Srini: Sam, welcome to the unmistakable creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Sam Sommers: Of course, thanks for having me

Srini: Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. So As I was saying here, before we hit record, I stumbled on your book on Amazon Situations Matter, which was all about context. And I think part of the reason that must've showed up as I was writing a lot about context and how often it is overlooked by so many of us in almost every decision we make.

But before we get into the content of the book I'm gonna start asking you, what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping the choices that you've made throughout your life, in your life. What did your parents

Sam Sommers: do for work? I'm repeating the question so I can give myself a chance to think about how to most articulately answer this. Cause it's not a question I get often. My father when I was growing up was a English professor at a community college. And so he taught freshmen composition and creative writing. My mother was a critical care nurse and when I was in high school, she actually went back to graduate school.

Finished her PhD and became a a researcher doing clinical research

Srini: in the field. What influence did that end up having on you? Did they give you any particular advice in terms of career paths to follow? Did they suggest things you shouldn't do with your life?

Sam Sommers: I think that for both of them doing what you were passionate about and thought was important was the emphasis that it was not, I was not growing up in a household where it was, you must do professions X, Y, and Z, because you must make a certain income in order to be considered a success.

It was. What are you passionate about? And I think for my father, his passion was teaching and working with students and helping them develop their writing and that's, and doing his own writing. And I think that's what he was passionate about and that's what he pursued. And I don't think he ever sat down and told me that, but I watched that happen.

I saw him in the basement of the old school analog tape recorder, recording verbal comments on students, freshmen composition papers, so they could revise them for their portfolios. For my mother was working with people who needed her assistance and care and comfort and treatment.

And then pursuing that at later in life with three kids and juggling everything that was going on in our house on deciding to get her PhD. So that. Do research on the kinds of clinical interventions related to both alcohol-related trauma and car accidents and and diagnostic tools for better assessing victims of sexual assault and doing that work because she thought it was important, not because it was easy.

And I think I more observed that rather than had anyone instruct me that's what I

Srini: should do. What in the world led you down the path where you would actually. Write a book about something like context, because it's such a subtle, nuanced subject that plays such a huge role in our lives. Because this is, to me, like almost every guest I have is not something that the high school guidance counselor says.

Yeah, here's a potentially good career option.

Sam Sommers: Yeah. I found myself as a college freshmen going to a liberal arts college to major in English or Spanish or something like that. And I found myself in an intro psych course, because it was just the thing you did. People were taking it, my friends were taking it and I thought, why not?

And what that course did for me was opened my eyes to the idea that a lot of the conversations that I have and had in my life with my friends, Mall food court or with my brothers around the dinner table, or just in whatever context about why people are acting the way they were and just human nature.

More generally, that there was a way to approach that through a scientific lens. And that became my career path. That became what I wanted to do. I took courses more courses in psychology and behavioral sciences more generally, and found my niche within social psychology, a field that really has this.

Underlying credo, this idea that situations matter, that very small seemingly small aspects of our ordinary environments and circumstances can have a huge effect on how we think and feel and act. And that was my path. I started to conduct research and I started to teach my courses in this field and the book really grew out of that.

This desire to, to share with the more general audience this power of the context has to shape human.

Srini: Yeah. Speaking of context, why do you think it is that somebody like you could recognize, that early in your life that, Hey, wow, there's something here that I clearly have an interest in and a passion for versus, I went to Berkeley for years and I can tell you, I can't really tell you much about any classes that I think had enough of an impact to say, oh, this is going to shape and influence where I do.

Where I go with my career.

Sam Sommers: Luck, some of it's luck, right? Some of it is finding yourself in the right spots and I'm sure that your experiences and in college, but also before and after have had. I know it countless influences in shaping who you are and the way you think today, even if it's some of it is to reject a certain class or experience or viewpoint and say, that's not for me and so forth.

And I had some level, perhaps I was just fortuitous and lucky to find myself in these classes in a small sort of liberal arts setting where I could really. Go in-depth into them. And it sparks something within me that I think had already been there in some of the classes I had taken in high school and books, I was reading and movies I was into.

And I think we all as goes without saying take our own paths and that, that intersection. Of what's always captivated us with the environments, which we find ourselves that, that interaction plays out differently for different people. And for me, it was relatively early on. It was in college.

I had that spark of this is what I want to do. And unfortunately, luckily 20, 25 years later, I'm still doing that teaching the kinds of courses that at that point I was in. And but we all take different paths and that intersection of who we are as people and the environments in which we find ourselves that's, it's a curious and unpredictable.

