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People Make More Sense in Context
by Drew Robbins
4 min read
Invest in Relationships
When someone's behavior feels confusing or disproportionate, understanding more of their context can help you respond with clearer judgment.
Work gets better when you stay curious about the people in front of you.
Have you ever walked away from a conversation thinking, "What was that?" Someone gets sharp in a meeting, goes quiet after feedback, or pushes back harder than the moment seems to require. It is easy to decide they are difficult, defensive, or impossible to read.
The trouble is that behavior is the most visible part of a person, not the whole story. When we only react to what we can see, we fill in the rest with our own assumptions. Most of the time, those assumptions say more about our frustration than their reality.
A lot of workplace behavior makes more sense once you ask what context is sitting behind it. A person may not just be interrupting you. They may feel cornered, responsible for something that is slipping, worried about looking unprepared, shaped by past experiences, carrying cultural expectations, or used to protecting themselves by staying in control. The behavior may still be a problem, but it stops feeling random.
That shift matters because context changes your next move. If you assume bad intent, you usually fight, withdraw, or start building a case. If you get curious about the pressure, the history, the expectations, or the fear in the room, you have a better chance of saying something that actually helps.
This is not the same as excusing bad behavior. Understanding someone’s context does not mean tolerating disrespect, dropping your standards, or pretending everything is fine. It means you stop wasting energy on the wrong interpretation and start responding to what may actually be happening.
That has real value.
Context helps you take less personally, ask better questions, and hold your ground without turning every hard interaction into a fight. Psychologists have long documented how quickly we explain behavior by character and miss the situation around it, what Gilbert and Malone (1995) call the correspondence bias.
Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.
— Leslie Jamison
I love that line because it captures the humility this takes. You do not need to diagnose people. You do not need to excuse them. You just need to remember that what is visible in the moment is rarely the whole explanation.
Where in your work right now are you reacting to behavior when understanding the context would help more?
Try This
The next time someone’s reaction catches you off guard, write down two things you observed and two possible contextual factors behind them. Then ask one clarifying question before you respond.
Notice What Happens
Pay attention to whether your tone changes when you enter the conversation trying to understand the context, not just correct the behavior.
Share or Reflect
Think of one person you have labeled difficult lately. What might they be protecting, carrying, or misunderstanding?
Keep Going
In your next tense conversation, ask, "What constraint am I missing?" or "What feels most important from your side right now?"
References
Galinsky, A. D., Maddux, W. W., Gilin, D., & White, J. B. (2008). Why it pays to get inside the head of your opponent: The differential effects of perspective taking and empathy in negotiations. Psychological Science, 19(4), 378–384.
