by Sam Sommers
Marty Tankleff ’s morning was more than seventeen years in the making. That’s the uphill battle you face when going up against WYSIWYG.
THE INVISIBILITY OF SITUATIONS
So what drives us to explain other people’s behavior in internal, character-driven terms? To forsake the power of situations for the allure of personality? The answer lies in how we think as well as how we feel.6 That is, this tendency results from the way our minds take in information and also because thinking this way makes our world a reassuringly predictable place.
People are easy to see. They’re tangible. Context is harder: it’s an abstract, nebulous concept, a backdrop that can be downright invisible. In this sense, our social lens is set to shallow focus. We see the world with limited depth of field, blurring the background and accentuating in sharp contrast the action up front. Just like most cinematography in pre–Orson Welles Hollywood. Or sports magazine photos of bikinied supermodels on beaches. At least, that’s what they tell me—I only made it through the first twenty minutes of Citizen Kane.
Precisely because situations are difficult to see, effort is required to recognize their influence. So we’re particularly likely to stick to internal explanations for behavior when we don’t have the mental energy to consider the alternatives. When we’re tired, busy, or under time pressure, our cognitive resources are otherwise occupied and we can’t summon the mental strength necessary to mount the challenge to WYSIWYG.
As an example, in one research study at the University of Texas, respondents evaluated a woman in a videotaped conversation.7 She always appeared nervous, though in one version of the video her anxiety had an obvious situational cause: she was asked to discuss her sexual fantasies. In the other version it was less clear why she was nervous, as she was only talking about her passion for gardening. After both versions of the video, participants rated her personality as more anxious than average, but this was particularly the case after the gardening discussion. While her nervous appearance made sense when she was discussing sex, why was she so anxious when talking about hydrangeas?
However, a different outcome emerged for the next group of viewers. They were instructed to watch the video and simultaneously remember a list of words. For these observers, personality ratings didn’t vary by conversation topic. They thought the woman was an anxious type when she talked about gardening, and they saw her as just as anxious when she talked about sex. So caught up in rehearsing the memory list, these respondents were too cognitively drained to exert the mental effort necessary to recognize the power of her situation. They lost sight of the fact that sharing fantasies with strangers would make anyone uncomfortable outside of a late-night Cinemax movie.
When our mind is occupied by other tasks and concerns, we’re even less able than usual to see situations. Much of the time, our default tendency is an automatic leap to WYSIWYG, and sometimes we’re powerless to override it.
THERE’S ALSO ANOTHER, more strategic reason for the pull of WYSIWYG. Quite often, we simply don’t want to recognize the influence of context.
Natural disasters strike without warning. Financial markets go into free fall. The Red Sox win the World Series. Twice. The world can be a nutty, unpredictable place, so some semblance of consistency in the personalities of our fellow man and woman gives us one less thing to worry about. It makes us feel more in control.
After all, it’s not just any internal explanations we jump to when evaluating the behavior of others. In particular, we cling to the notion of stable character. In the Stanford quiz show study, the idea that the Questioner looked so smart because he’s the smarter person is the most appealingly simple explanation for what the audience observed.
Our false confidence that we can predict the behavior of others is reassuring, and it leads us to resist evidence to the contrary. It’s comforting to think that our neighbors are capable of nothing worse than the sins we observe: leaving the lids off garbage cans and parking too far from the curb. But how many times have we seen the news report in which the coworker, ex-roommate, or fiancée says, “I know him and he couldn’t hurt a fly”? And then the evidence emerges to prove that the suspect was, indeed, capable of insecticide and then some.
The motivation to ignore situations is even stronger when the actions in question are distasteful. It’s reassuring to label bystanders who fail to help in an emergency as chronically apathetic. That’s what we think when we hear about the patient who collapses and dies in the waiting room, in full view of hospital staff who do nothing to assist him for more than an hour. Or the woman attacked within earshot of dozens of her neighbors, none of whom intervene, yell out the window, or even call the police. Our immediate reaction to these stories is What’s wrong with these people? We cling to the belief that we would have risen to the occasion. However, as detailed in chapter 2, this thought process overlooks a wide range of circumstances under which everyone—you and me included—is likely to keep going about our business, failing to come to the rescue of a fellow citizen in need.
WYSIWYG allows us to see the world as a stable place and view ourselves in a positive light. It enables us to resist the idea that were we to find ourselves in the same situation, we might act the very same unappealing way. Perhaps you experienced just this sort of resistance as you read this chapter. Have you been thinking that you would’ve been the exception in the quiz show study, the observer who rated Questioner and Contestant as equally intelligent? That you’re too savvy to be swayed by paid endorsements? That you would’ve gone all 12 Angry Men on your fellow jurors, holding out and Henry Fonda-ing them into an acquittal to save Marty Tankleff?
Maybe you’re right. I’ll admit, I often find myself thinking this way. But the research says otherwise. Other than the fact that my mother and Mister Rogers always told me I was unique, what’s the basis for thinking that I’m somehow the exception? At the end of the day, while my mom may have been more judicious in her praise, I’m pretty sure Mister Rogers was telling all the other kids in the neighborhood that they were special, too.