Srini: So you're a college professor, so there's no way we're going to get out of this conversation without me asking you about education. Cause I've had a lot of educators here and my dad is a college professor, but the question for me that always seems to come up is, what is working with education as current form, what isn't and how do you see either the material that you teach play out in the lives of your students?

Sam Sommers: Yeah. I'm going to take the cop-out answer and answer it from my level of analysis, because I have the, I was just having a conversation with a colleague about this the other day, I have no aspirations for being an administrator for being a Dean who has to wrestle with those questions about what, what works in higher education.

What doesn't, that sounds like. Like I have blinders on or to be know what I love about my job is that in ordinary circumstances, pre and hopefully post pandemic, I get to get up throw on a button-down shirt and relatively nice jeans and go in and have really interesting conversations with really interesting and enthusiastic students and colleagues and call that job call at work.

And so what works, what's working in academia and what's working in higher education. W what I get to do every day. And in fact, yes, we're in the middle of pandemic, but later this afternoon, I'm going to drive to my campus and I'm going to put on a mask and I'm going to be in a socially distanced room of 30 undergraduate students who are showing up for a purely option.

Q and a discussion section that goes along with the course that they're otherwise taking remotely and asynchronously, and they're going to be there only because they want to be there. And it's not the entire class of 200, some odd students. It's going to be a handful of them who decide to show up for this one session and we're going to do exactly what I just said.

We're just going to, we are just going to have a conversation about whatever strikes us at some level. Yes, it will be tied to the social psychology course. That we are taking, but it very much will be to your question about how we can apply the material from our class to their daily lives. And we have in these conversations this semester certainly talks about the pandemic and certainly talked about the debates and the campaign and the election, but just to talk about their lives in general.

This lens of viewing the world through this this perspective of the ways in which context and situations can shape us that how that changes the way they're viewing their lives and how that changes their interaction. Yeah.

Srini: Cause I wonder, when you're talking to the students, what their sort of major existential concerns are, because to me, you think about it, you get older, the context changes and you start to see things in retrospect that you didn't.

The example I always come back to is Berkeley as this smorgasbord of opportunity that I didn't see when I was in my twenties because I thought, oh, my job here is to get as decent grades as possible. Get a decent job and get the hell out of here. And now looking back, I always wondered what the hell was the point of that.

I, there was no need to be in such a hurry. And I only think that's because the context has changed because now that I've spent 10 years talking to people like you, I always think that the experience of going back would be wildly different.

Sam Sommers: Oh, for sure. It's the biggest cliche is the idea that college is lost on us when we're young.

But I tell my students this all the time, the one that. And let me be very clear. I, my students are often fairly privileged. I'm very privileged to leave this lead this life, where this is where I get to do what I get to do for a living, my students who get to go again to a liberal arts environment.

Play with these ideas in intellectually for a period of three or four years, that's a privileged existence and yes, some of them pay their own way. And some of them are on financial aid. I'm not even talking about the finances, which is a huge part of it. But this pandemic has brought into stark sharp relief for.

All of us, it should have brought for all of us that we in this country and other countries, people live very different lives. And what their day-to-day existence is but for someone like me and maybe your experience at Berkeley with similar, yeah. It was the same kind of thing that, I was at this elite liberal arts college and I spent the focus is on.

Having fun and doing well in your classes. And when I talk to my students now at Tufts I often say to them, they say it's senior year. I'm thinking I'm going to pick up this second minor and whatever. And I'm like, nah, no. I was like, take a class in, in, in artists. Take astronomy. Like this is the opportunity.

No one has ever emailed me 10 years later and said, professor summers just wanted to check in. Now I really regret that. I didn't finish that triple major. No one in the history of the world has ever said that. But what they all say is, you know what, I should have taken a class in. Music of rock and roll or even classical music.

That was my opportunity. I always wanted to explore genetics. Why didn't I do that? I know I was a psychology and dance major, but I could have taken a course in that because it's not easy to do that later. And that's why people listen to podcasts like yours. That's why people buy books like mine.

That's why people love the whole Ted talk industry, because it's this effort to recapture what at some level is lost on a lot of us at that. Younger age, this richness of experience and intellectual stimulation, that one can stop and try to appreciate while it's happening. But we rarely do. I think at that.

Yeah.

Srini: I think that makes a perfect setup to getting into the concepts in the book. You open the book by saying, when we look at situations objectively detaching ourselves from the emotion bias that often cloud our vision, we're better able to pick up the clues that allow us to understand other people and achieve the outcomes we seek.

Now, I think the key words being detach yourself from the emotion and the bias. So one, what, or how does emotion end up clouding our view of context?

Sam Sommers: Yeah, motion serves a lot of purposes, a lot of them beneficial, right? There's research that positive emotion broadens what we pay attention to.

