Susan Faludi's The Power Of Context

Societal norms are defined by the expectations society has upon its inhabitants. In the western world, for example, it is expected for people to exchange gifts with each other during the holidays. Another example would be that in traditional India, people are expected to marry through an arranged marriage. However sometimes, a person’s immediate context or specific circumstances in a situation might alter whether that person follows the expectations set by his or her society or not by behaving in a different manner. This idea of a person’s immediate context or situation changing a person’s behavior is presented in Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Power of Context”. His theory further seems to be applied in Susan Faludi’s “The Naked Citadel”, an essay

In Susan Faludi’s “The Naked Citadel”, the military school’s gender setup causes the students to become hateful against woman: “Another is the rule that so many of the cadets say brought them to this Moorish-style, gated campus: Girls keep out” (Faludi 73). As Malcolm Gladwell would correctly recognize, this new structured society would serve as an immediate context that would change the behaviors the male students would display against women. However, the change demonstrated by the students goes much deeper than just behavior. These students grew up in a heterogeneous world, where both sexes interacted with each other. So does simply attending an all-male institution only affect the behavior of the students? On the contrary, the single sex society not only changed the behavior, as Gladwell would point out, but also changed the beliefs the students held. The students passionately believed after joining the Citadel that women were objects of hate and inferiority. Their misogynistic qualities and beliefs developed because of the environment they were placed into. The situation they were in led them to not only behave, but also truly believe that men were the dominant and superior gender. This type of change in belief systems is also illustrated in Gladwell’s “The Power of Context”. In his essay, Gladwell mentions how only after a societal change of drastically decreased violence

Sometimes a new situation can create very different mindsets in a person. In Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Power of Context”, a social experiment was conducted where people are randomly chosen to take upon roles as either prisoners or prison guards over a period of time in a prison: “A group of scientists…decided to create a mock prison…half of the group were chosen, at random, to be guards. […] the other half were told that they were to be prisoners” (Gladwell 157). This experiment resulted with the prison guards, who were noted to be pacifists before, adapting violent and sordid methods of handling the prisoners. The immediate context or situation the pacifistic individuals were placed in suddenly caused them to take upon very different roles or attitudes. Not only did their behavior change, as Gladwell would note due to their new environment, but also their mentalities were completely altered when given absolute rule. The individuals adapted to very different roles almost unintentionally when placed in that specific situation. Such a type of change in personalities is also illustrated in Faludi’s “The Naked Citadel”. In her essay, Susan Faludi points out how, by becoming part of the environment established in the Citadel, the male students adapted to very aggressive and violent dispositions from who they were before: “An infuriated father who wanted to