DON’T THINK, THOUGH, that the message of this chapter is that seeing others in dispositional terms is inevitable. Is this tendency pervasive? Absolutely—sometimes we’re almost powerless to avoid it. But totally unavoidable? No.
We don’t always draw inferences about personality. For one, we often recognize the impact of situations when we think about people we already know well.8 We’ve seen our friends and family in a variety of settings. This reservoir of memories reminds us that our roommate isn’t always a lousy tipper and that Uncle Barry has a gentle side in addition to the obnoxious one currently on display.
You’re also more likely to recognize the influence of situations when you’re the actor in question. Unlike the other people waiting for the restroom, I have access to the information that I only cut the line because I was holding a preschooler with a time bomb for a bladder. I know that I’m not socially awkward; there just wasn’t anyone at that party worth talking to. In short, there’s a huge difference between being an observer and being the one involved in the action.9
You don’t view yourself through the lens of WYSIWYG because, for better or for worse, you’re stuck with yourself all the time. You’ve seen how you act differently across different contexts. Moreover, as I’ll explore in more detail a few chapters from now, we tend to be overly generous when evaluating the self, so we’re particularly motivated to explain away our own negative behavior in situational terms.
Still another way to think about the inevitability question is to consider whether there are individuals who don’t fall victim to WYSIWYG in the first place. While some behavioral scientists have labeled it a fundamental human tendency,10 more recent research suggests that the failure to take note of context is particularly pronounced in American, European, and other Western cultures.
Take, for example, the scene below.
Photo courtesy Taka Masuda
How would you describe it? If you grew up in the United State
s or Western Europe, your response would probably be something like, There are fish swimming around. Or, The fish in front are moving to the left.
But the same image shown to Japanese students elicits very different responses.11 Japanese talk about the fish in front but often in terms of their relationship to the rest of the scene. Unlike Americans, they mention the plant formation on the left, the inert animals in the background, and the color of the water. In other words, they seem to notice and consider context in a way that many Westerners don’t. They literally see more of the situation than Americans do.
This study teaches us that the tendency to look past situations and focus on the action up front is not some sort of universal given. Rather, cultural experiences and priorities shape our default tendencies for how we see the world. In particular, it’s Westerners who are most likely to be hard-core disciples of the doctrine of WYSIWYG, a mind-set that’s a natural offshoot of traditional Western values such as rugged individualism, self-reliance, personal uniqueness, and self-actualization. These ideals translate easily into a social focus on the specific individuals around us and what their behavior has to say about their underlying character.
Japanese respondents, however, attend more to backdrop and context in looking at the fish scene. Cultural psychologists and anthropologists would suggest that this reflects the more holistic, situationally sensitive way of thought prevalent in Asian societies, a worldview dating back to ancient China’s emphasis on social obligation and collective harmony. 12 Indeed, the Chinese were contemplating the relatedness of all things while early Greek philosophers touted the unique properties inherent to every object. While Eastern medicine emphasized a harmonious balance of forces throughout the body, Western medicine experimented with surgery, solving health problems by excising the individually problematic body part. And while Beijing opened its Olympics with 2,008 drummers performing in stunning synchronization, the Atlanta opening ceremonies a decade earlier were highlighted by the inimitably unique properties of one Celine Dion.
Plato would have been so proud.
You could write an entire book exploring the roots of these cultural differences. And feel free, because this is not that book. For our purposes, the paragraphs above suffice, illustrating as they do that we are not born with brains hardwired to look past context. In comparisons of how children in Western and Eastern cultures write about the behavior of others, mostly similarities emerge. It’s the adults who have evolved to see things differently, with Americans turning to personality-based explanations for others’ actions (e.g., “He’s just a self-absorbed person”) and Indians offering more context-sensitive accounts (e.g., “He’s unemployed and not in a position to give that money”).13 Situations don’t have to be invisible, but many of us grow up in cultures that teach us to focus on the individuals up front, to think about what makes a fish or object or person unique as opposed to considering how it fits into the surrounding environment.
So make no mistake—personality and character do exist. Some people really are more helpful or more aggressive or more outgoing than others. But the way we tend to view one another, especially in the West, is out of balance. We put all our eggs in the basket of personality, overlooking context.
Fortunately, this also means that you can train yourself not to do this—or at least not all the time. And that is what this book is about.
REDISCOVERING CONTEXT
Days after my finger surgery, once the haze of anxiety and pain medication lifted, I recounted my experiences to my father-in-law, an accomplished physician himself. He told me that whenever he addresses graduating medical students, he always tells them that the best thing that can happen to them is to get sick. Nothing serious, of course. Just enough for them to struggle to book a timely appointment, haggle with their insurance carrier, sit in waiting rooms—a refresher course on what it’s like to be a patient.
It’s great advice. And it’s one concrete strategy you can use to break free from the WYSIWYG mentality, from the complacency of looking past context: force yourself to see familiar situations from unfamiliar perspectives. Every day, make yourself walk the proverbial mile in the proverbial shoes of others.
