How situation can influence behavior

The cover of “Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World” / Courtesy of KPI books

By Yun Suh-young

One of the common errors people make in their everyday lives is that they tend to look only at the tree in front of them instead of the entire forest. Rather than taking in the context and the environment that influences human behavior, people tend to hastily conclude a person’s personality based on what they see fragmentarily.

In “Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World” by Sam Sommers, which was translated into Korean and published in May, the author, who is a psychology professor at Tufts University, intriguingly points out the many factors that people fail to notice about human nature.

“People easily overlook how situations influence human nature. The core message of this book is that we tend to conclude too hastily about the nature of human beings,” says Sommers in his book, stressing the importance of how situations play a huge role in determining how we act, speak and think.

“This book will help you observe and analyze the world around you with a keener and wiser perspective.”

Indeed, the book offers an intriguing analysis of human behavior with ample research data to back up its thesis.

We all like to believe that we are seemingly objective and that petty surroundings cannot disturb or influence our decisions but, in fact, the different scenarios that spread ahead of us manipulate our understandings, it says.

People assume that beauty helps achieve success but this argument backfires in workplace environments or in the court. When a person who is visually attractive does fraudulent acts, that person received a harsher punishment than those who were not as attractive, because people believed that they had abused their appearance to conduct those acts. In the recruitment process at workplaces, attractive applicants were evaluated more closely than others. Such experiments show that people, without realizing it, have prejudices against beauty that influence their decisions.

In a series of experiments with students on academic performance, those who were told in advance to state their gender or race before taking the test received lower scores than when they were not told to state them before the test. Gender and racial biases affected academic performances.

Children who were complimented based on their intelligence were less likely to improve than those who were complimented based on their efforts. This shows that our assumptions on innate ability hinder our development.

We unknowingly display our gender expectations when saying “girls and boys” to a group of children or giving out toys based on gender-appropriate colors. Our assumptions about biology, i.e. that girls have weaker sense of space and boys are aggressive, can have a negative impact on developing children.

In a group, we are less likely to help others because we want to hide behind the mass and shift responsibility to others, believing that someone else is likely to do it. Mass emails, for example, end up being replied to by no one because our responsibilities are dispersed. Ironically, in a tug-of-war, the more people there are, the less amount of force applied because people expect others to play larger roles.

In romantic relationships, the attractiveness of the counterpart is heavily influenced by the opinions of others and more so depending on how influential the person is.

There is a big gap between what we believe influences us and what we are actually influenced by, the book says.

For instance, we would easily overlook or even deny the “order effect.” The order of introduction can influence our reaction and perception. In an experiment that introduced chocolates in five stages showed the last one introduced received the best evaluation. The effect of the “last” applies in many cases, magnifying the effect than its actual state.

Above are only few of the fascinating experiments and analyses the book introduces that helps us understand human behavior in a macro-perspective. When you have finished reading, you will be more understanding of others instead of criticizing them for behaving in certain ways and start reflecting on your own behavior.