Dear colleagues,

Please forgive me for this instance of "extended-self” promotion, but I wanted to alert you to a new general audience book, Situations Matter, written by my colleague Sam Sommers at Tufts University.  While I had read bit and pieces in the past, I finally had a chance to read it on a long flight back from the SPSP Meeting in San Diego.

As the title suggests, Situations Matter explores the argument that people too often overlook the power of situations across a wide range of domains in our day-to-day lives. It’s premise is all too familiar to the members of this list, and Sam has put into print what we all attempt in our teaching of introductory social psychology. Sam’s effort is a wonderful example of several books that seek to bring psychology to an audience broader than the relatively small sample of the population we meet in our classrooms.  But, while targeted to a general audience, the book does not over-simplify - he deals with the complexity of social psychological phenomena with the eye of a skeptic and the care of an academic.  Sam complements clear and concise explanations of some of the field’s most famous (and infamous) studies with lucid, accessible, witty, and sometimes humorous storytelling and examples taken from the popular media, current events, and personal anecdotes. In one example, Sam uses his keen observations of the social psychological subtleties of the television series Seinfeld to humorous effect. Ironically, he uses "the show about nothing” to illustrate ‘something’ important: a perspective in psychology that can help people become better social perceivers and decision-makers. There’s also a personal narrative throughout the book as Sam cites examples from his own life that highlight a lesson we can all benefit from – even as supposed "experts” we must remain vigilant to the ways that situations matter in our own lives.

In this book, Sam has recreated the wonder and excitement of that first social psychology course to be experienced by novices, or re-experienced by those of us who want to fall in love with social psychology all over again. As such, the book would make a nice complement to your introductory social psychology textbook, or a nice addition to your nightstand. And, in the interest of objectivity, this is a book that focuses squarely on social, rather than personality, psychology.  However, despite an inference you might draw from the title, it does not discount personality perspectives.  Thus, it could also make a nice complement to those of you whose personality courses seek to explore the balance between personality and social psychological perspectives on the determinants of thought, feeling, and behavior. 

If you haven’t already, please take a moment to have a closer look at www.samsommers.com or http://tinyurl.com/situationsmatter.

Sincerely,

Keith Maddox