Situations Matter

by Sam Sommers

I can get a block on the entire arm, the most common side effect of which is permanent nerve damage.

  Ah, it’s not like I really needed nerves in both arms, right?

  I can “go under” altogether, with or without a breathing tube. Oh, and while we’re on the topic, do I have any dental work they should be aware of in case things deteriorate—deteriorate?!—quickly and said tube needs to be inserted in a hurry?

  By the time they start asking about a health-care proxy, I’m officially freaking out. What’s next, brochures for hospice care? A “Do Not Resuscitate” order? Because I don’t think I’m cut out for a coma.

  I know that they’re all just doing their jobs, and in a thorough and courteous manner at that. But this situation now has me totally spooked. I’m in an unfamiliar place, consulting with people I’ve never met before, getting a crash course on medical issues about which I know very little. And I’m still essentially naked. I figure everyone in the room is picking up on my discomfort and anxiety by now. It must be written all over my face. So I wait for the inevitable pep talk from my doctor or nurse.

  It never comes.

  As I take a few deep breaths and look around the room, I realize that for the hospital staff, there’s nothing remarkable about this situation or my reaction to it. Two medical residents stand at the foot of my bed, bemoaning a new hospital requirement of additional paperwork, the same way my university colleagues and I might chirp about unwelcome changes in course registration procedure. At the side of my bed, a nurse shares with a colleague her recipe for vegetarian chili. Off in the corner, a conversation broaches the pressing topic of vacation plans.

  To everyone around me, it’s just another day at the office and I’m just a regular patient. In their eyes, there’s nothing noteworthy about this situation. It’s just business as usual. An ordinary Friday morning.

  So I took a deep breath to calm myself, consulted with my wife, and decided to go with the finger block.

  Our typical obliviousness to the power of situations emerges because most of our daily existence takes place in familiar environments, within the confines of well-worn routine. It takes the jolt of the unfamiliar to remind you just how blind you are to your regular surroundings. Only after traveling abroad do you start to note the unwritten rules guiding social interactions back home. Not until you move out of the house you grew up in do you realize, upon return visits, that it has a distinct smell and sound. And so on.

  But our default tendency remains to look right past situations. Take, as a case study, my dear wife. This is a loving woman and doting mother to two young daughters. For that matter, she’s the indisputable hero of the saga of the softball-broken fingers. She showed up at the ER that night, boxed pizza in tow, having called a short-notice babysitter so that I wouldn’t go hungry or need a cab home. She gave up any semblance of free time the rest of the summer, forced as she was to do everything around the house from paying bills to opening pickle jars to washing my hair for me in the shower.

  Still, lurking within this nurturing woman is the same capacity for unabashed animosity possessed by all of us (more details in this book’s final chapter), and it arises from the very tendency to jump to conclusions about personality. There’s one group in particular that inspires her wrath, one category of humanity toward which she harbors a gut-level antipathy along the lines of how cats feel about dogs, Hatfields about McCoys, and Democrats about Joe Lieberman. Why, city bus drivers, naturally.

  She’s convinced that these drivers are aggressive, reckless, sadistic individuals who choose their area of employ for the sole purpose of carrying out their evil schemes. She tangles with them often on the streets of our urban neighborhood, what with our house literally situated on Main Street. To drive anywhere nearby is to jostle for space with the forty-foot-long behemoths of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

  To little avail, I try to convince her that there may be more to these people than first glance suggests. That navigating a bus through the streets of Boston requires an assertiveness and fearlessness rarely demanded of civilians during peacetime. Faced with dense traffic, narrow streets, and notoriously impatient motorists, bus drivers on a rigid schedule have little choice but to pull back onto the road blindly, assuming that cars will scatter much in the way that pigeons do for the rest of us. They’re really just doing their job, I argue. They’re simply reacting to the environment around them.

