Situations Matter

by Sam Sommers

  • Even our deference to WYSIWYG falls by the wayside when ego is on the line. 24 We see others’ missteps as indicating deficient personality, but we chalk up our own failings to external causes. When the customer in front of you in line pockets the extra change the cashier mistakenly gives him, you view him as dishonest; when you do the same thing, it’s because the cashier was rude, you’re in a hurry, and you’re pretty sure the store is marking up prices to begin with.

  We see the world around us in ways that are easy on the ego. Sure, these strategies amount to self-deception, but they help us through the rough patches in life. Injecting ourselves into the success stories of others . . . deflecting blame when things go wrong . . . tactics like these have restorative effects in the face of unfulfilled expectation; they buffer us from the threat of negative feedback. And these rose-colored lenses through which we see ourselves constitute just one more reason why getting to know “who you really are” isn’t as easy as some would lead you to believe.

  SELF-HELP REVISITED

  What, then, should the gurus of self-help be telling you? Should they call you out on the habit of bending the truth when you look in the mirror? Might a forced dose of reality allow you to cut through the distortion and finally get to know your authentic self?

  Nah.

  Reality isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, either. Sure, refusing to accept truths about the self poses problems. Consider the social drinker who’s sure that he’s OK to drive home because, unlike his friends, he can hold his liquor—not to mention that like Rain Man and 85 percent of the rest of us, he thinks he’s an excellent driver. And if you always seek out less accomplished individuals for social comparison, how will you ever improve yourself? If you never take responsibility for anything that goes wrong, don’t you become an intolerable blowhard?

  Still, despite all this, stretching the truth a bit for ego’s sake is arguably an important ingredient of, quote-unquote, normal daily functioning. Many of the unrealistic self-views we cling to are illusions, but they’re positive illusions without which we’d spend much of our time miserable or wallowing in self-doubt.25 Compared to those who are less satisfied, people content with life tend to exhibit more self-serving tendencies: from an unrealistically high opinion of themselves to an overly optimistic view of the future to an exaggerated sense of control over events around them.

  Findings like these turn on its head conventional wisdom concerning what it means to be “normal.” Ask most people about the thought processes associated with depression, and they’ll describe an unrealistically pessimistic take on life, an Eeyore-like tendency to see things as gloomier than they really are. But the pervasiveness of self-serving distortions suggests that the ostensibly normal or happy among us are actually the ones out of touch with reality. Some research goes so far as to suggest that unfailingly accurate and unfiltered self-perception is linked to depression.

  In a series of studies conducted by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson at the University of Pennsylvania, male and female participants completed a written assessment of their depression level.26 Immediately afterward, they were each led to a different location and seated in front of a green light with a button next to it. They were told that upon a signal from the researcher, they could push the button or choose to leave it alone. Sometimes when they pressed the button, the green light went on. Other times it didn’t. In reality, in most versions of the research, the button had no impact on the green light at all; it went on or stayed off a predetermined percentage of the time, regardless of what respondents did.

  At the end of each session, participants were asked how much control they had over the light. Those individuals whose earlier questionnaire scores indicated that they were depressed accurately reported that they had little to no control. They recognized that there was no relationship between their button and the light. But nondepressed respondents saw things differently. These “normal” people exaggerated their control over the green light—a similar illusion to the one harbored by the overconfident patient who’s sure that he’ll be the one to buck the odds and avoid the treatment’s side effects, or the superstitious sports fan who thinks that where she sits and what she wears might just change the outcome on the field. Beliefs like these are a familiar part of daily life.

  And so it would seem that much like red wine, chocolate, and Jim Carrey movies, self-serving distortions have positive effects when enjoyed in moderation, but too much becomes hard to stomach. In the short term, a touch of self-enhancement allows you to salve the wounds of negative feedback and distressing outcome, buffering the ego until self-regard rebounds enough to resume the pursuit of long-term goals. Often, it’s not accurate knowledge about the self that allows peace of mind; it’s the bit of self-deception that helps us bounce back from setback and trudge on through failure.

  ARE YOU LOOKING to be a happier, more productive, more successful person? Are you in the market for self-help? Then stop worrying about how to see yourself for who you really, truly are. Forget about this “authentic” self business. Instead, learn to embrace the notion of the self as flexible.

  Yes, your processes of self-perception are context-dependent. And introspection yields different information at different times. Your sense of self varies depending on who you’re with. Identity is malleable and personal preferences are constructed on the spot. But none of this is bad or distressing news.

  So you’re not the person you thought you were, at least not all the time? Big deal. Let that conclusion empower not alarm you.

  It’s refreshing to realize that you’re not a finished product—that who you are in the here and now may not be the same person you’ll be in the then and there. In fact, it’s that opposite view of the self as a fixed entity that causes problems. When you assume that there’s a true core self waiting to be discovered, that’s when your potential seems limited and the world around you is full of threats to be rationalized away.

