Table Of ContentTable 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
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Copyright © 2011 by Sam Sommers All rights reserved. No part of this book
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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
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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 that 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.”