  She doesn’t buy it. To her, the situation is irrelevant. She’d never cut people off like that, she says. To my wife, the drivers are just dispositional jerks, as any one of them who’s had the gall to infringe upon her car’s personal space can attest. Because, unlike me, she has no trouble with full extension of her middle finger.

  WYSIWYG ON MADISON AVENUE

  The implications of WYSIWYG go beyond how we watch TV or react to bad driving. Consider the following scenario. You’re asked to read a high school student’s essay. You’re told that his assignment was to evaluate U.S. policy in Afghanistan, taking any stance he wanted. The essay starts as follows:While there have been bumps in the road, overall the mission in Afghanistan is moving in the right direction. The people of Afghanistan now have a share in their government and are demonstrating their approval by their tremendous response to the trials of building a new society from the wreckage left by previous leaders.

  Knowing nothing else about the student, what do you think his personal attitude about the war is? Use a scale of 1–7, where 1 means he’s very much opposed to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and 7 means he’s very much in favor. What number do you choose?

  A 6 or 7, right? In the 1960s, two researchers at Duke University, Ned Jones and Victor Harris, conducted a similar study using essays about Castro’s Cuba.2 The second sentence in the paragraph above actually comes almost word for word from their study. The average response of participants back then to the same question I just posed to you was a 6: readers believed that the personal beliefs of the essay writer were fairly pro-Castro.

  This makes sense. The student was able to choose which side of the issue to take, and the coherent opinions expressed in his essay are reasonably interpreted as indicators of his personal attitudes. The same thing happened when a different set of participants read an anti-Castro essay; their ratings of the writer’s true attitudes averaged between a 1 and 2. Again, a perfectly reasonable response: the student chose to write an anti-Castro essay because he himself is anti-Castro.

  But now imagine that I give you the same excerpt with a different context. Once again, it’s from an essay by a student asked to write about U.S. policy in Afghanistan. But this time he was assigned to advocate for the pro-war position. Now I pose to you the same question on the same scale of 1–7: Having read the passage, what do you think are the writer’s true attitudes regarding the war?

  Maybe this time a 5? Or 4? Because now the student has to write in favor of the war, so we recognize that his essay tells us less about his personal feelings. In the 1960s, those who read a pro-Castro essay averaged a more neutral rating of 4.4 when they believed the writer was assigned to his position. Participants who read an anti-Castro essay showed a similar tendency, moving from a 1.7 for the free-choice version to a less extreme 2.3 for the supposedly assigned version.

  But take a closer look at those numbers.

  For an assigned pro-Castro essay, the average rating was 4.4.

  For an assigned anti-Castro writer, it was 2.3.

  In other words, even when respondents believed that the students had no choice in their position, they still thought of the anti-Castro writer as less of a sympathizer than the pro-Castro writer. Two points less sympathetic, in fact—a substantial difference on a 7-point scale. Readers found it difficult to resist the temptation to draw inferences about the writer’s underlying beliefs, despite the clear situational factors at play. This would be like attending a debate competition, watching the coin toss to determine which side of the abortion issue each team will defend, and then leaving
convinced that the debaters on one side of the stage are truly pro-life and those on the other side are pro-choice.

  That’s how strong WYSIWYG is. Even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, we turn to internal explanations for the behavior of others. Researchers aren’t the only ones who know this. Many commercials, for instance, work only if advertisers can count on you to overlook the obvious situational explanation (they’re paying this guy to say how great their razor is), turning instead to a more internal, dispositional interpretation of what you see (hey, this guy really likes his razor! ).

  Sometimes they accomplish this with testimonials by “ordinary people.” Other times it’s a purported expert who tells you how well a detergent cleans or a sports drink rehydrates. Like the recent Sharp commercials, in which a white-haired gentleman of apparent distinction intones that it “Seems like you need to be a physics professor to choose the right TV. Luckily, I am one.” Yes, how fortunate are we to have access to such groundbreaking science! Of course, I’ve yet to meet a tenure-track astrophysicist with a product endorsement deal. Not to mention that we have no way to know whether his alleged degree comes from the same mail-order school Sally Struthers used to shill for, the one that offered diplomas in animal husbandry and TV/ VCR repair.

