Situations Matter

by Sam Sommers

  The real moral of this book, however, is that recognizing the power of situations gives us a leg up in a range of endeavors. This competitive advantage may be accompanied by the side effect of “being a better person,” but just as often it isn’t. Consider the effective salesperson. Success in sales is often achieved by those who best appreciate the role of framing on consumer preference, who figure out how to make the same item more appealing just by pitching it differently. Toward this end, salespeople have honed dozens of techniques that take advantage of context to influence consumers’ thoughts and behaviors. 17 Few of them have anything to do with striving to be a good person.

  Want to tack on a service plan your customer doesn’t really need? First offer the more expensive three-year contract so the shorter one seems like a bargain. Want to make a pedestrian product seem more valuable? Turn it into a scarce commodity available for a limited time only. Indeed, the sales pitch at every health club I’ve ever joined has ended with my discovery that I can take advantage of a special offer expiring later that day—an offer that just so happens to have only one spot remaining.

  Perhaps I was just born lucky, though the physique that drives me to the gym (and, at least once in a while, the emergency room) suggests otherwise. No, I ain’t no fortunate son. And these salespeople aren’t paragons of sympathy and morality. Rather, they’re professionals who have learned to harness the power of situations, to appreciate the contexts that frame how people think and act.

  You can, too.

  In fact, once you start learning about the effects of context on human nature, you’ll have little choice. Once you attend to those situational influences that used to be hidden in plain sight, there’s no going back. Like learning the secret to a magic trick or optical illusion, it becomes impossible to revert to old assumptions and see things the way you used to, through eyes that are blissfully but misleadingly naïve. In short, one of the best ways to combat WYSIWYG is simple awareness that it exists in the first place.

  Accepting that what you see isn’t always what you get will allow you to navigate your social universe more shrewdly, whether the biggest challenge on your to-do list is negotiating nuclear proliferation or finding a new gym. For example, the next time you’re in the midst of a political argument or heated negotiation, take time out before angrily concluding that you’re butting heads with a zealot or hopeless curmudgeon. Instead, force yourself to see the discussion from your opponent’s point of view—even if fleetingly. Not because it will make you a kindler, gentler person, but because it’ll make you more likely to win out in the end.

  The next time you read about, say, the webcam suicide that went unreported for hours by the rest of the chat room, pause before you make blanket assessments regarding the demise of compassion in the modern era. Take a moment to at least briefly consider the impact of physical detachment and anonymity across various walks of life. Then gird yourself for a more proactive response when you next encounter a situation in which everybody seems to be waiting for someone else to take action.

  And remind yourself not to assume that the brief snippets of public behavior you observe in others—whether through your own eyes or the media’s—tell you everything you need to know about what someone “is capable of.” How gullible are we to think that press conferences, paid endorsements, and talk show appearances allow us to get to know the type of person someone is? Yet we fall for this trap over and over again. It’s high time to stop being surprised by the politician’s philandering, the actor’s bigoted rant, the athlete’s steroid use, and the international golfing icon’s . . . well, whatever the hell you want to call what he did.

  The chapters that follow continue to flesh out lessons like these in specific detail, examining the overlooked impact of ordinary situations on a wide range of human experiences. We’ll take a look at the contextual considerations that shape our private sense of self, that color our notion of the differences between men and women, that determine who we love and who we hate. We’ll start by examining the circumstances that dictate when we’re heroic and when we’re cowardly, with particular focus on the very situational notion that when surrounded by others, we become very different people than when we’re on our own.

  2.

  HELP WANTED

  SHORTLY AFTER 3:30 ON A FEBRUARY AFTERNOON IN 1993, a security camera at the Bootle Strand Shopping Centre outside Liverpool, England, captured an image that would have been, in any other circumstance, eminently forgettable. The recorded scene was pedestrian, by both meanings of the word. Shoppers in winter coats carried bags in various directions. In the center of the frame, backs to the camera, a toddler reached up to hold the hand of a taller, older boy. A mundane image, yes, but also one approaching the staged cuteness of a greeting card, what with the older, faceless child standing exactly twice the height of his younger, also anonymous dependent.

  Less than two days later, this photograph was the talk of England for the most unfathomable of reasons. Literally a picture of tranquillity, this still frame had captured two-year-old James Bulger moments after he was lured away from his mother at the Strand and just two hours before his death. James’s companion was not an older brother shepherding him through a busy shopping mall but rather one of two ten-year-olds who would later admit to abducting and torturing the young boy before leaving his body on train tracks in the hope that the death would be deemed accidental.

  The nature of the crime and, of course, the age of its perpetrators, both horrified and captivated a nation. Wrenching questions emerged instantaneously. What could drive two children to terrorize and kill another child? What does such barbarism say about morality in the modern era? What punishment could ever do justice to both the youth of the perpetrators and the heinousness of their actions?

  These aren’t the questions addressed in this chapter.

