On March 16, Sam Sommers, a professor and chair of the psychology department who was well-known as a researcher, teacher, and colleague, passed away. He was 49. After starting as an assistant professor at Tufts in 2003, he became a full professor and chaired the psychology department for multiple times. In addition, he served as the director of Tufts’ Racial Diversity & Equity Lab.
Sommers began working with the School of Arts and Sciences’ dean, Bárbara Brizuela, in 2007. The psychology department’s faculty praised him for his compassion and kindness. According to psychology professor Heather Urry, “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 out of serious conversations with his quick wit and keen mind.”
Sommers was an experimental social psychologist who studied prejudice, group diversity, race and social perception, and the relationship between psychology and the law. As an undergraduate at Williams College, he took a course on the subject, which ignited his interest in the relationship between psychology and the legal system. Early in his career, he concentrated on the boundaries of eyewitness recall and testimony in criminal justice cases.
Jury decision-making and racial diversity were the subjects of a 2006 study published in the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. Diverse juries represented a range of viewpoints. They evaluated the information more carefully and made fewer errors,” Sommers said. “Trial outcomes can be significantly impacted by their more in-depth and knowledgeable discussions.”
He emphasized the fallibility of memory—and its implications for eyewitness testimony in criminal trials—in a 2008 presentation given in recognition of his Lerman-Neubauer Prize for exceptional teaching and advising. In 2008, the American Psychology-Law Society awarded him the Saleem Shah Award for Early Career Excellence in recognition of this work.