And we build on previous experiences because of the positive emotions that are associated with the successes or the new opportunities and so forth. But it is also the case that a variety of biases can get in the way from. Ability to make the most of our capabilities and the environments in which we find ourselves.

We are we are remarkably good at protecting the self and the ego from threat and setback and frustration, and that could be a useful buffer so that we can. And get work done even after we get that latest rejection at at work, whether it's me sending off a journal article that gets rejected, or whether it's someone, who sends their script or their novel somewhere, whatever it is, or just the day to day rejections and frustrations, we can encounter professionally and personally.

Buffering our ego through all these biases that allow us to to soldier forth and move forward is great in the short term. But we do when we go through life in this way of protecting ourselves from disappointment and frustration and introspection and improving. And just recognition of really what's going on around us, that comes with a cost as well.

And and so a lot of the biases that help us get through our day on a regular basis when you add them up cumulatively can be problematic if our true goal is to get a real, accurate assessment of human nature of our own behaviors of our own foibles strengths and limitations. And I think bias does play a major role.

So what

Srini: role do you know, experiences like, parents, upbringing, culture all of that play, so let me just give you a weird example. I moved around a lot as a kid. And I think that, I think as a byproduct of that, my bias is that probably people aren't going to be around for very long.

Another bias I got fired from a bunch of jobs. I'm like corporations are untrusted. Based on previous experiences, but I wonder, parents and culture in particular, just because of having grown up in an Indian, cultural, like I wonder about the context of that and the biases that it probably creates.

Sam Sommers: Yeah. We're talking about context and situations and environments mattering and having an influence on us and certainly culture is about as. Influential and as wide ranging and influence on us as you can come up with. And so whether we're talking about the different belief systems that, that different parts of the world tend to embrace and then bring with them when they move from one culture to the next.

Certainly those we know from the behavioral sciences play a huge role in, in how we see ourselves and how we see each other and explain each other's behaviors. And the environments in which we first experienced life our caregivers there's a lot of good research out there on attachment style and how the early attachments that we form with caregivers can just can persist and be quite evident in, in our later interactions with romantic partners but friends and not all sorts of social interactions.

And it's not. That parents dictate and determine our futures because there's also a fair amount of research that suggests that once you hit a certain. Parental influence is pretty limited. And it's your peer groups that really make a difference. And then of course, there's the other kind of culture to talk about just the general media and popular culture that we all are steeped in different ways.

And all of these ingredients are a part of the complicated algorithm that goes into. Helping to shape the kind of people that we become. And that, of course, further complicating things. You could have a, you could have an identical twin for that matter, but a fraternal twin or a sibling who goes to the same exact experiences and turns out very differently with some similarities.

But yeah. That was literally going to be

Srini: my next question. You read my mind because, my sister and I couldn't be more different and she's a doctor she's, but one of my friends is your sister is like every Indian parent's dream comes true. I'm like I guess that makes me every Indian parent's nightmare, even potentially my own.

Yeah. I wondered about that. Like how you could have two kids, despite having the same exact upbringing. Now keep in mind. There, there is one thing where the context changes and I. Two major context changes. And I wonder, what research would show about this, like your own research? So when I was growing up my dad was actually building his career.

This experience, he was still doing postdoctoral work, trying to get a teaching position that was a tenure track position. And that didn't happen until I was a sophomore in high school. And also as a result of that, we moved constantly. Like I had been to 13 different schools by the time I got to my final high school in California.

My sister, on the other hand, by the time she got to that, formative age of adolescents, where everything is really influential. My parents, my dad was pretty well-established in his career. She also has had the same group of friends that she's known many since sixth grade. Whereas I don't think I could tell you anybody that I've known since sixth grade, that I would be able to call on the phone and be like, yo let's have.

Sam Sommers: Yeah, so what's going on, right? Yeah,

Srini: that's right. So I, in the context, in that context, how do you explain, how we've turned out so differently?

Sam Sommers: And there's and both the beauty and the V. Inherently vexing nature of studying human beings is that we'll never know. And there's two multiple, it's such a mostly determined set of outcomes here, who we become as people that it's hard to tease apart, even post-talk, but certainly the differences you just identified could be part of it.

Could there be differences in people always like to grab on to things like birth order and gender in terms of how. Teach they are interact with their kids and what they expected them and so forth. That's often at the top of people's lists when they tell you things like I have two kids and boys will be boys and girls, but there's a lot that could go into that too.

