The Power of Context by Malcolm Gladwell essay
The Tipping Point is the debut work of a famous American marketer Malcolm Gladwell which explores the mechanisms of emergence and development of social epidemics. It is about how using tipping points any person can radically change one’s life; the author also provides an answer to the question of why certain information (like habits or fashion) takes possession of the society or is rejected by it despite the efforts of advertisers. M. Gladwell compares the distribution of ideas, goods, information and behaviors with viruses. But according to the author, not all the changes are epidemic in their nature. The latter include those that develop non-linearly and have a tipping point that makes the changes avalanche-like. The author identifies several ways to give impetus to the spread of infection united in one concept of a “tipping point” (the moment of accumulated critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point): the law of the few, the stickiness factor, the power of context.
Thus, the law of the few is related to the type of people who play a crucial role in the dissemination of information. For the epidemic to be launched the ideas must be easy to remember and galvanize us to action (the stickiness factor). However, the subject we are currently considering in this paper – the power of context – is no less important than the first two ones. Gladwell argues that epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of time and place in which they occur, and the law of the power of context shows that we are more than receptive to changes in external conditions (Gladwell 294). In addition, the types of changes that can start an epidemic are too different from what we are used to believe in.
Explaining the power of context on an example of crime rates, Gladwell (289), first of all, relies on the broken windows theory by criminologists James C. Wilson and George Kelling, who argued that the crime is the inevitable result of the lack of order, and eventually the broken and unglazed windows, graffiti, petty extortion and ticketless travel escalate into all-encompassing sense of impunity pushing to more serious crimes. In this sense, Gladwell’s theory on power of contexts stands out as an ambitious social ecological theory which asserts that the behavior is a product of the existing social context where real influence is rather produced by little things than social macrostructures like political regimes or social stratification situation.
Considering such examples like Bernie Goetz incident, one cannot but agree that there is an enormous difference between the propensity to violence and actual act of violence. As it is correctly noted by Gladwell (299), for such a going beyond the norms event as a crime to be committed something else coming from the outside should happen that would push a disadvantaged person to violence. At the moment, there are a large number of schools incriminology explaining the underlying causes of crime. However, there is still no common points of view on many issues, as well as none of the existing biological, psychological and sociological theories provides an exhaustive explanation of all kinds of crimes despite their attempts to search for answers both in and out of human body, starting from gene mutations and up to state poverty levels. Gladwell, who rather belongs to the supporters of the latter approach and could join the row of the recognized theorists in this field like Edwin H. Sutherland or Robert K. Merton, demonstrates a tend to emphasize the relationship of conformity and deviations in different social contexts.
Thus, according to Gladwell, it is the context, i.e. specific and relatively small elements of the social environment that may become the turning points such as the mundane daily evidence of the disorder – graffiti and ticketless travel.
However, in this case, it is logical to assume that this mechanism has the retroactive effect as well, as shown by the example of subway system transformation. Removing signals that encourage crime – erasing graffiti, glazing the broken windows and arresting a number of “fare dodgers”, it is possible to turn back the epidemic of crime. In this part, Gladwell’s work clearly contains the humanist message of the Enlightenment thinkers: man is weak, but not vicious; give one a decent education and society based on reason, and crime will disappear as such. However, it should be also marked that the reasons for the decline of crime in New York and whole United States in the mid-1990’s are most often associated with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to legalize abortion, due to which women from ghettos and poor areas such as Harlem could refrain from giving birth to a predeterminedly poor and uneducated individuals, who based of these assumptions would have been likely to become criminals in future. At the same time, despite of the certain lack of scientific proof, Gladwell’s findings have a rational kernel, and his ideas have the right to be probed in future studies of behavioral psychologists.
By now, the power of the social context in individual psychology is partly confirmed by the well-known Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment, in which 21 normal college students were selected as prison guards and prisoners in a conditional “prison” in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department. Students were getting more and more into their characters; “guards” became increasingly sadistic and the “prisoners” more passive and showing signs of extreme depression. The results of the experiment were used to demonstrate the sensitivity and obedience of people when there is a justifying ideology supported by society and the State. In psychology, the experimental results are also used to demonstrate the situational factors of human behavior as opposed to personal ones. In other words, it seems that the situation affects a person’s behavior more than the intrinsic properties of the individual. In this sense, it is similar to the result of a well-known Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people obey the orders against their own wish, and thus become accomplices of the experimenter. Both researches also serve as a proof for Gladwell’s argument on the fundamental attribution error, consisting in overestimating the fundamentality of the character traits and underestimating the importance of the environment and context (Gladwell 296).
Indeed, in the scientific community there are constantly going discussions about the experiments that revealed man’s inclination to obedience and conformity through the possibilities of social influence (like the Darley-Batson Good Samaritan experiment Gladwell also refers to), as well as researches on the extent of influence of genetic factors on the properties of the personality. Despite the fundamental difference between the approaches in their basis, it is still rather two sides of the same coin equally present in human nature. The overall conclusion is extremely simple, and it the conclusion Gladwell comes to: we cannot even imagine how fast and dramatically the context can change our identity.
In the essence, Gladwell follows the ideas of Ross and Nisbett, Cialdini, Aronson and Myers saying that man is rather a situational creature and one’s behavior can be fully ruled by the situation. Theorists agree in thinking that the situation sets in motion a lot of automatisms and stereotypical reactions and is an effective tool of changing not only behavior but also deep personal structures like a system of values. Here, Gladwell contributes by stressing that the details characterizing the specificity of the situation are of fundamental importance. Inability to recognize subtle situational context and the existing external influence or pressure, as well as the fundamental attribution error can lead a person through automatic responding to a distinctly built set of socially relevant stimuli to a depending position, both on an individual person and on the group of people.
However, the main positive idea to be derived from Gladwell’s ratiocinations is that all the above mentioned factors are not just actively exploited in a destructive cult , but may also be used to enhance the control in the society and prevent the spread of negative trends, when the power of little things in a well-built situation will force a man to quickly make a specific right decision which will be further treated as one’s own internal choice, it will become the tipping point to a total change of personality.
