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Summary Of Malcolm Gladwell The Power Of Context

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Living in fear each and every day is not an acceptable lifestyle for anyone to have, but the truth is that many people fear the safety of their family, friends, and loved ones going to work, school, or even the grocery store each day. It's not a secret that crime rates in the United States are at its highest in large cities throughout the country. New York City has had one of the highest crime rates since the early 1900s. The pressure placed on the city’s lawmakers was immeasurable to help manage and deal with the crisis at hand. In the 1980s, New York’s crime rates skyrocketed, but following 1990, crime in the city declined immensely. In Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Power of Context”, he analyzes and goes into great depth explaining the theories …show more content…

Goetz shot the four men and became a known figure in New York for standing up against “dangerous criminals.” However, in the 1990s when Goetz went to trial court, New York’s crime rate had declined at a surprising rate and citizens viewed him as a murderer and racist for his actions on the subway. In “The Power of Context,” Gladwell expands into his own personal theories behind the city’s decline in crime. He brings attention to two hypotheses: the power of context and the broken-window hypothesis. The broken-window hypothesis was implemented by New York leaders in collaboration with the police department to take stricter action with minor crimes occurring in the city, such as graffiti and small burglaries. These actions taken by the city officials helped with reducing the occurrence of major crimes, including rape and murder. With the power of context theory however, Gladwell discusses the environmental and situational factors that affect the behavior of others. He refers back to the subway shooting with Goetz, and two historical examples of the Stanford Prison experiment, which involved fake guards brutally abusing fake prisoners, and the Hartshorne/May experiment, which proved students were likely to not cheat due to varying factors, as examples of how the environment one is surrounded in can influence the decisions they make (Gladwell). This theory of Gladwell’s that environmental stimuli can easily trigger the human brain to react and make decisions that contradict how one normally perceives a situation, can be used as an analytical tool to define and explain the actions and decisions of

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