But just frankly, the point of the book, just to be clear, I think I say it in the book is not to argue. There are no internal differences between people either like temperament exists and personality exists. And we come out of the womb differently. In some respects I have two daughters myself, and while they have a fair number of similarities, they're two years apart, they have a fair number of differences as well.

And those differences were pretty evident from the start. One of them temperamental. Just yelled at us for months after she was born and just screamed at us. And the other one was, a delight to take to anywhere she would ride in the car without having an epic melt. And th there's a lot that goes into this from genetics and temperament and and personality that's formed through our early experiences to also that thing that we never really liked to attribute.

Outcomes too, and that's chance and fluke and luck and those things are there. And they are challenging as scientists. And I know this sounds like a bit of a tangent and a segue but in my mind, it's all connected. I've been reading a lot about conspiracy theories recently because this is a understandably, a hot topic right now because.

Whether it's politically or related to COVID there's a lot of that going on around it with seaman. And I think there's a, there's an argument to be made that that the people who are really. Unable to relinquish their grasp on these conspiracy theories are the ones who have a hard time coming to grass with the conclusion that, Hey, you know what, sometimes life stuff just happens and you can't explain it.

It just, it happens, a terrible car accident happens or someone dies at a young age or the polling error is such that we didn't expect this outcome, but you get another outcome. Sometimes that stuff happens right. And you just have to deal with it in some people are better at tolerating that ambiguity than are others.

And, I think we can apply that to a lot of the existential questions we ask about ourselves and others around us. When an athlete reaches its absolute highest level of performance, they call that the. When a business reaches its highest level BMC calls it. The autonomous digital enterprise.

See for yourself@bmc.com slash a game.

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And you actually talk about what you say, or as the invisibility of situation, your Sarah social lens is set to shallow focus. We see the world with limited depth of field blurring the background and accentuating in sharp contrast the action upfront. And the question for me that comes from that is how does this influence.

The decisions we make when it comes to career relationships, whatever it is. And how do we make sure that we actually, get a view into all of these things that is a bit more accurate to prevent lousy

Sam Sommers: decisions? Yeah. I do think we jumped to a lot of conclusions. I think we, we see a small sliver of behavior and we assume that we understand what kind of person we're dealing with and that phrase, what kind of person we're dealing with.

Is a challenging one. I, and I say this as someone who feels that he's a pretty good judge of character and a pretty good sizer up of other people. And I think I've gotten fairly good at that over the years but at the same time, we have to recognize. We are only getting slivers of individuals in very selected environments.

It's not quite as bad as watching reality TV where you only see what the editors have packaged for

Srini: you. I trust you. I go, yeah, I've been on a reality show

Sam Sommers: recently. So is that okay? There you go. So you've got firsthand experience, right? I have this conversation with my kids with some regularity.

It's you don't know this. If there's no conflict, there's no show. So they're showing you like the two seconds where that went off the rails, the rest of the hour, it was probably a fairly boring. Yeah, I think in real life, it's not as bad as a reality show, a editing job, but we only see snippets.

My students see me as a recorded image on. Asynchronous virtual lectures. And they see me in the classroom for an hour at a time. They don't see me losing patience with my kids over stupid things like parents do. They don't see me struggling to parallel park on the left side of the road in Boston. And people are honking at me and they don't see these.

Aspects of me. And so they feel they have a picture, a complete picture of me as an individual. And they don't. And so how do we do that? I think we have to force ourselves to, to take a step back and ask am I getting the whole picture here? What's the situation? What are the constraints of this particular interaction and this particular set of circumstances?

Is it reasonable to assume that this person they'd be acting this way? If I saw them. Kind of text. And so I do think we have to question the assumptions.

Srini: Yeah, I think that's particularly true with public figures. People tend to attribute all sorts of qualities. I, I wouldn't say I'm anywhere near famous, but enough people know about me that they attribute certain qualities.

I think, one of the most ridiculous things I ever heard came from somebody who emailed. It was like, oh, you must be the most self-actualized person in the world because of the content you create. I was like, no, I'm probably one of the most screwed up people, which is why I create this content. But it's just interesting.

Cause you see this online in particular, I think where context is overlooked and people, like you said, they don't see the whole picture. Cause I remember I had just finished publishing this piece called the psychology of building an audience on medium and in context with one of the things that came up and I said, look, behind closed doors, I see things on a daily basis that are a PR crisis in the making.

But I would never say those things on air. It's a very different situation with my listeners. And and I think that people, for some reason, don't particularly understand that particularly when they look at people on the. Yeah.

Sam Sommers: Yeah, I think you're right. I think that we when we see these packets per depictions of the internet influencer, which is now a word, apparently when we see the politician, I, I think that we do get that sense that we know people much better than we do, and let's face it.

