Situations Matter

by Sam Sommers

  Because, in the end, situations of all types are important, from the unexceptional to the profound. Consider that the very same principles at work in my routine airport interaction with Marta can be found in settings with far graver consequences. As one example, according to a recent book by pseudonymous intelligence officer Matthew Alexander, U.S. interrogators weren’t particularly successful in obtaining useful information from alleged terrorists captured during the first few years of the Iraq war.1 The reason, suggests Alexander, was the default tendency of most interrogators to view their suspects as incorrigible evildoers who’d only respond to domination, threat, and fear—much like the fruitless strategies pursued by many customers with service representatives. And if you think this analogy strains credulity, well, clearly you’ve never seen the residents of my grandparents’ retirement community interacting with the dining room waitstaff during dinner.

  The turning point in Iraq, writes Alexander, came when interrogators changed strategies, abandoning the harsh tactics of belittlement in the name of cultural respect and rapport building. It’s not that they started taking detainees out for pizza and ice cream—distortion of reality, false hope, and good, old-fashioned lies became essential ingredients of the new game plan. But the key was a shift from brutality to brains, as Alexander calls it.

  The suspect is a father with young kids? Then pretend you’re a dad, too—all the better to bond over parenting stories. The interrogators’ goal became to find out as much as possible about the detainees, to suss out as many details as they could regarding the context in which this tense interaction was taking place, and then to spin those details to their own advantage.

  From airports to Abu Ghraib, from small talk to life-or-death decisions, situations matter.

  By the end of this book, my hope is that you’ll appreciate this conclusion and recognize the many ways in which context shapes human behavior and daily experiences—even your own. These are life lessons with the potential to pay dividends both personal and professional, in the short term as well as the long run. Because even when we aren’t bartering for hotel rooms or questioning terrorists, who among us doesn’t spend more time than we’d like to admit trying to anticipate the behavior of the people we live and work with? Devising strategies for making a better first impression? Pondering whether the saleswoman really has a thing for me or just tells everyone who tries on that shirt that he looks good in it?

  We come to better answers to questions like these—regarding both the mundane and sublime aspects of our social world—when we take into account the power of situations. So think of this book as a primer on what really makes people tick. Consider it your guide as you start down a new path toward a deeper understanding of the true nature of human nature.

  For the record, the saleswoman works on commission, hotshot. She says that to every customer.

  1.

  WYSIWYG

  THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX. RUBIK’S CUBE. FERMAT’S Last Theorem. The popularity of NASCAR. To this pantheon of inscrutable puzzles, permit me to add another entry: the Conundrum of the Game Show Host.

  Imagine, if you will, the following scenario. You’re looking to hire a tutor. Maybe your fourteen-year-old is struggling with early European history; maybe you’re struggling with early European history. Either way, the school year is well under way, and all the experienced tutors are booked for the foreseeable future. However, as a result of the economic downturn, you’re able to dig up a few surprising applicants interested in the position. Your three finalists have no teaching experience whatsoever, but their names are familiar: Pat Sajak, Ryan Seacrest, Alex Trebek.

  Remember, this is a vitally important choice. The grade point average of a loved one hangs in the balance. So take a moment.

  Seriously. To the extent that your mental library of game show host images permits it, visualize each of these men as you mull over the question of whom to hire as a history tutor: the host of Wheel of Fortune , American Idol, or Jeopardy!

  All set? Decision made? As yet another host would ask, is this your final answer? Then continue reading.

  Most of you picked Trebek, of course. With Sajak a distant second. Why? Because Jeopardy! is the most intellectually challenging of the shows on which these men appear. We therefore assume that Trebek must be an intelligent guy in order to host it effectively—after all, he always knows the answer. While “European History” has been a category on his program, I don’t recall Simon and Randy (or, for that matter, J.Lo and Steven Tyler) ever discussing the Hundred Years’ War between Idol auditions. Perhaps Trebek retained some relevant information through osmosis? And at the very least, you’re confident that he’s going to know how to pronounce “Charlemagne.”

  But is this a wise decision? Maybe Trebek isn’t the best choice after all. Would it surprise you to learn that Seacrest majored in history at Yale? That Sajak began a Ph.D. in European literature before turning to a career in television?

  OK, it would surprise them, too, because I just made all that up.

  What is true, though, is that you and I have no idea how intelligent these men are. For all we know, each is bright, well-read, and would make an adequate tutor. But for all we know, they’re nothing more than glorified spokesmodels who read well from cue cards and make good small talk with strangers. Even though the only information we have about these three individuals has been gleaned from the sanitized, edited context of syndicated television, we still feel like we have some idea of the type of people they are.

  Therein lies the puzzle. Logically speaking, being asked to choose the wisest game show host should lead us to throw up our hands and plead ignorance. But Trebek is the consensus choice. Rationally, I have little more basis for this conclusion than I do for thinking that Patrick Dempsey or any other TV doctor could give me at least some useful insight regarding my grandmother’s blood pressure medication. But try telling that to my neighbor down the street with the faded “Martin Sheen Is My President” bumper sticker. You see, the Conundrum of the Game Show Host isn’t which of these three gentlemen you’ll choose as your tutor, but rather the question of why the vast majority of us is so quick to pick the same guy.

