1. The Power of Context, Crime Reduction, and Concepts

2. The Power of Context

3. Bernard Goetz – “Subway Vigilante” "If you're injured, paralyzed or whatever while committing a violent crime against me, that's not my fault." B. Goetz

4. The Power of Context The “Broken Windows” theory of crime epidemics... - crime is contagious - small indicators of chaos lead to more serious crimes e.g., graffiti, fare-beating

5. The Power of Context The “Broken Windows” theory of crime epidemics... - “daisy-chains,” “rolling station houses,” squeegee men, and public urination Result: people changed their behavior, free-rider problems eradicated RIAA & music downloading lawsuits - 261 lawsuits (1 st round, 2004), 532 lawsuits (2 nd round,’05): suggest that you can solve big problems by changing little things: % of Americans who download illegally has been sliced in half (Pew Internet & American Life Study, 2005)

6. The Power of Context, cont’d... “What we think of as inner states – preferences and emotions – are actually powerfully and imperceptibly influenced by seemingly inconsequential... (1)personal influences (the “Law of the Few”), (2)advertising/marketing (“Stickiness”), and also... (3) certain kinds of environments that in ways that we don’t necessarily appreciate, our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances (the “Power of Context”)

7. The Power of Context, cont’d... Kirsten Barrish

8. The Power of Context, cont’d... 1971 Example:

9. Types of Guards in the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment By the fifth day, a new relationship had emerged between prisoners and guards. The guards now fell into their job more easily -- a job which at times was boring and at times was interesting. There were three types of guards. First, there were tough but fair guards who followed prison rules. Second, there were "good guys" who did little favors for the prisoners and never punished them. And finally, about a third of the guards were hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation. These guards appeared to thoroughly enjoy the power they wielded, yet none of our preliminary personality tests were able to predict this behavior (predictive validity was poor). The only link between personality and prison behavior was a finding that prisoners with a high degree of authoritarianism endured the authoritarian prison environment longer than did other prisoners. In 2003 U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners held at Abu Ghraib, 20 miles west of Baghdad. The prisoners were stripped, made to wear bags over their heads, and sexually humiliated while the guards laughed and took photographs. How is this abuse similar to or different from what took place in the Stanford Prison Experiment?

12. The Power of Context & Cheating Example: Hartshorne & May’s research on the concept of “honesty” among schoolchildren (n=11,000) Findings: - Lots of cheating goes on. - There aren’t clusters of “cheaters” and “non cheaters.” situational - Honesty isn’t a fundamental trait; it is situational. Conclusion: When it comes to personality/character, we naturally think in terms of absolutes (Myers-Briggs). but what Zimbardo and Hartshorne & May’s research found is that this is often a mistake. “When we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we’re deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior.”

13. The Power of Context, cont’d... Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), “which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. We will always reach for a ‘dispositional’ explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation.” Examples: (1) the “birth order” myth (2) the seminarians’ extemporaneous talk on the biblical theme of “The Good Samaritan” (3) Studies of juvenile delinquency and high school drop-outs demonstrate that a child is, arguably, better off in a good neighborhood and a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighborhood and a good family. Hence, it is possible and perhaps likely to be a better/nicer person on a clean street or in a clean subway than in one littered with trash and graffiti.

14. Change the Context/Microeconomic Incentives Example 1: prison-ship voyages from London to Sydney in the early part of the 20 th century Example 2: fix broken windows, eradicate graffiti and fare-beating and... Result: human behavior can be changed … harmful epidemics can be PREVENTED and perhaps healthy epidemics can be TRIGGERED UofR examples? -- “social norms marketing” and binge drinking -- computer arrangements and pornography