is that we can’t provide a hotel because your first flight’s delay was weather-related.”

  “I understand that policy,” I responded in as rational a tone as I could. “And it even makes sense to me in most cases. But what happened tonight was a little different, no? Our first plane was only a couple of minutes late. We got to the gate here before the scheduled departure time. The airline just didn’t feel like waiting for us, and weather really had nothing to do with it,” I offered.

  Marta had softened a tad, but she remained unbowed, sticking to her script: “I’m sorry, sir, but that’s our policy. My hands are tied.”

  Methodically, I probed further. “Well, there must be something you can do. You must have some discretion. I can’t believe you’re going to make the older woman behind me spend the night in the airport,” I argued, conveniently overlooking that this purported concern for my elders hadn’t been enough to compel me to offer said woman my spot at the front of the line.

  “Well, we make exceptions in special cases, of course. If you were in a wheelchair or were ill, I could give you a voucher,” she admitted. “But you don’t seem ill, Mr. Sommers,” she said with the knowing smile of someone who realizes that she’s winning the argument.

  I smiled back. I wasn’t ill. But I did now have a better grasp of the situation. Marta wasn’t hard-hearted or even unreasonable. In fact, I was even starting to like her a little. In a different setting—next to her on the bus or at the grocery store—I would have found her to be pleasant or at the very least innocuous. But tonight she was an employee toeing the bottom line. She was just following procedure. And our civil conversation had gone on long enough to reveal one of the loopholes in that procedure.

  “No, I’m not sick,” I agreed. I took a deep breath and then plunged forward. “My wife, however . . .” I said, pointing to the bench where she was now waiting with our bags. “She’s . . . two months pregnant,” I stammered, my voice now in a near whisper.

  Marta blinked twice, processing this new development.

  “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” I continued, in what I suppose was an instinctual effort to fill the silence.

  “We haven’t even told our family yet,” I rambled on.

  “Actually, you’re the first person to know,” I added, now picking up steam. “Well, other than our obstetrician. Oh, and the guy at the pharmacy who sold us the pregnancy test—I’m pretty sure he has his suspicions.”

  Marta started typing, which I took as a sign to shut up. Good move, too, because had I kept talking, I might have gone on to promise to name our firstborn after her. After a few moments, she silently held out a green hotel voucher. Then, for good measure, she threw in tickets for breakfast the next morning.

  My wife greeted me with a mixed response. Ecstatic that we had a hotel room, she also cautioned me that any future pregnancy complications would be chalked up to my having violated our superstitious agreement to keep all such talk private until we reached the second trimester.

  “How do you feel about Marta for a girl’s name?” I asked her.

  I STUDY SITUATIONS for a living. It’s the greatest job in the world, teaching people about the power of context and examining it in my own research. As I detail in this book, the world around us is constantly pulling our strings, coloring how we think and guiding how we behave. And yet we rarely notice.

  My hope is that this book will force you to notice. Its aim is to prompt you to appreciate the influence that different situations have on your daily tendencies and experiences. Ordinary contexts of all types—where you are, who you’re with, what you see around you—transform how you act and, indeed, what kind of person you appear to be. By coming to grips with this idea, we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and the other people in our lives.

  What does the science of situations teach us? That many of our intuitions about human nature are wrong. Though we come to believe at a young age that we have a pretty good handle on what makes people do what they do, many of these assumptions turn out to be misplaced: individuals’ personalities—yours and mine included—are not as stable as we think they are. We’re more influenced by those around us than we’d like to believe. Even our private sense of identity is highly context-dependent.

  This book will take you down a less-traveled, often surprising, and sometimes disconcerting road of human experience, refocusing your attention on the ordinary situations that have extraordinary effects on how we
think and act. Research shows us that context impacts even the most intimate aspects of our lives, and this conclusion offers to those who embrace it insight as well as competitive advantage.

  Now, I’m not promising you that reading this book will make you a better person. After all, I opened with a story about reneging on a marital agreement and shamelessly exploiting the miracle of pregnancy—all in the name of a free hotel night in New Jersey. So a self-help book this isn’t.

  But I will promise that this book will alter the way you think about human nature, thereby making you a more effective person. It will do so by improving your ability to predict how others around you will react to a wide range of situations: by training you to step back and assess more dispassionately the contexts in which you find yourself and the social dilemmas you encounter; by making you acutely aware of how situational factors can be manipulated to sway others and how you can deflect similar efforts to unduly influence you. In short, if you want to maximize success in professional ventures such as sales, politics, litigation, marketing, negotiation, and teaching—not to mention more generally refine your “people skills”—you have to start studying up on the science of situations.

  Admittedly, there was nothing all that scientific about my performance in Newark. I didn’t draw on specific research findings to figure out how best to demonstrate voucher-worthiness. Rather, I just followed a more general principle: when we look at situations objectively, detaching ourselves from the emotion and bias that often cloud our vision, we’re better able to pick up on the clues that allow us to understand other people and achieve the outcomes we seek.

  However, the science of situations also offers more concrete lessons about navigating our social universe. The chapters that follow explore human nature across a variety of dimensions, relying on empirical research as well as daily observation, drawing from scientific theory as well as Seinfeld episodes. And this is what makes studying situations so useful as well as so captivating: it requires attention to both scientific method and mundane detail; it appeals to both the behavioral researcher and sitcom fan lurking within each of us.