  The phenomenon isn’t limited to Trebek. Our tendency to attribute wisdom to game show hosts emerges even when perfect diction and a certain Canadian bonhomie—mustachioed or not—isn’t part of the picture. Consider a research study conducted with pairs of college students at Stanford.1 At random, one member of each pair was assigned to the role of quiz show host, or “Questioner.” The other became the “Contestant.” The Questioner was given several minutes to compose a list of ten challenging questions on any topics, the only requirement being that she had to know the right answer to each one. Once the list was complete, the Questioner then proceeded to quiz the Contestant, whose job, naturally, was to answer the questions correctly.

  The student body at Stanford is an impressive group. These are really smart people. But on average, Contestants answered only four out of ten questions correctly. After all, even the most accomplished of scholars is challenged when asked to match the idiosyncratic knowledge of another bright person. Just think about your friends and their varied interests, experiences, and expertise. When you’re a gourmet chef who’s into fantasy football and your buddy the entomologist can quote every episode of Star Trek by heart, stumping each other with trivia isn’t too hard. Finding common ground to talk about when you get together for drinks? That seems more challenging, but hey, he’s your friend, not mine.

  Imagine how much greater this variability in expertise is for strangers with no shared history. In the quiz show task, unless the Contestant lucks into a partner who just happens to mirror exactly her own areas of interest, she’ll be stumped before too long. Take, for example, the eclectically well-rounded expertise exhibited by one of my former students during an in-class demonstration of this study:

  Maybe you’re equally proficient in judicial political history and pop music boy bands. For most pe
ople, though, this combination of disciplines poses a challenge.

  Knowing all this: knowing that the Contestant’s job is quite difficult, that the Questioner is pulling topics out of thin air, and that the random draw to determine roles could easily have gone the other way, how would you evaluate the quiz show participants? The researchers asked this question by getting neutral observers of the study—the “studio audience” for the quiz show—to rate the general knowledge of both the Questioner and the Contestant on a scale of 1–100.

  On average, they rated the Questioner an 82.

  They rated the Contestant a 49.

  In other words, despite knowing that the Contestant was at a pronounced disadvantage in this situation, observers drew internal conclusions about the pair as they watched them play the game. The Questioner must be the one with the greater wealth of knowledge, they inferred. The Questioner is the one they’d expect to do well on a real game show, and presumably the one they’d hire as a tutor. The Contestant, they determined in a resounding majority, was dumber.

  SEDUCED BY CHARACTER

  So much of how we see and interact with the social universe around us is shaped by our immediate context. As the chapters in this book detail, seemingly trivial aspects of daily situations determine whether we keep to ourselves or get involved in the affairs of others, whether we follow a group or stake out an independent path, why we’re drawn to certain people and away from others.

  But as the game show examples demonstrate, we rarely appreciate this robust power of situations. We look right past them, hidden in plain sight. Just like the museum visitor pays little heed to the painting’s frame, we fail to notice the impact of outside influences on our innermost thoughts and instincts. But frames do matter. Though you won’t find them highlighted in a museum’s catalogue, they catch the eye and accentuate aspects of the paintings within. You might not realize it, but your experience at the museum wouldn’t be the same without them.

  The frame of social context has a similar impact on how people behave. When we overlook it, we produce an oversimplified picture of human nature, clinging as we do to the belief that what you see is what you get. Computer programmers have adopted this phrase, complete with a fun-to-pronounce acronym, to refer to an interface that allows the user to see what the final product will look like while a document is being created. In daily life, even when we should know better, we endorse this idea of WYSIWYG (or wizzywig, if you prefer) when we assume that the behavior we observe of another person at a particular point in time provides an accurate glimpse of the “true product” within.

  The waiter who screwed up our order? We label him incompetent. The colleague who won’t return our e-mails? She’s inconsiderate. The actor who delivers the knockout soliloquy? He’s articulate. WYSIWYG leads us to conclude that these actions result from underlying, consistent character—and we expect this personality to emerge reliably anytime, anywhere. So the waiter was an idiot before you showed up for lunch, the coworker is a jerk even on her day off, the actor would be the perfect commencement speaker, and Alex Trebek will help me pass history once he wraps his shooting schedule.

  In essence, we’re most comfortable seeing each other the same way we watch sitcoms, expecting to encounter familiar characters who act much the same from episode to episode. Even in exotic locations, like a vat of grapes or a cursed Hawaiian vacation, we look for the familiar dispositions of our TV friends to shine through. When you think about it, although we call these shows “situation comedies,” they depend on stable personalities, and stock ones at that.

  Developing a sitcom? You might want to include a nosy or wacky neighbor. Or even better, a nosy and wacky neighbor. Perhaps an overbearing mother-in-law or world-weary grouch with a hidden heart of gold. It only takes a few minutes at www.smalltime.com/dictatorto confirm this notion of standard-issue sitcom characters. The website uses binary trees created by user input—essentially a flowchart of yes-or-no questions—to guess the sitcom character or world dictator you’re thinking of (clever site tagline: “whether you’re Gilligan or Fidel stuck on that island”).