We live in a psychologically fascinating era. You w when you and I were in college and we took courses with our professors they didn't have, they weren't tweeting. You didn't hear anything from them that wasn't part of the lecture, the formal lecture. I wasn't even getting emails from them.

It's a very different environment now where the, you feel like you have a sense of who individuals are, because you have so many different input points. And of course we don't even know who's helming all of those, the social media that we read for celebrities and politicians may very well not be that.

But we do have this false sense of intimacy in many respects. I think with people in the state. Yeah.

Srini: Let's talk about that, actually, a perfect segue to talking about crowds. You talk about the inertia and action, and you say two things here when no one in the crowd seems concerned by what's going on.

Each of us feels more comfortable with the status quo, contributing to a cycle of inaction that only continues as new individuals enter the scene. Crowds diffused responsible. And responsibility, diffuses and groups chemists. Talk about diffusion in terms of molecules spreading from areas of high concentration to low concentration.

The same thing happens to feelings of obligation and responsibility in a crowd. And to me what's interesting is there's a paradox almost because it takes a group of people to accomplish something. You say that crowds diffused responsibility. So explain to me how that happens and how, how does that play out in our own lives, day to day?

Sam Sommers: Yeah. Yeah. I wrote that. Huh? That's not a pretty good, I liked that. That was good. I the, he, yeah, th the psychology of being in a group is fascinating because groups both make us do things that we wouldn't ordinarily do, or it can help us accomplish things we couldn't accomplish on our own, but they also can in, in some situations, circumstances, Drive us to be passive and inactive and be different people than we would in that regard.

And we can all think of examples of the former the idea. If you want to move a couch into a new apartment, you probably need a group of people to do it. And moreover, you can think of a negative examples of. What crowds do on well on spring break or on black Friday when they can go to the stores, into hoards of people.

And so being in a crowd can egg people on. And if you think about protests and riots and so forth but there's also an aspect of being in a group of people that can be. This this apathetic kind of experience that can make you feel very passive because we spend a lot of time in crowds where we're expected to be fairly passive when you're and again, a lot of this feels like it's pre post pandemic, but when you're in a crowded movie theater or you're supposed to, for the most part stay quietly or a lecture hall or in public transit and a crowded city street, you're just trying to get where you need to go.

And you put on perceptual blinders. To get there. And groups can move us in both of those directions. And it's one of the great and pretty robust findings of of social psychology that we are different. Individuals are our tendencies. Our psychology is different in a crowd, in a group than it is when we're by ourselves.

And that can be used for both positive and for negative the outcomes for, towards both positive.

Srini: It's funny because I think any duke just, came up, he came up with a new book called how to decide. And she said that often, even when people disagree with something, they'll actually conform to the group if a group is, if the consensus is large enough.

Sam Sommers: So there are these, when we talked, I talked about this in the book and there are these famous studies by. Bye Solomon Ash, where they show groups of people, a series of lines. It's a really easy job. Your job is to say, which of these three lines is the same length as this target line over here and by yourself as an individual, you get it right.

99.5% of the time. But if they put you in. That has actors. And every once in a while the actors give the wrong answer. By the time it gets around to you, you've got a choice. Do I give the answer? I know it to be right. Do I break with the crowd and give the wrong answer? And it's not. That were my lists automatons.

In fact, a third of people never in these studies give the wrong answer, but a good two thirds of people do with some regular. Say that, which they know to be wrong, just because what's, it's not worth it. It's not worth the angst and the eyeballs on me and the added psychological heft of trying to go against the group on this.

And I think if we're honest with ourselves, we can all think of times in our lives where we've done this.

Srini: It's funny because I think back to Berkeley and the overwhelming majority of my friends, it sounds like you probably have been in some environments, it was a given that you're going to either become a banker or a management consultant, that doctor or a lawyer, it was, almost like a fast food menu of careers.

And so you never think to question. Whether there are other options, it's almost as if the options in front of you blind you to the possibilities that surround you. Yeah.

Sam Sommers: It becomes important in that example. I just gave you to have someone who breaks through and shows you that, you know what, there are assumptions here.

There are norms here. They don't have to be followed. In that study, wood Ash found was just having one other person in the group. Who's willing to break with the group and give the correct answer Liberty. Participants themselves to give the right answer. In fact, just having one person in the group, break with the group and give a different wrong answer is enough to make me as an individual feel liberated to give the right answer.

Sort of a new norm or a new set of expectations has been authored or you, your eyes have been open to it. Oh, I can disagree with these people. That's okay. And there are many times in life where it takes seeing a concrete example of somebody doing something different to make you realize, oh, there is a different way to do it.

