Situations Matter
Understanding How Context Transforms Your World
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An "entertaining and engaging" exploration of the invisible forces influencing your life-and how understanding them can improve everything you do.
The world around you is pulling your strings, shaping your innermost instincts and your most private thoughts. And you don't even realize it.
Every day and in all walks of life, we overlook the enormous power of situations, of context in our lives. That's a mistake, says Sam Sommers in his provocative new book. Just as a museum visitor neglects to notice the frames around paintings, so do people miss the influence of ordinary situations on the way they think and act. But frames- situations- do matter. Your experience viewing the paintings wouldn't be the same without them. The same is true for human nature.
In Situations Matter, Sommers argues that by understanding the powerful influence that context has in our lives and using this knowledge to rethink how we see the world, we can be more effective at work, at home, and in daily interactions with others. He describes the pitfalls to avoid and offers insights into making better decisions and smarter observations about the world around us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With a conversational, laid-back tone and a penchant for storytelling, Tufts University psychology professor Sommers explores the power of context, its ability to "shape our private sense of self, color our notion of the differences between men and women, determine who we love and who we hate." Most potently, Sommers investigates the notion that "when surrounded by others, we become different people than when we're on our own." He finds context responsible for why we feel safer (but more impotent) in crowds, why being reminded of gender stereotypes makes girls do poorly on math tests, and how your apartment building's floor plan determines how many dates you get. In prose peppered with pop culture anecdotes and stories from his own life, Sommers keeps reader engaged as he unpacks how self-perception affects performance and how mastery of the unspoken norms that govern situations will "alter the way you think about human nature, thereby making you a more effective person...and navigate your social universe more shrewdly." The book shares its heritage with the bestselling Influence by Robert B. Cialdini. It trots out similar studies and cases, with only a slight twist on Cialdini's original thesis about power and politics. With its softer approach toward deploying these techniques (referencing awareness more than power) and its personal references, Sommers's book is the lighter, more pleasurable version.
Customer Reviews
Insightful and entertaining
Drawing widely from fascinating social psychology research, ranging from familiar classics like the Zimbardo/Stanford studies, the Milgram obedience experiments, and Steele's stereotype threat studies, Prof Sommers weaves an endlessly fascinating discussion of the role that context plays in our everyday lives. We may like to view ourselves as rugged individualists, but the reality is that we are influenced by our circumstances, most notably by those around us. That doesn't make his book a "downer" nor an argument for relativistic morality. Instead, it offers readers a way of reading situations and understanding better why people around them--as well as they themselves--behave as they do. The book covers situations ranging from marriage and child-rearing to the behavior of crowds. It's certainly timely--see also Sommers's blog on "Psychology Today" or "The Huffington Post" for takes on such current topics as the Tim Tebow phenomenon. However, my description doesn't do the book justice in terms of its ability to entertain while informing--it's consistently funny. Even the acknowledgments page has a chuckle or two.
Readers will recognize the world around them in this book, but they'll see it with different eyes after reading it. As good as anything Malcolm Gladwell has produced. A book club winner for sure!