  Consider one study of college freshmen in Hong Kong.27 Researchers presented them with a series of statements regarding the stability of intelligence, including “you have a certain amount of intelligence and you really can’t do much to change it” and “you can learn new things, but you can’t really change your basic intelligence.” Based on students’ agreement or disagreement with these ideas, the researchers created two groups: those who saw their own intelligence as a predetermined, stable entity and those who thought of their own intellect in more malleable terms.

  The freshmen were then asked whether they intended to enroll in a remedial English course in the years to come. Not surprisingly, those who had aced their high school English certification exam were less likely to plan on taking such a course than students who had scored in the C range or worse. But even among low-performing students, those who viewed intelligence level as etched in stone saw no need for remedial work. They were already as good as they were going to get at English, they figured. So why bother? Only the low performers with a less fixed view of their own intellect were willing to sign up for the additional English work that they really needed.

  In other words, seeing the self as a static and stable entity is what puts us on the defensive and mandates chronic self-deception. Think of a characteristic like intelligence in terms of fixed capacity and the poor exam grade or subpar performance review becomes intolerably threatening. Instead, you should train yourself to view intellect—and any other aspect of your personal skill set—as a muscle that grows with effort and atrophies with neglect. When you accept that the answer to “Who am I?” should be written in pencil and not pen, threats become opportunities and failures transform into life lessons. Even if this isn’t how you usually see things, it’s not too late to start now.

  Because in a follow-up study, the same researchers in Hong Kong demonstrated how easy it is to change how you think about yourself. They gave a new group of students one of two different, ostensibly scientific articles—articles that depicted intelligence in either static or fl
exible terms. Those led to think about intelligence as a fixed quantity took the easy way out: they showed little persistence on tasks in the wake of poor performance and they avoided taking on new challenges later. Only students told that intelligence was malleable showed the stick-to-itiveness necessary for self-improvement.

  Or consider another study, this one with American students at Stanford asked to serve as pen pals with “at-risk” middleschoolers.28 The college students were instructed to offer encouragement to the younger kids by explaining in their letters that they, too, had struggled at times in school but eventually persevered and found academic success. They were told to emphasize the idea that natural ability is overrated—that intelligence “is not a finite endowment but rather an expandable capacity.”

  Did these letters help the middle school students bounce back from adversity? It’s impossible to say—the letters were never delivered. But the mere experience of writing them had a lasting impact on the college students themselves. Months later, the letter writers were still reporting greater enjoyment of school than were other Stanford undergrads. Their grade point averages were higher, too, by a full third of a point on a four-point scale. The effect of writing the letters was particularly strong among African American participants, a promising finding for diverse universities seeking to remedy the underperformance too often observed among students of color.

  So what should the gurus of self-help be telling you?

  That the aftermath of failure and setback is precisely when you need to remember that the self is flexible.

  That you’re better off focusing on effort and other controllable factors rather than fixed aptitude.

  That you can forget about “not being a _______ kind of person,” whatever the presumed deficit in your supposedly authentic self may be.

  Bad grade on your paper? Lousy earnings projections for the quarter? First one voted off the celebrity dancing show? Now that you recognize how self-perception really works, you know the dangers of chalking up setback to a hopeless lack of ability. But you also know better than to automatically shrug it off as bad luck or someone else’s fault. Instead, force yourself to ponder or even make a list of the changeable factors—internal and external—that can bring about better outcomes the next time around.

  Because whether you’re a Hong Kong student struggling with English or a pen pal at Stanford, good things happen when you embrace the self as malleable. Regardless of what you read in the self-help aisle, you don’t have to lose sleep hunting for your core identity or reconnecting with your inner you. Chicken soup and numbered lists are overrated.

  Instead, it’s time to start appreciating that you’re a different person in different settings.

  To recognize that who you are today need not dictate who you’ll be tomorrow.

  And to accept that the “authentic” self isn’t some sort of Holy Grail, unless by the analogy you mean that you aren’t sure whether or not it even exists in the first place.

  5.

  MARS AND VENUS HERE ON EARTH

  ACCORDING TO LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF RESEARCH STUDIES, the human male is more physically aggressive than his female counterpart, regardless of age group, culture, or geographical region.1

  According to statistical analysis of newspaper personal ads, women tend to seek older partners with stable incomes, whereas men place greater emphasis on a potential mate’s youth and physical appearance .2

  According to my brazenly loud, then two-year-old daughter during the course of a formal dinner reception, girls have a butt that only goes potty sitting down, while a boy’s butt works standing up.

  There are myriad differences between men and women, as we learn at a young age. Life expectancy. Earning potential. Crying during weddings. Propensity for bringing reading material to the toilet. This litany of apparent sex differences runs the gamut from fodder for stand-up comics to more important discrepancies with sobering societal implications.