And of course, those of us who can realize that without the example often are innovators and folks who become quite influential and some, successful and even wealthy people.

Srini: Yeah so I think that, was a perfect setup for our next question, which is somebody listening to this, my Blackheart.

That sounds lovely. I have a boss, white, I disagree with it, but if I disagree with my boss or challenge has authority I'll get fired. I think particularly when we have situations where other people have, higher authority or higher status going against the grain seems really challenging.

So what do you say to those.

Sam Sommers: Yeah, it's true, right? The power that structure and status and authority have on us is pretty well-documented. There are ways to. Even with absent the idea of a status difference, if you're in the attitudinal minority, in a group, there are times where the minority viewpoint comes to, to win and that's by being really consistent.

And by maybe having built up a store of Goodwill by having been a good group member who's told lie in the past that liberates you to be a little bit outspoken and go rogue once in awhile, down the road. But it's a challenge, right? There's no question that way. Put in a position where someone in a higher status authority position has a different viewpoint or tells you to do something you don't feel that you should do.

That's an unenviable position to be in. I think more generally in life though, there are lessons to be learned that we can shape the the normative structures of the situations in which we find ourselves. So for example, that, that line judging study, there's no authority figure there.

That's just a question of breaking free from the mold of what other people are doing. I think we can apply that to some pretty simple. Stuff that goes on a day-to-day a day-to-day society these days. Take about a serious issue as you can come up with things, racism and other forms of bias, which unfortunately are on the uptick in our society and in the United States and elsewhere in the last couple of years, I think there's often a mentality that someone has said something terrible on social media, but what am I going to do about it?

I'm not going to change their opinion. Other people see what you say. And other people see the normative structure of the situation based on what isn't sad. And when someone says something or encourages workers to do something that's wrong or illegal, when someone says something that's racist or otherwise biased and nobody speaks up and nobody says anything, there is truth to this idea of it's silence is complicity.

And if people learn that. No one's saying anything, I guess it's not appropriate to stand up to this or to say something to the contrary that influences everyone else. So sometimes I think when you've got the somewhat unhinged relative at Thanksgiving, whether it's on zoom or otherwise who's spouting off something.

Based in no reality, that's conspiracy theory or that's racist or otherwise offensive. You might not be able to change that person's mind on Facebook or whatever. The domain isn't where this is happening, but other people are watching you and other people hear and see what you say.

And I think that our responses do shape the normative environments in which other people exist. And that's an important conclusion to keep it. Yeah

Srini: let's get into sort of two practical examples where context plays a role. The first being loved the second being consumer behavior, but let's start with love.

I think this was one of my favorite chapters of the book, just because it was something I related to so much. You said we romanticize about soulmates under ponder, the mysteries of animal magnetism and deem attraction to magical for rational analysis. We prefer packaged Hollywood style with predestined couples that persevere through near misses before finally landing each other in the end.

And it took a an old business partner to get a good friend to wake me up from that reality and say, life as a damn Disney movie. That's not how this works. But talk to me in terms of context, like how this plays a role in how we choose our life partners and how we can make sure we don't choose the wrong ones.

Sam Sommers: We do have this sense, I think, and it's both reflected in and shaped by movies and other fictional depictions of. Right there being two people, if they're being this soulmate that you've got to somehow uncover and find and I understand the allure of that. It's also fairly daunting. There's by last count, what we have to 7 billion people in the world right now.

And yeah. That's a pretty, that's pretty much the needle in the haystack idea. And what am I supposed to do if my. The thing to my dog as an Azerbaijan, I that's tough luck for me. I'm not going to find them. And I do think that while a lot of people don't like applying a scientific lens.

So the idea of attraction, what draws us to other compatibility relationship satisfaction, that really, it should be somewhat liberating. This idea that. There are circumstance circumstances, environmental factors that make a forming connection to someone else, whether we're talking about a romantic sexual connection or just, close friends or work partners or what have you.

I think that idea that in the right circumstances, those kinds of relationships are more right for the picking than others. That can be a liberating. Yeah

Srini: it just basically thinks, so I, I alluded to a reality show earlier is this thing called Indian matchmaking. And I remember the first conversation I had with a matchmaker.

It literally was like, is there a particular school that you want this girl to have gone to? Is there a particular occupation? I was like, lady, I'm not interviewing somebody for a damn job here. Yeah. I'm like, I'm looking for a life partner, but I wonder from your research, where do you think she blew it?

Because the funny thing about that show is literally none of the couples that she matched were a success and she's supposedly India's, top matchmaker. Hopefully I don't get sued for saying this, but, journalists have said there hasn't been a single match that was successful, that came out of it.

