The Daily sat down with Associate Professor of Psychology Sam Sommers to discuss his new book, "Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World," which was released on Dec. 29, 2011.
Tufts Daily: Tell me a little about your new book.
Sam Sommers: It's about the power of ordinary, day-to-day situations to shape how we think, behave and the kind of people we are. It's really a story about the psychology of everyday life and how context-dependent human nature actually is. In many respects … it's my Social Psychology course in a book. The way I teach that class is to focus on the behavior science and the research studies about human cognition, perception and behavior, but also integrating into that popular culture and current events and personal anecdotes and humor and the like. That's really the way I wrote the book, too.
TD: How did you get started writing the book?
SS: It was the summer that I turned in my materials to apply for tenure here at Tufts. Psychology is not a field where we're expected to write books for tenure. We focus mostly on … publishing in academic journals. Having assembled five years' worth of scholarship in academic journals and submitted that up the Hill for consideration for tenure, it was sort of my post-tenure application present to myself. I gave myself the summer to write the book proposal. I thought, "I'll put together a book proposal, I'll send it to a couple of literary agents, and if something happens with it, great! And if nothing happens, fine." It would be kind of just a fun exercise and I'll get back to the kind of writing I usually do. So I spent that summer writing it up basically. I didn't know what I was doing, book proposals for dummies. I put together the proposal and wrote a sample chapter or two and sent it off to a few literary agents.
TD: What was the inspiration for writing the book?
SS: I really thought it would be fun to do. The other part [of the book draws from my Social Psychology class]. On the first day of the semester, I tell the students that it's going to be the most informative and best class they'll take in college. It's setting the bar high. I'm trying to make it clear that it has nothing to do with me; it's not an ego-focused statement. It's about the material. The material is the science of everyday life and that it has the ability to make you a more effective person in a variety of domains, professionally, academically, personally. Students really like the class and the material. When you talk to people about this material at parties or wherever you are, people are like, "Oh, that's really interesting. I talk about those kind of things with my friends or my coworkers or my family, but I know you study them scientifically." So you hear that enough times, you think there's a market for this potentially, that people are interested in learning about the science of human nature. For me, I thought it would be fun to write, but I also thought it was a book people would enjoy and get something out of.
TD: How did your interest in the book's topic develop?
SS: It's sort of a question of how I became interested in being a psychologist. It was not written as an academic book. It was written for a general audience, but it is still very much a book about social psychology, the kind of psychology I do. I went to college to be an English major and didn't know anything about psychology or social sciences in general. I found myself in a Psych 1 class because everyone was taking it and really thought the social psych part of the course was interesting. I participated in experiments and thought that was really interesting. It sort of snowballed from there and I realized that it has always been something that captivated my interest, the ways in which people behave and why they behave those ways, and trying to study those things objectively and scientifically. That's the same focus that the book has.
TD: What was the process of writing the book like?
SS: You're looking at a lot of it: me, in this room, with that door closed. I wrote that proposal in the summer of 2008, and my agent helped me reformulate it into a more polished book proposal that was ready to go by the spring of 2009. We sent it off to a bunch of different publishers and ended up signing with Riverhead Books. From March of 2009 — when they bought the book — I had a year, until April, to write it. On the one hand, it seems like not a lot of time, just a year to write the whole book. But on the other hand, it's sort of a book that, in my head, I've been writing as I've been teaching this stuff for the past nine years at Tufts and as I've been doing research on these issues. The process was trying to think about what the highlights of that material would be in the most interesting, important and engaging way to present it, and then spending a lot of my time when I wasn't teaching or working with my graduate students on research here writing it. Or at home, when I could find quiet places or time, writing it, just hammering out the ideas and stuff that had been building up for a while.
The process of writing the book was, in many respects, not totally different than the process of preparing to teach that class on a regular basis. I had a few students say, "I read the book and the best part was that while I was reading it, I could hear you saying it." I wrote the book in the voice I use to teach.
TD: What kind of research did you do for the book?
SS: I had to do some outside research into the specific political examples, and the news stories and crime stories, things that appear in the book to flesh out the details. A lot of the research was just keeping up-to-date with the research my colleagues and fellow social psychologists were doing over the last couple years.
TD: What was the hardest part about writing the book?
SS: It's all-encompassing and consuming. Even when you're not sitting there and doing it, you're thinking about it. There are times where it was like, "I have two hours to write now." Sometimes you just stare at the screen, surf the Web, do the same things you do when you're writing papers. There were times I'd wake up at night and think, "Oh, that's how I can tie those two examples together." Or, I'd be literally in the showers at the gym thinking, "Oh! That could be good. I need to write that down somewhere." Times when you're not expecting it, when you weren't consciously thinking about the book, it was still on a back burner. That's good, but also overwhelming.
TD: What are some examples you used in the book?
SS: I write a blog for Psychology Today and Huffington Post where I do some of the same stuff I do in the … book. Talking about this week's political debate and how the crowd's reaction could affect how we see the debate. I wrote a blog post about the whole Penn State scandal and people's reactions to that. Whatever's going on in the news, there's a social psychology perspective to be offered on it, usually. In the book, I have examples that range from real stories of police investigations and crimes that have been committed, to analyses of movies that you wouldn't think of being particularly academic or intellectual. Seinfeld episodes — when I teach my class I often use a lot of Seinfeld episodes. There are personal anecdotes in there, too, frankly about what it's like to be a professor in front of a large class of students and how anonymous the students feel, and how that plays into the psychology of the classroom. [There's also] stuff about being a father and raising kids, specifically in my case, daughters.
TD: What in the book is drawn from your experience here at Tufts?
SS: There literally are, in some instances, demonstrations I did in class with Tufts students. There's a chapter on love and attraction in the book and we spend a week on that in my [Social Psych] class. I asked the students in class to list the top three factors in who they're attracted to. These responses are actually in the book, anonymous of course. In the epilogue, there are three or four emails from former students — all Tufts students — with examples about how learning this stuff affected how they interacted and thought. The Tufts student plays a major role in the book.
TD: This is your first book published. What is it like being a first time author?
SS: Interesting. It's all new. Going to Barnes & Noble and seeing a stack of your books is a pretty cool thing. It's been good.
This interview has been edited, abridged and condensed.
