A member of the Tufts faculty since 2003, he studied the psychological causes and consequences of racism
Sam Sommers in 2023. “He taught us all so much through both words and actions, and we are truly better people for having known him,” said Lisa Shin, professor of psychology. Photo: Alonso Nichols
Sam Sommers, psychology department chair and professor, highly regarded as a teacher, researcher, and colleague, died on March 16. He was 49.
He had taught at Tufts since he arrived as an assistant professor in 2003, rising to full professor and serving several terms as chair of the Department of Psychology. He was also director of the Racial Diversity & Equity Lab at Tufts.
Bárbara Brizuela, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, first worked with Sommers in 2007. “I, like so many, was immediately impressed by his thoughtfulness, caring, warmth, insight, and commitment to justice,” she said. “This is a tragic loss, and it will take us all time to process the grief of losing such a pillar of our Tufts community.”
Faculty in the Department of Psychology spoke of his kindness and compassion. “Sam was generous with his time, always thoughtful, exceedingly fair and principled, a fierce advocate for equity, diversity, and inclusion, and the first to inject light into serious conversations with his quick wit and keen mind,” said Heather Urry, professor of psychology.
“He had genuine compassion and phenomenal perspective-taking skills that together made him a stellar teacher, advisor, leader, colleague, and friend. He taught us all so much through both words and actions, and we are truly better people for having known him,” said Lisa Shin, professor of psychology.
“Each one of us is deeply affected by the loss of our dear friend and colleague, and it feels difficult to comprehend how we will manage to function going forward,” she said. “However, Sam would have wanted us to forge ahead, fighting for what is right and showing kindness and respect to others, and I feel confident that we will do just that.”
An experimental social psychologist, Sommers’ research centered on race and social perception, prejudice, group diversity, and the intersection of psychology and law.
Early in his career he focused on the limits of eyewitness memory and testimony in criminal justice cases, part of his fascination with the interplay of psychology and the legal system, which was sparked by a course on the topic as an undergraduate at Williams College. “Combining those seemed a natural fit,” he said. “What really interests me about the law is the human dynamic of what goes on in the courtroom.”
A 2006 paper in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology focused on racial diversity and decision-making by juries. “Diverse juries had a diversity of perspectives. They made fewer mistakes and processed the information more carefully,” Sommers said. “They had more knowledgeable and thorough discussions, and that can have a significant influence on trial outcomes.”
In a 2008 lecture in honor of his Lerman-Neubauer Prize for outstanding teaching and advising, he pointed to the fallibility of memory—and its consequences for eyewitness testimony in criminal trials. “Memory is not videotape,” Sommers said. “Quite often, it is a reconstructed process.” Its relationship to justice “is a fascinating area of practical importance.”
For this work, he received the Saleem Shah Award for Early Career Excellence from the American Psychology-Law Society in 2008.
Racism and its consequences were a primary focus of his research. In a 2011 paper in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, Sommers reported that whites believe that they have replaced Blacks as the primary victims of racial discrimination in contemporary America. The article was titled “Whites See Racism as a Zero-sum Game that They Are Now Losing.”
“It’s a pretty surprising finding when you think of the wide range of disparities that still exist in society, most of which show Black Americans with worse outcomes than whites in areas such as income, home ownership, health, and employment,” Sommers said at the time.
In response to the 2020 killing of George Floyd, and the evident disparities between Blacks and others in the early stages of the pandemic, Sommers and Keith Maddox, a professor of psychology, offered an online conversation in June that year for students and recent alumni titled Navigating the Pandemic: Knowledge, Resilience, Civic Purpose and Engagement.
In it, Sommers said that while he and Maddox often talked about the mechanisms underlying processes of stereotyping, he worried that at some level this focus on the cognitive tendencies that lead to implicit bias might normalize those processes, “and ratchet us back from a state of alert and emergency and suggest … this is human nature, and this is the way that we think.”
His most recent research focused on stress caused by racism, tracking its neurological and other physiological pathways to ill health. He and his colleagues were seeking “to better understand the effects that lived experiences with anti-Black racism have on the mind, the brain, the body,” he said.
Sommers was co-author of the textbooks Invitation to Psychology and Social Psychology. In addition to his academic writing, he wrote two books for general audiences: Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World and, with co-author L. Jon Wertheim, This Is Your Brain on Sports: The Science of Underdogs, the Value of Rivalry and What We Can Learn from the T-Shirt Cannon.
In the sports book, he wrote about rivalries. “We understand how rivalries dictate our passions and motivations. What we don’t always grasp about rivalry is that usually we are drawn to rivals who are very, very much like us,” he said.
Sommers was a lifelong New York Yankees fan, and proudly played for and managed the psychology department softball team. He was also a huge fan of the TV show Seinfeld, having watched all 180 episodes numerous times, and often brought lessons from the show to his lectures.
Sommers received a B.A. from Williams College in 1997 and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2002.
He is survived by his wife, Marilyn, and daughters Abby, A25, and Sophie, A27.