And the one girl she said that would be the hardest to match was a girl who was divorced and, in Indian culture for no good reason, that's basically a Scarlet. And yet that girl is the only one to have gotten married from all the people that were on the show.

Sam Sommers: It's a hard question to answer.

I think that this idea that a lot of people pay money for. Dating apps and websites that use an algorithm. That's say their perfect partner is in the form of that. Doesn't seem to work that well, but we do, there are some tried and true conclusions out there about what does predict and facilitate attraction.

And some of them are so obvious that they almost seem like they shouldn't be researched conclusions, but similarity is one. The, I, birds of a feather flock together gets a whole lot more support than the whole idea of opposites attract. And yes, I know we've all been drawn to people who are very different than we are, and plenty of people are very happy.

Whether they are interfaith relationships or Republican and Democrat together are interracial relationships. And that's not the argument that, no one's arguing against that, but in the aggregate similar values and experiences and attitudes tend to be attractive to us. It's why we often find ourselves in.

Like-minded other people familiarity and proximity are hugely important. Just the more time you spend with someone and cross paths with them, usually the more positive that you are inclined towards them much as the more often you hear a commercial jingle on the radio with time, even if it's annoying at first, there, there often becomes a sort of familiarity and familiarity does seem to be.

Liking more than contempt. And it's hard to operationalize those things as a matchmaker, as a, as an algorithm on a dating app.

Srini: It's funny you say that thinking about similarity I'm I told this woman I'm a surfer and UMass from another girl who said she hates the beach. Like

Sam Sommers: clearly you missed the boat on this.

Yeah. And so exactly. And so I think. Share the ability for shared experience is really important. And maybe at some level that's what they, what the impetus was for her asking about where the person has gone to school and so forth, but that's, it's really a proxy for something else. Again, similarity, familiarity, proximity, all really important ingredients that we don't often.

Yeah.

Srini: I remember a friend asked me about, this person. I was like I'm like, w would you hire Hannibal Lecter to operate on one of your family members? No, that's about fine. That was like my last sort of

Sam Sommers: conclusion about this. Fair enough. Fair enough. Dating, dating and cannibalism.

I got to watch the show. Now. This sounds great. Oh, yeah,

Srini: we'll have to talk. You'll have to email me about it. And tell me about it through the context of your own research. Let's do one other thing, I think part of the reason your work really struck me is when I started looking at purchasing behavior, particularly when it came to purchasing behavior in online courses and watching how people.

Look at authority figures people who are established something and completely overlook the context. And let me give you a backdrop for this somebody who basically is wildly popular online, or has a really successful podcast. Millions of listeners goes out and tells everybody should start a podcast and nobody questions.

To or looks at all the things that fall below it like, Hey, wait a minute. This person has had a ten-year head stark. This person has 70,000 people on their email list to tell about the podcast. There's all these things that nobody can see. Yeah. Even when you read a sales page of course the sales page is designed to hide some of the contexts.

I know because I've written a few of them not intentionally, but I know, and this is something that I always tell people is look, I won't teach a podcasting courses. I can't replicate certain aspects of the context for you. I got a 10 year head start. I had this amazing mentor. That has to be taken into consideration yet.

It almost never

Sam Sommers: is. Yeah. And again, the serendipity of so much, I have two teenagers at home, so we are, I am somewhat fluent in the language of say, tick talk though. Not on it myself. And so you hear about these people who a year ago, nobody knew, and now have literally 50, a hundred million followers and you ask, what are they doing?

Let's she did. You're like professionally trained. And like now like little dances that she comes up with to, to songs, they're pretty easy to learn. She seems nice enough. And it really is hard. And to figure out what the algorithm is behind the scenes, that's making this person take off like this.

And of course, if any company in the world would love to find out, cause they'll do it for their own products or their own spokespeople and so forth. But, and given that an ordinary person in this day and age, How'd that happen? It gives hope to anyone that they can too. And whether it's podcasting, whether it's being the social media influencer yeah, I think it's really hard to you did this, you must know what the formula was, teach it to me.

And, the formula was a lot of serendipity and a lot of turns here and there, or in some cases just flat out luck. And it's hard to to recapture that, to match what you're talking about. Podcasts, everyone's got to have their own style and their own way of doing it. It's well, for me, things often go back to Seinfeld and it's a little bit like the Georgia stanza storyline, where Jerry wants to learn how to lie.

And he's I can't teach you how to lie. It's like asking Pavarotti to teach you how to sing. I don't know. It's just who we are. And and, I'm not a podcaster, but I teach in would the style that I have honed or come upon or fallen into after 20 years of doing this work for somebody else, probably not.

