Plaut and her co-authors, Hazel Rose Markus, Jodi Treadway, and Alyssa Fu, published their findings in the paper “The Cultural Construction of Self and Well-Being: A Tale of Two Cities” (the hat tip for the Mark Twain quote goes to them). They focused in their research on San Francisco and Boston, two cities steeped in quite different popular narratives about the stodgy and history-oriented East and new and shiny West.
“These differences are often thought of as stereotypes,” Plaut says. “And what we are finding is that these stereotypes actually reflect something much deeper, and that local context shapes us in dramatic ways.”
Christy Pardew, spokeswoman for Whose Foods, Whose Community?, an activist group protesting the forthcoming Whole Foods, says the issue is “keeping multinational chains out.” According to Ms. Pardew, the addition of a high-end grocery store to Jamaica Plain will result in higher rents, pushing low-income residents from the neighborhood. “It’s a term that real estate agents use,” she intoned, “called ‘the Whole Foods effect.’”