  James Bulger’s killers spent more than two hours with him before their final act of violence, a time during which they covered two miles, alternately accompanying, carrying, and dragging the boy through public thoroughfares. We know this because at trial the prosecution called thirty-eight witnesses who had seen the threesome together that afternoon. Thirty-eight ordinary citizens who—in the midst of daily routine—observed some aspect of James’s terrifying ordeal, but none of whom intervened and helped him.1

  Some of the thirty-eight testified that they saw James crying. One witness observed the defendants drag the boy and kick him in the ribs. Another saw the older boys shaking James angrily. A few bystanders approached to find out what was going on: in one instance, the older children explained that James was their brother and they were bringing him home; in another, that they found the boy wandering on the street and were taking him to the police station. But none of the bystanders accompanied the threesome to these purported destinations. Not a single one phoned the police just to be safe.

  While it feels easy to dismiss James’s killers as subhuman, to label them as monsters whose abnormal conduct falls outside the realm of typical human capacity, the thirty-eight witnesses to his abduction appear to be unavoidably and disturbingly ordinary. By all accounts, they were regular people like us. But that’s difficult to accept. When we hear their story, who among us doesn’t think, no, not me? I would have done something to help. I would have insisted on walking with the boys to the police station or maybe even picked up James and carried him there myself.

  We’re quick to pass judgment on the character of these bystanders, in the WYSIWYG manner described in the previous chapter. We search for some abiding character flaw to explain their inaction: What’s wrong with these people anyway? Why was poor James doubly cursed—first, the happenstance encounter with ten-year-old sociopaths, then the misfortune of being paraded around a neighborhood inhabited by the indifferent and the apathetic? If only this had been a different city with different witnesses, we think.

  But the story isn’t that simple.

  I DON’T DISPUTE THAT James Bulger might have met a less tragic
fate if even one of the bystanders he encountered had been of a particularly attentive or assertive disposition. But chalking up James’s death to the personalities of thirty-eight witnesses—to the idea that there are helpful and unhelpful people in the world and James’s ultimate misfortune was crossing paths with the latter—misses the big picture. Such a conclusion may be comforting, allowing us to feel a bit better about ourselves and our own neighborhoods, but it deflects focus from the true power of situations.

  Indeed, one of the most dramatic demonstrations of how situational factors transform our behavior turns out to be this very influence of context on bystanders. Our decisions to help (or not help) those in need are the perfect place to begin the effort to catalogue the impacts of situations on human nature. Because in spite of our instinct to label as chronically apathetic the witnesses to James Bulger’s ordeal, there are circumstances under which all of us become less likely to help—or even notice that there’s an emergency in the first place. One of the most compelling illustrations of this conclusion is a now-famous study conducted at Princeton University by John Darley and Daniel Batson.2

  In this experiment, students were asked to give a brief oral presentation in another building on campus. On their walk to this second location, handwritten map in tow, they passed a shabbily dressed actor slumped over in a doorway. Per the researchers’ script, this actor kept his eyes closed, moaned, and coughed twice as each participant passed. Overall, only 40 percent of the students made any sort of effort to assist him.

  But the more striking finding has to do with the factors that dictated who stopped to help and who didn’t. The critical determinant of helping behavior wasn’t some aspect of the participants’ personalities—which the researchers had assessed before sending them on their walk—but rather the most mundane of situational considerations: whether or not the students were in a rush.

  When told that they were running ahead of schedule, 63 percent stopped to tend to the actor in the doorway. Among those told to hurry because they were late, only 10 percent helped.

  Why is this noteworthy, you might ask? Is it that surprising that when in a rush, we’re less likely to get involved in the affairs of others? Well, the most remarkable result from the study was that of all the potential determinants of helping behavior examined by researchers, time pressure was the single strongest influence. This ordinary experience of being in a hurry was a much better predictor of helping than was personality type. Time pressure was even more influential than the assigned topic of the oral presentation—all the more surprising a conclusion given that half of the participants were heading across campus to give a talk about . . . the parable of the Good Samaritan!

  And I haven’t even mentioned the really ironic finding yet. In evaluating the various impacts on helping behavior, the researchers had actually stacked the deck against situational factors. That is, they chose participants you’d expect to be particularly likely to assist others, regardless of context. You see, the participants in this study weren’t just any Princeton students—they were seminary students.

  It isn’t a group that you’d expect to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others. I mean, we’re not talking Wall Street brokers or Baltimore Ravens linebackers or even FEMA administrators. These were men and women studying to join the clergy. Yet dozens of them just walked right by a stranger in need. In fact, when running late, a full 90 percent failed to give any sort of assistance, in some instances literally stepping around a semiconscious man en route to discuss the Good Samaritan.

  This triumph of context over personality—of situation over occupation—is more than just ironic. There are few better demonstrations of the transcendent power of ordinary situations.