  Though “gender gaps”a are visible across a range of domains, they share something in common: how we think about them. Like the personalities of others and our own identities, we usually see sex differences as fixed—as stable and even inevitable disparities arising from internal causes. When we hear that boys are more likely to X, or women are better at Y, our first instinct is to turn to innate explanations based on physiology, hormones, or predisposition. In other words, as someone once famously and lucratively suggested, men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

  Why, then, are males more aggressive? Because of testosterone, we assume—it’s just boys being boys. Why do women often prefer older, career-minded men? Because in the more dangerous societies of our genetic ancestors, natural selection must have bestowed advantages unto those females who landed a high-status mate. And so on.

  This notion of immutable, inborn gender gaps overlooks the critical role of context. Just as situations help dictate our sense of self and whether we remain passive or take action, so, too, are many gender differences surprisingly context-dependent. While the analogy of men and women as life-forms from different planets is amusingly and appealingly straightforward, in the end, it’s just extraterrestrial WYSIWYG. My daughter’s anatomical observations aside, we male and female earthlings are far more similar than different—at least in terms of how we see and react to the social universe.

  THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS shed light on the ways in which other people shape our thoughts and actions. But the power of situations doesn’t always come in the form of specific others in our immediate surroundings. The effects of context can be more ethereal. With gender, it’s not typically that particular individuals around us tell men to behave one way and women another. Instead, subtler forces of unspoken expectation and societal norms drive the emergence of gender difference. And nothing I’ve studied academically has taught me this lesson as well as my fledgling parenting career has.

  Having grown up as one of three brothers, my new status as the father of two girls has been the source of repeated revelation over the past half decade. These days, I’m well versed in sartorial concepts such as the halter top and pinafore. I can pontificate on the relative merits of hair bands versus clips. I find myself able to explain the difference between passé and plié, and depending on how my back feels, I can even demonstrate.

  But perhaps the greatest change I’ve experienced in the past few years is my newfound sensitivity to the gendered messages we convey to kids on a regular basis. As just one example, to celebrate the birth of each of our daughters, some family members gave us embroidered alphabet quilts. Not wanting to get two of the exact same gift, they opted for a different color scheme the second time around. So we now have one blanket that’s pink and green and one that’s blue and red. According to the experts at Pottery Barn Kids, the difference transcends color scheme—per official catalogue nomenclature, we own one “girls’ quilt” and one “boys’ quilt.”

  What does this actually mean? Well, most of the images on the two quilts are the same. Both have a picture of apple for A and blocks for B, for example. For other letters, there are slight variations: the boys’ quilt depicts an empty wagon for W, while the girls’ quilt shows a wagon with a doll in it.

  But there are some not-so-subtle differences as well. Boys get a pencil for P. And why not? Boys grow up to be authors, architects, draftsmen.

  What about girls? Their quilt has a purse. Girls like to shop.

  Here are the R and S panels. On the left is the “boy” version, with a radio for R and a shooting star for S. On the right is the “girl” quilt: R is for ring and S is for shoes.

  Boys’ Quilt

  Girls’ Quilt

  Naturally. Because girls aren’t interested in music or astronomy or science. Only jewelry. Oh, and fashionable footwear.

  These quilts are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the different contexts in which boys and girls grow up. They capture the well-entrenched gender norms we convey to children as soon as they’re born (and sometimes even
earlier). Mere minutes after becoming parents, new mothers and fathers are already more likely to see their daughters as “fine-featured” or “delicate” and their sons as “strong.”3 This despite the fact that newborn humans are a lot like snails—the male and female varieties are nearly indistinguishable unless you flip them over and blow on them.

  Indeed, when my older daughter tells me she wants to be either Peter Pan or a knight for Halloween because the female protagonists from the movies she watches “don’t do anything interesting,” it’s hard to argue. These female characters mostly tend to domestic concerns while patiently and prettily awaiting the rescue of a prince or other male lead. Fighting for the right to choose their own husband is what passes for strength of character and independence of spirit. And this is just eighty minutes’ worth of gendered messages in the course of one day. In some cultures, different opportunities for men and for women are still codified by law or religious decree, rendering the impact of gender-based expectations far more problematic. But even subtler societal cues about gender have a dramatic impact on how we think and act.

  This chapter explores gender through the lens of context. It considers situational influences ranging from the mundane world of baby quilts, Disney princesses, and fast-food drive-thrus to more institutionalized expectations conveyed in the classroom and workplace. It challenges the notion of entrenched gender gaps, asking instead under which circumstances such differences emerge and when they disappear. Because situations matter, even for a distinction as basic as male and female, and that’s a conclusion that matters as well, whether you’re a parent or principal, manager or marketer.

  Far too infrequently do we ponder how ordinary situations shape our thoughts about gender. Or to what extent the apparent differences between men and women are context-dependent rather than inevitable. All too often even the most well-educated and powerful among us look right past the situation in thinking about gender.