  The program needed thirty-four questions to figure out that I was thinking of Pol Pot. For Cliff Clavin, the mailman from Cheers, it only took eleven.

  The recent emergence of “reality TV” isn’t much different. These shows consistently promise the manipulative villain, the flirtatious schemer, the carefree soul just there to have a good time. These “characters” are often the products of creative editing (or even intentional staging), but viewers don’t seem to mind. Clearly, the producers of such programming also realize the appeal of easily identifiable personalities to those of us watching at home.

  Back to the real real world, it’s true that every so often life redirects our attention to the power of situations, snapping us out of our default WYSIWYG mode. Maybe we discover our inept waiter at a nightclub playing a proficient guitar and learn that his incompetence is context-specific. We find out that our unresponsive coworker has been battling a computer virus and never received our messages. Our favorite thespian gives a stilted, hackneyed graduation speech and we realize that he isn’t particularly well spoken when the words are his own and he hasn’t had rehearsal.

  Or we catch a glimpse of a more subversive, self-referential sitcom. Like the episode of Seinfeld when, through a typically convoluted tangle of plotlines, the giant neon chicken sign outside Kramer’s window prompts an apartment swap with Jerry. After just one night in a noisy, distraction-filled bedroom, suddenly it’s Jerry who’s frazzled and jumpy, recounting 3:00 a.m. phone calls from oddball friends and eating straight out of the ice cream carton. And the soothing effects of just one good night’s sleep allow Kramer to emerge as the all-knowing yet sarcastic voice of reason around whom the group gathers for perspective on their own neuroses. The comedic premise works because the audience is familiar with each character by this point in the show’s run. We immediately get the joke that the sleep-depriving physical space of Kramer’s apartment (and the relative lack of chaos across the hall at Jerry’s) could be all that separates one character’s recognizable quirks from the other’s.

  But by the end of the half hour, status quo has returned. And in real life, too, while unfamiliar situations can push us beyond WYSIWYG, the general tendency lingers on: we encounter new people, we observe new behaviors, and we instinctively draw new conclusions regarding character and personality. Just ask the patient chagrined to see his doctor outside her realm of expertise, struggling to, say, parallel park. Or the surprised student who once ran into me at a bar and asked, “Isn’t it strange for professors to go out and see people from class?” While I realize that I continue to exist outside the lecture hall, she seemed genuinely shocked to learn that I could survive, much less enjoy myself, in a room without a dry-erase board.

  We’re easily seduced by the notion of stable character. So much of who we are, how we think, and what we do is driven by the situations we’re in, yet we remain blissfully unaware of it.

  LAST SUMMER, I got a first- (and second-) hand refresher course in just how blind we tend to be to situations. It came just days after I discovered that I am a marvel of modern medicine. Or, at least, that’s what a bemused emergency room physician told me when I showed up one night with two broken fingers, one on each hand.

  How did I hurt myself? As I trudged through the next several weeks with matching splints, I had ample opportunity to answer this question. My response varied by mood. Sometimes I’d get creative and say I was injured pulling orphans from the rubble of an earthquake. Other days I’d stick to the truth and admit that the damage came from the knob of a slippery softball bat that flew out of my hands during a rainy slow-pitch game. It didn’t really matter whether or not I was honest: either way, no one—including multiple orthopedists—seemed to believe me.

  One of the fractures went into a joint, which meant I needed surgery. But the morning of the procedure, I really wasn’t nervous. In fact, I was much less anxious tha
n my wife, who was still juggling sympathy with (completely justified) irritation at how I had suffered the injury. Had I really been saving orphans, I would’ve gotten a pass, but my decision to ignore her prescient warnings against playing softball during a downpour didn’t sit well.

  At the hospital, I was left alone in a small room to change into a plastic-wrapped gown, or “johnnie” as those in the know apparently call it. When I asked for clarification, I was informed that, yes, I did have to remove every last article of clothing before embarking on a thirty-minute outpatient procedure on the tip of my right middle finger.

  So here’s the scene: I’m alone in a dark waiting room that seems to double as a storage closet for outmoded Soviet computer equipment, nothing but a paper-thin gown between me and the rest of the world. And I can’t keep the damn thing closed because it has the one fastener I can’t navigate in my current state: a tie drawstring. The nurse returns to ask me questions, but I’m barely listening—I have to constantly attend to the unraveling knot in back of my johnnie, desperate to ensure that our interaction remains entrenched in the nurse/patient category without devolving into that of artist/nude model.

  Suddenly, the “anesthesia team” descends upon me in S.W.A.T. formation. I had no idea it would take an entire squadron to dull my pain. They brief me on my options:

  I can get a local finger block, but they’re not convinced it’ll be strong enough if the surgeon needs to insert screws.

  Wait a minute, who said anything about screws?