  Time pressure isn’t the only mundane consideration that shapes helping. In a study of much lower-stakes helping, researchers went up to 116 people at an American shopping mall and simply asked for change for a dollar.3 A male researcher always approached the male shoppers, and a female researcher approached the females. In front of a Cinnabon or Mrs. Fields Cookies—locations that even the novice shopper can tell you are the best-smelling storefronts at the mall—60 percent of the respondents agreed to make change. But fewer than 20 percent of the individuals in front of clothing stores helped when asked. Follow-up questions revealed that the sweet smells of food court bakeries put mall denizens in a better mood, and people are more helpful when they’re happy.

  Just ask the waitress who leaves mints along with your check—she knows exactly what she’s doing, and it has nothing to do with your after-dinner breath. Statistical analysis indicates that average gratuities rise from 15 percent to 18 percent when candy is included with the bill, and climb even higher if customers get to choose their own piece.4 Free candy puts us in a good mood, but the strategy also works because we’re more likely to help those who have previously helped us. There’s a reason the guy on the street corner hands you a small flag or trinket before hitting you up for a donation—the same reason you get agitated when your chivalrous gesture to another driver doesn’t elicit so much as a thank-you wave. The notion of reciprocity, the obligation to return a favor, also pushes us toward helping.

  Taken together, various studies indicate that context plays too important a role to permit us the reassurance of classifying the world’s citizenry in terms of the dispositionally helpful versus the chronically unhelpful. The same person who, one day, interrupts her leisurely stroll to give directions to the lost tourist may very well, the next morning, drive right by you in the parking garage because she’s in no mood to give a jump start.

  How does any of this help us understand the Bulger witnesses? It doesn’t really, at least not directly. We’ve yet to touch on the contextual considerations that might have been at play that afternoon in Liverpool. Sure, some of those thirty-eight witnesses may have been under time pressure like the students at Princeton Seminary, but others were just idling in parked cars, waiting for a friend, or taking a smoke break from their delivery route. And mood doesn’t seem particularly relevant to our analysis, either.

  No, to more fully understand the “Liverpool 38,” as the British press dubbed them, we need to dig deeper. We have to ponder perhaps the strongest situational influence of all: the effect of being around other people.

  THE POWER OF CROWDS

  I spend hours each week in front of crowded lecture halls. It’s a familiar context that I take for granted as part of my routine. But I still remember my first time in this situation more than a decade ago. Almost instantly, the experience brought with it two realizations.

  The first was that no matter the content, the simple act of clicking to my next lecture slide inevitably sets in motion scores of synchronized, scribbling pens. I learned very quickly that there’s a devoted contingent of the audience intractable in its goal o writing down every last word projected during class. Midlecture, it dawned on me that I could have put on the screen, say, dirty limericks, and many a dedicated student would have kept on writing long after “Nantucket.”

  The second epiphany was that I owed some of my former teachers an apology. Actually, a lot of them. Turns out that you’re not as anonymous sitting in the crowded classroom as you think you are. While teaching, I could hear two students on the left trade wisecracks throughout the entire class. I could see the woman a few rows in front of them surreptitiously reading a magazine. And, of course, in the far corner of the room was Sleepy Guy, drifting in and out of consciousness with the soothing regularity of the tides.

  Damn, I thought to myself. My history professor must have known I was just pretending to take notes on the antebellum South as I actually pondered the more stimulating nature of 11-across. And, while I’m coming clean, same with linear algebra. Intro to Religion and art history, too.

  But you think you’re anonymous in the lecture hall. You certainly feel like you are. How else to explain why—when I’m busy setting up before class—students in the front row feel free to share other audible nuggets
like, “I haven’t even started the paper for Wednesday. Think he’ll give me an extension?”

  It takes every bit of my willpower not to interject, “You know, he is just twelve feet away. And, since you asked, that’d be a ‘no’ on the extension.” As fun as that would be, blowing my cover would cost me a valuable means of counterinsurgent surveillance.

  This feeling of anonymity in crowds affects our tendency to help as well. To illustrate, I sometimes bring to class a sheaf of scrap paper on the day we discuss helping behavior. In the midst of my preclass maneuvers, I “accidentally” drop the pile in the front of the room—I’ve gotten pretty good over the years at maximizing paper dispersion. Though more than one hundred people are watching, it’s rare that any one of them so much as asks if I need help picking things up, even though the title slide from my lecture is already writ large on the projection screen: “HELPING BEHAVIOR, PART I.”

  The power of being in a crowd shines through in my students’ reaction (or lack thereof). The presence of others is more influential than any anticipation they have regarding that day’s topic; it’s a better predictor of how they will act than any personality type. Remember, these are intelligent and personable young people. Sitting across my desk on a solo visit to office hours, they’d help me if I dropped something. For that matter, in such a highly individualized context, they might agree to mow my lawn and pick up my dry cleaning. I am the one who assigns final grades, after all.