![](../../images/elements/sociology_logo.png)
![Bookmark and Share](http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/sm-plus.gif)
-
I. The Sociological Perspective
-
Supplemental Resource
-
Excerpts from Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point
-
Theme: Thinking Sociologically
-
Description
Malcolm Gladwell, in his 2002 book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Little, Brown),
discusses how social contexts can influence behavior:
“The essence of the Power of Context is that… our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances….
In the early 1970s, a group of social scientists at Stanford University, led by Philip Zimbardo, decided to create a mock prison in the basement of the university’s psychology building…. [Ed. Note: See Zimbardo’s website for further discussion and video clips of the actual experiment.]
The purpose of the experiment was to try to find out why prisons are such nasty places. Was it because prisons are fully of nasty people, or was it because prisons are such nasty environments that they make people nasty? ....What Zimbardo found out shocked him. The guards, some of whom had previously identified themselves as pacifists, fell quickly into the role of hard-bitten disciplinarians. The first night they woke up the prisoners at two in the morning and made them do pushups, line up against the wall, and perform other arbitrary tasks…. As the experiment progressed, the guards got systematically crueler and more sadistic…. Zimbardo had originally intended to have the experiment run for two weeks. He called it off after six days….Zimbardo’s conclusion was that there are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions. The key word here is situation. Zimbardo isn’t talking about environment, about the major external influences on all of our lives…. His point is simply that there are certain times and places and conditions when much of that can be swept away, that there are instances where you can take normal people from good schools and happy families and good neighborhoods and powerfully affect their behavior merely by changing the immediate details of their situation (pp. 152-155).”
Gladwell concludes, “The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the 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” (p. 160).
-
Learning GoalsThe purpose of this reading is to help students understand how Zimbardo's Prison Experiment shows the power of social situations for human behavior.Back to top
-
-
Things NeededThis excerpt. If students wish to read more they can go to Zimbardo's entire book.
Access to the internet to view the Zimbardo website and video clips of the experiment.
-
ActionsRead and discuss the excerpt from Gladwell. Investigate the Zimbardo website.
-
-
More Information Back to top
-
Creator/SourceCaroline Persell prepared the excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell's book.