  Perhaps the most striking example of how WYSIWYG plays into the hands of advertisers is the celebrity endorser. The hope here is that we’re so asleep at the switch that we’ll think a famous person’s proficiency in one area bleeds into another: Michael Jordan was a great basketball player; I suppose he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to underwear as well. Come on, do any of us really think that Jordan conducted a careful product analysis before determining that Hanes was the way to go? Has William Shatner ever really bid online for nonrefundable coach airfare? Had Martha Stewart ever stepped foot in a Kmart, much less actually shopped there?

  Sure, there’s more to this advertising strategy than I’m letting on. The celebrity spokesmodel draws attention to the product, and that alone may be worth a company’s money. The most recent development appears to be the celebrity narrator, whom we never see and who never even offers an explicit endorsement. Hey, this voice-over sounds familiar—is that Gene Hackman? I like Gene Hackman. I don’t know what these Oppenheimer Funds are that he’s talking about, but I guess I should like them, too.

  The bottom line remains that ad executives count on you to look past the power of the situation. They trust that you won’t dismiss out of hand what the endorser says just because you know she was paid to say it. Rationally, though, we should. It’s an admittedly extreme analogy, but paid endorsements—like student essays with an assigned position—tell us little more about an individual’s true beliefs than would the confession of a detainee with a gun pointed at him. The endorser simply wants to make money, the essay writer wants a good grade, and the suspect just wants to see the light of another day. Speaking of which . . .

  COMPELLED CONFESSIONS, COMPELLING EVIDENCE

  On an autumn morning in 1988, a wealthy Long Island husband and wife were discovered by their son in pools of blood on opposite sides of their bedroom. Arlene Tankleff, fifty-four, had been bludgeoned and stabbed to death. Seymour Tankleff, sixty-two, was fighting for his life but soon slipped into a coma and died a month later. With no sign of forced entry, the police quickly settled on the seventeen-year-old son, Marty, as chief suspect, bringing him in for immediate questioning. Hours later, when the teenager’s lawyer learned of his client’s location and called the district attorney to stop the interrogation, it was already too late: Marty had confessed.

  A jury convicted Tankleff on two counts of murder. In addition to the confession, the prosecution presented witnesses who testified that Marty was surprisingly emotionless at the crime scene but had been observed arguing loudly with his father in public just days earlier. The judge sentenced Marty to no less than fifty years in prison, seventeen of which he served before his release in 2007.3

  Why did Tankleff serve only one-third of his minimum sentence? Because he didn’t kill his parents. He’d been duped into a confession, then spent almost two decades trying to convince the State of New York what had happened. And much of what went wrong can be chalked up to WYSIWYG.

  In retrospect, the evidence against Marty Tankleff was never very compelling.4 According to the police statement, Marty confessed to committing the attacks between 5:30 and 6:00 with a barbell and fruit paring knife. But forensic analysis placed Arlene’s time of death hours earlier and neither household item tested positive for blood. Defensive wounds on Arlene’s body indicated a struggle with her assailant, but Marty had no scratches or bruises. Immediately after the attacks, an estranged business associate who had been at the Tankleff house that night for a poker game and who owed a half million dollars to Seymour—a man whom Marty immediately named to detectives as a probable suspect with a grudge to bear—suddenly shaved his beard, skipped town to California, and checked into a spa under an assumed name.

  Still, the prosecution based its case, and the jury its verdict, on four words uttered by Marty at police headquarters, mere hours after he had found his parents: “Yeah, I did it.”

  And for good reason, right? After all, who would ever confess to something he hadn’t done? Sure, by trial Marty had recanted his confession, claiming that he was coerced while in an unstable state. But isn’t that what guilty people do once they lawyer up? As Morgan Freeman’s Red says in The Shawshank Redemption, “Everyone in here is innocent, you know that?”