If you teach for a living, then attend the classes of other teachers once in a while, sitting quietly in the crowd to rediscover what separates the riveting lecture from the one that sends the audience scrambling for the sudoku puzzle. If you’re a customer service representative, wait on hold while the recording assures you that your call is important. If you’re an airline attendant, fly coach.
This prescription works in the other direction as well, applying to service consumers as well as providers. If you’re a student irritated that two hours have passed without an e-mail response from your professor, stop to consider that your ninety-nine fellow classmates might be making simultaneous requests for attention. If you’re a traveler at the lost luggage desk, remind yourself that this clerk isn’t the one who personally sent your bags to St. Petersburg instead of St. Louis. If you’re a patient nearing the end of your third hour in the ER, recognize that, painful though they may be, your two broken fingers don’t require prompter medical attention than the asthma attack of the seven-year-old who just arrived by ambulance. Even if you are pretty sure that the kid’s a big faker.
Assuming the perspective of others is one way to make sure that you don’t lose sight of the small factors that have huge impacts on the people with whom you interact. And rediscovering the power of situations will do more than make you a more patient human being—it’ll improve your ability to navigate social settings and make you better at your job to boot.
Who knows, by learning to appreciate that situations matter, you might even manage to save the world one day. Indeed, breaking free from WYSIWYG was critical to resolving one of the most tense international crises of the nuclear era. An oft-cited chapter of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is that of the competing Khrushchev letters. 14 On Friday, October 26, at the height of the conflict, Nikita Khrushchev sent a private letter to his American counterpart, John Kennedy. It rambled through thirty-one conciliatory paragraphs, promising to withdraw Soviet missiles from the area in return for American assurances that Cuba wouldn’t be invaded.
But the next day, October 27, relations went downhill. The Soviets shot down a U-2 reconnaissance plane over Cuba, killing its American pilot. Kennedy received a second letter from Khrushchev, this one released publicly and taking a tougher stance. Once again, Khrushchev insisted on a promise not to invade Cuba, but now he also demanded that the Americans dismantle their missile sites in Turkey. Suddenly, in both word and deed, the Soviet leader seemed to be escalating the conflict. Kennedy and his advisers faced a quandary: Which letter to respond to? Did the first offer still stand? Or did the public second missive irreversibly up the ante?
As the tale is told, Kennedy, influenced chiefly by the lobbying of his brother Robert, decided to respond only to the first letter, ignoring the second. The story goes that the Americans rightly attributed the more strident tone of the second letter to public posturing in an effort to appease Kremlin hard-liners. Whether this is an accurate depiction of the events in question is a debate I leave to historians. If it is, then the Kennedys’ recognition of the situational pressures shaping Khrushchev’s public words would certainly constitute a momentously important example of how effective leadership can be facilitated by going beyond WYSIWYG.
But even if the story of the Khrushchev letters is oversimplified legend—after all, U.S. removal of missiles from Turkey was part of the final agreement, so the second letter wasn’t really ignored—the peaceful resolution of this seemingly intractable conflict would still owe much to the ability of both leaders to envision themselves in their rival’s position, to see each other as more than “personality types.” This was, after all, the same Khrushchev who six years earlier banged his shoe as he promised, “We will bury you.” It would have been easy and understandable for Kennedy to see his adversary as a dispositional
aggressor, bent on destruction of the United States and incapable of negotiation. But he held off on such a conclusion, at least for as long as he could.
A similarly generous evaluation can be made of Khrushchev. I’m not suggesting that the Soviet premier’s original motivation in setting up missile sites was one of altruistic concern for Cuba’s sovereignty. Hardly. But once the crisis hit its apex, Khrushchev, too, kept his eyes on context. His own translated words, from his first letter to Kennedy, reveal as much: “You can regard us with distrust, but, in any case, you can be calm in this regard, that we are of sound mind and understand perfectly well that if we attack you, you will respond the same way.... This indicates that we are normal people, that we correctly understand and correctly evaluate the situation.”15
At this most consequential of moments, at a point in time when our civilization stood as close to full-out nuclear war as we’ve ever been, Kennedy and Khrushchev were able to sidestep calamity, in large part by resisting the urge to jump to conclusions about predisposition. In the words they exchanged, they even went so far as to assure each other that they appreciated the power of the situation. One envisions a much more sobering outcome to the crisis had either man insisted on seeing the other as a barbarian or evildoer or any other descriptor from the lexicon of WYSIWYG.
BUT AT THE RISK of repeating myself, let me be clear: my argument is not that embracing the influence of situations inevitably makes us better people. Sure, that would be a feel-good message, and I admit that there’s some support for it. For example, research suggests that romantic couples are happier when they refrain from blaming negative outcomes on their partner’s internal characteristics.16 Recognizing the effects of context can make you a happier mate and better lover. And, more generally, many of us would be more patient, forgiving, and understanding citizens of the world if we didn’t automatically draw conclusions about personality type.