Power and Context

In the short essay “Power of Context” the author Malcolm Gladwell did a good job in showing how people will act differently in curtain environments. It is really true that if the building you are in or the classroom that you have to go to will make you not want to go to it just because of how it looks. I thought it was interesting how he talked about the crime rates declining in New York City just because of a subway car being cleaned and not full of graffiti. It is kind of weird to think that just by changing something as insignificant as graffiti will have an effect on something as big as the crime rate.
I used to think that crime was an unusual thing that never happened here in Montana. Then I took a trip to Phoenix Arizona one summer to visit my aunt. While I was there I saw how crime is a really big issue in larger cities. We were just sitting out in her yard on evening, and in the hour that we were out there I probably heard eight gun shots go off that weren’t close to us but they were towards the main part of the city. At first I didn’t think anything of it because here in Montana when you here a shot go off it’s usually somebody hunting in a nearby farm. Then it hit me that the shots I was hearing weren’t hunting shots. And it really shocked me.

When the author talked about the experiments of when the university took the volunteers to do a study, if made me think of how these people would change do to the kind of people they were around. This I thought was a bit much of an experiment to find out how they reacted, but it proved that in prisons some people are probably good and just act nasty do to the bad guys that are around them.

I would have to agree with one of the statements that the author said and it is” A crime is relatively rare and aberrant event. For a crime to be committed something extra has to happen to tip a troubled person into towards violence, these tipping points could be as simple as graffiti.” I think that if a person is really mad about something that has happened to them, that they are already on the verge of freaking out and if something simple that would normally not make anyone mad would cause this person to go off the hook.

In the essay, I thought it did a good job in having curtain examples of how people will act differently in curtain places and situations. Just by changing the appearance of a building or whatever will have some sort of affect on the entire picture no matter big of an issue it is.