  It was this mentality—confessions always come from internal causes, from people who know they’re guilty—that prompted prosecutors to charge Marty, the jury to convict him, and a judge to send him away for fifty years for crimes he didn’t commit. It was WYSIWYG, an automatic assumption that no external forces could ever lead an innocent person to confess. And let’s be fair: we probably would have come to the same conclusion had we been on the jury. Everyone thinks that they’d never confess to something they didn’t do.

  But suspend your automatic disbelief for a moment. Ponder more carefully Marty Tankleff ’s situation. He’s seventeen. Having just stumbled upon his parents’ bodies, he’s literally in shock. The police haul him in for questioning without a lawyer and grow increasingly aggressive as they press him to explain why he isn’t crying more. Then they start fabricating evidence in the effort to box Marty in. They tell him they found clumps of his hair in his dead mother’s hands. They say that something called a “humidity test” proves he showered right after the attack, not the night before as he claimed.

  What’s that, you say? The police can’t just make things up? Oh yes, they can. They can’t present it at trial—it is false evidence, after all. But during an interrogation, the police can spin tales far and wide. They can give you a lie detector test and say that you failed. They can say your fingerprints were found on the murder weapon. Or that the doctors injected your nearly dead father with adrenaline, rousing him from his coma just long enough for him to finger you as his attacker.

  For Marty, this last gambit was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Wracked with grief and exhausted from the police interview, he let down his guard for just a moment when they told him his father had identified him. In the wake of this bombshell, he wondered aloud if he could’ve blacked out and committed the crimes. After being asked the same question dozens of times, Marty Tankleff finally succumbed to the situation around him. Just to make his world stop spinning, just to get some breathing room so he could try to wrap his head around that morning’s incomprehensible events, he replied, “Yeah, I did it.”

  So the police drafted a statement with their version of events, reflecting their theory for the case. It was a theory that the forensic tests would soon reveal to be impossible. And it was a statement that Marty would never sign, as he would almost immediately come to regret and withdraw his so-called confession.

  Marty Tankleff wasn’t alone. By some accounting, the Suffolk County Police
Department had a 94 percent confession rate in homicide cases in the 1980s, an obscenely high percentage unmatched by surrounding jurisdictions. I mean, 94 percent is the return on Madoff investments or Ahmadinejad elections, not homicide investigations—you just don’t get all but 6 percent of murder suspects to confess unless something fishy is going on. A few juries may have seen past this slew of purported confessions, correctly determining that the defendant in their case hadn’t confessed of free will and clear mind. Unfortunately for Marty, his wasn’t one of them.

  Like it or not, you and I probably would have judged Marty’s case the same way. Legal researchers at Williams College once asked mock juries to evaluate the summary transcript of an interrogation in which a detective obtained a murder confession by yelling and waving his gun in a threatening manner. Respondents said that the confession wasn’t voluntary. They reported that it wouldn’t affect their judgment of the trial. They claimed that they’d disregard it entirely. And then, when asked to render a verdict, they were still four times more likely to think the defendant was guilty than were other mock juries never told about a confession.5

  The problem isn’t confined to Long Island, either. The Innocence Project is a national consortium of attorneys and other legal professionals dedicated to overturning wrongful convictions. Over the past two decades, it has succeeded with more than two hundred exonerations through DNA testing, proving, for example, that the semen of a man convicted of rape didn’t match that left by the rapist at the crime scene. In over 25 percent of these DNA exonerations, a false or coerced confession played a major role in the original conviction. This means that more than one-quarter of these innocent men and women who were sent to prison had, at one point, offered some sort of admission of guilt.

  Contrary to intuition, there’s a surprisingly wide range of situations that can drive an innocent person to confess. Overt threats. Intoxication. Ignorance of the law: The police can’t just make up evidence, can they? A prolonged interrogation leading to physical deprivation, emotional exhaustion, and thoughts like, I’ll say whatever they want so I can get out of here and get some sleep—it’ll all get sorted out in the morning.