The Power of Context

Well before the summer of 1977 and “The Son Of Sam”, New York City had another famous murder, which many believe is really when the city lost its innocence. On March 13th, 1964, Kitty Genovese returned home to her apartment in Queens in the early morning hours. As she walked from her car to her apartment, she was repeatedly stabbed by Winston Moseley and screamed for help. Accounts differ, but at least a dozen (and perhaps as many as 38) people heard her screams, and shockingly, nobody called the police until it was too late.

The general reaction to the story was that New York City had lost its innocence. How could these neighbors be so apathetic and callous that they did not call the police?

But the reason people didn't call the police had nothing to do with apathy, and had everything to do with what sociologists term "The Bystander Effect". Put simply, people didn't call the police because they assumed someone else would. This is very similar to why you might not call the electric company when your power goes out. Indeed, your more responsible neighbors will have surely notified the electric company by now and they are already on their way to fix it.

What this shows is that we are far more sensitive to the context of our environment than we could possibly know. If I asked a roomful of people whether they would call the police should they witness a violent crime outside their home, I am sure most everyone would say yes. But we could actually put those people in a certain context or situation, where they wouldn’t call the police.

The lesson here is that we have to put our message or product in the right context and it will have a huge effect on the receptivity towards it. To use my own example, if I were to buy a used vinyl jacket from a thrift shop, many young people might look at me like I stepped out of a time machine. But put those same young people in New York City, and have them witness a bunch of east village hipsters wearing that same jacket, and all of a sudden the jacket is cool and sought-after. The jacket hasn’t changed, only the context of the environment in which the jacket was seen has changed.