But in fact, the students’ behavior changed greatly, depending on how they were escorted to the other building. One might assume that almost all the theological students stopped to help the man, especially since the situation was based on one of the most famous biblical parables, the parable of the Good Samaritan.

During this walk, the assistant made sure to lead the students past a groaning, coughing man crawling on the ground (in reality, just an actor). The students were given some time to prepare their presentations, and then a lab assistant escorted them across the campus to a new building. There was an experiment conducted at Princeton University in which Princeton theological students were asked to make a brief presentation on a biblical parable.

Therefore, the Broken Window Hypothesis could be said to take a sympathetic view of crime and criminals: rather than implying that criminals are just “bad guys,” it suggests that bad guys do bad things because of external factors. Gladwell acknowledges that the Broken Window Hypothesis has faced some harsh criticisms (though he doesn’t address the possibility that it unfairly persecutes minorities and the poor), but argues that the hypothesis was ultimately “Liberal.” In interviews, Gladwell has expanded on this point: a “liberal” view of crime, as Gladwell sees it, is that people are products of their environment in other words, people commit crimes because their environments compel them to do so, not because they’re innately bad people. While it’s true that Goetz was a racist and a moody, angry man, it was (Gladwell argues) Goetz’s environment that finally triggered him to shoot at the fatal moment. The Power of Context is a radical idea because it posits that people’s environments are more influential in determining their actions than people’s personalities or innate psychologies. Within a few years, crime in New York City-including serious crimes like rape and murder-had plummeted. They clamped down on minor crimes like graffiti, turnstile-jumping, and public urination. In the mid-1990s, two important New York City leaders, Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor, and William Bratton, the head of the New York City Police Department, worked together to apply the Broken Window Hypothesis to their city. Some sociologists have attributed the decline in crime to new policing techniques, based in a theory called the “Broken Window Hypothesis”-the idea that major crimes (murder, rape, robbery) are encouraged by seemingly trivial crimes (graffiti, public urination, and broken windows), meaning that cities can reduce serious crimes by clamping down in minor crimes. as a whole was declining slowly and steadily, crime in New York declined rapidly and decisively. One reason why the decline in New York City crime is such a mystery is that is happened so quickly.

The tipping point gladwell