And. I teach much, like I wrote that book much. Like we're having this conversation in very conversational fashion and that has turned out to work, I think for me and for my students, but I don't know that it works for everybody. And it's frankly, probably an easier strategy to, to have be successful as a white male who walks into the classroom and doesn't have a lot of people.

Immediately casting aspersions on my authority and so forth. And so there's so many factors that come into that. It is hard to articulate.

Srini: It just, it makes me think it was like somebody tried to reverse engineer my career path. It's let me get this straight. If I told you to reverse engineer my career path, it would be a terrible idea.

I'm like I got fired from every job rejected from every business school, started a blog. And then by dumb luck, granted there was work involved. Somehow my editors stumbled up on, my article on medium two years after I wrote it. Would you like to write a book I'm like you can't. I was like, it would be the height of stupidity to try to reverse engineer that and think it would lead somewhere.

Yeah.

Sam Sommers: Yeah. And I think just recognizing that as an important. The whole process as well, because it those of us in different domains and very different ways in life, professional, personal, otherwise who achieve success in any realm it can be easy sometimes to lose sight of that. Th the luck that went into it, that doesn't mean it wasn't hard work, but the luck and various forms of privilege and just the, they, there are very thin margins that separate success from abject failure in a variety of.

Domains and that's threatening also, that's a threatening worldview to have. But sometimes looking back, I think it's.

Srini: Let's wrap this up. You close the book by saying, we cling to a view of the self as an independent agent unswayed by others time. And again, we convince ourselves the brief exposures to public behavior allows us to really know someone only to get burned by the point next door turned serial killer or moralizing politician caught with his pants down.

Like I think about all of this and I wonder, if you could leave us with, one piece of advice, not to fall victim to overlooking context, what would you say to them?

Sam Sommers: I think the moral, the book really has to be. Just ask questions to, to consistently be less than complacent.

I think that I'm not saying that you take your 30 year long spouse or a close friend and say and on a regular basis, question them interrogate them about being a serial killer. That's not, that is not the argument here but just the sense that P people are going to consistently surprise us.

I think that it's worth keeping that in mind even your closest to friends who you've known for decades is capable of things and has done things that you don't know about. And that would surprise you. And frankly, I think sometimes we have surprised ourselves with what we're capable of doing and.

I, I'm not, I don't get surprised like that anymore, and I dunno if that's a good thing or a bad thing, maybe that makes me cynical. But I think that I think we have to recognize there is this incredibly broad continuum of human capacity that, that we all have, and we all make choices and we're all subject to different circumstances that are faced with.

Different choice sets. Some of which are more palatable than our others and more navigable than our others. But we, human beings are fascinating to study and interact with because we are capable of so much the, as I tell my students, the terrific and the terrible, just the tremendous examples of heroism and ingenuity and innovation. And then the examples of. Of depravity and cowardice and sometimes from the same people. And I think that's an important conclusion to keep in mind. Yeah.

Srini: This has been fantastic. So I have one final question, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the unmistakable creative.

What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Sam Sommers: What do I think it is that makes someone something unmistakable and just did the thing where I repeat the question again. So that's the tell that I have to think about that response.

I think that we don't know. And I think if we knew we would all try to capture that and bottle it. Back to our conversation about the unpredictable sudden mega influencer on social media, I don't think we necessarily know. I think that certainly things that violate our expectations are memorable and hard for us to.

To forget. I think things that, that lead to an emotional resonance in us are things that we remember more deeply and feel more deeply as life moves on. But again, I think that the unpredictability of life in many respects is what makes certain outcomes and certain individuals unmistakable.

It's the things that we look back on are the people that we look back on that somehow surprise, surprise. Elicited some sort of emotional response that violated some expectation or set of assumptions that we had. Those things often stick with us. We like order in the world.

We like predictability and things that ruffle those feathers or that, that undermine that worldview. We're trying to reach of feeling things that are predictable. Those things are often unmistakable for us.

Srini: Amazing. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story and your wisdom and insights with us, which this has been, funny and insightful thought provoking.

Where can people find out more about you, your work and everything that you're up to? They can

Sam Sommers: find me on they can find me at my website, www dot Sam summers, S a M S O M E R s.com. Stuff about my. Stuff about my research speaking opportunities and media coverage and so forth.

The books I've written a couple books situations matter, and then a book on what the world of sports has to tell us about human nature that I wrote with John worth. I'm, who's a, an editor at sports illustrated that one's called your brain on sports. And so those two books are pretty good insights into the kind of work that I do and the kind of stuff that interests me too.

Awesome.

Srini: And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with.