Research Paper Introduction

Human behavior can be influenced by several factors. A human could be born with a certain human behavior inherited or human behavior can be directly affected by the environment. The effects environment has on human behavior and more specifically, in urban areas, are vital to the human being. Urban areas are the home to some of the most diverse economic systems in which the social class divide it immense. In a single urban setting, there are affluent people living lavish and people barely getting food on the table. Investigating human social behavior in urban areas will help us better understand the reason behind the economic divide in these areas. Primarily, Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the NHR called “The Power of Context" argues that a person’s social behavior and attitude is mainly influenced by the environment he or she is living in. For example, he mentions that a child living in a good environment with a troubled family is better than a child living in a bad environment with a good family (Gladwell 162). This discrepancy exists solely due to the fact that certain environments are better equipped to properly influence a child’s behavior than others, whether it be based on location, weather, socio-economic status, etc. The higher the standard of living in an area, the less primitive the child’s social behavior and attitude will be. The discussion of the behavior of Wall Street workers in Karen Hoe's "Biographies of Hegemony,"  the Manchester example in Steven Johnson's "The Myth of the Ant Queen" and Fredrick Engel's "The Conditions of the Working Class in New England" all contain examples of urban areas and show how humans react to certain environments and surroundings in these areas.Economic divide in urban areas is caused through several contributing factors, but to better understand the divide we must start with the individuals living in these areas. Essentially, people’s social behaviors in urban environments are affected by the environment around them and accounts for the economic divide in these areas. Economic disparity in urban areas is influenced by people’s social reaction to their surroundings, and their social patterns in these areas.