On Philosophy’s Great Experiment

...People asking for change for a dollar got a much better response outside a pleasant-smelling bakery than a neutral-smelling hardware store; unwitting subjects in an experiment who found a dime in a phone booth were far more ready to help someone pick up dropped papers than those who hadn’t had that tiny piece of good luck...

“Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters.”

From: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10638

Is it amazing that context matters so much? I don't think it is. Human beings have often been described as the culmination of their memories and it seems obvious that memories are weighted by a combination of recentness and emotional impact. The paradigm shift here seems more to me to be about thinking in the broader context of situation instead of just memories. The term situation here should include genetics, conditioning, memories both short and long term, and current levels of neurotransmitters. All of which culminate in the current mental state of the individual.