The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“The HIV epidemic tipped in the early 1980s, in short, not just because of the enormous changes in sexual behavior in the gay communities that made it possible for the virus to spread rapidly. It also tipped because HIV itself changed. For one reason or another, the virus became deadlier. Once it infected you, you stayed infected. It stuck […] The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.”

When viruses become more “sticky,” they infect more people or become harder to heal. A similar thing happens to products or messages that have the quality of stickiness: More people purchase or remember the message, and it stays with them longer. A catchy jingle could course through a person's neural pathways for the rest of their life, as a sticky virus like HIV is always with them. A virus mutating to become even stickier is analogous to people modifying a message or product to enhance stickiness. Here, Gladwell hints at a theme he will develop later: People have the power to change the world by making surprisingly small changes in strategic ways.

“[…] no one called because thirty-eight people heard her scream. Ironically, had she been attacked on a lonely street with just one witness, she might have lived.”

Referring to the horrific case of Kitty Genovese, who was assaulted in plain view of dozens of witnesses who did nothing, this excerpt illustrates in uncomfortable detail The Power of Context. Something about having a multitude of witnesses to a crime diminishes the individual responsibility people feel to step in. They assume that somebody in the huge crowd must know what to do, so there is no need to take on personal risk. In these lines, Gladwell introduces the counterintuitive and subtle ways that environments radically affect behavior, a theme he will expand upon in future chapters.

“Perhaps one of the reasons why so many fashion trends don’t make it into mainstream America is that simply, by sheerest bad fortune, they never happen to meet the approval of a Connector along the way.”

Imagine a million would-be worldwide sensations in fashion and entertainment that fizzled out early because one cool kid in the neighborhood took a left turn instead of a right and never came into contact with the product that she could have caused to spread and eventually tip. The success of some products, like the Hush Puppies Gladwell discusses, may seem inevitable in retrospect but could have been derailed in countless ways if certain key individuals hadn't made specific personal fashion choices at exactly the "right" time.

“I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.”

On the one hand, the contagiousness of emotion is a pleasant concept that supports popular ideas regarding the power of having a positive attitude and the effect of one’s own happiness on the moods of others. On the other hand, emotional contagion can also be used unethically. For example, it can subtly manipulate people to make certain purchases. Gladwell alleges that news anchor Peter Jennings unintentionally affected voting behavior through his favorable facial expressions when he discussed Ronald Reagan during his nightly news broadcasts.

“It began on a cold spring morning, with a word-of-mouth epidemic that spread from a little stable boy to all of New England, relying along the way on a small number of very special people: a few Salesmen and a man with the particular genius of both a Maven and a Connector.”

Gladwell reinterprets the famous story of Paul Revere’s midnight ride in terms of his insights about word-of-mouth epidemics. Revere was a rare person who fit Gladwell’s Law of the Few: He was a Connector who knew all the right people and a Maven who had insider information that he wanted to share for selfless reasons. If Revere had been a man of average character, the American colonialists might not have responded to the message, and the British might have had the upper hand during their maneuvers the next morning. Gladwell compares Revere’s ride to a similar journey undertaken by William Dawes around the same time; Dawes's pleas of warning were largely ignored, in part because he did not know the right people to warn.

“This was the legacy of Sesame Street: If you paid careful attention to the structure of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness.”

The Stickiness Factor is another of Gladwell’s three rules of epidemics that deals with the memorability of a product or message. The breakthrough of Sesame Street was showrunners' realization that small tweaks in format and structure made all the difference in keeping children’s eyes glued to the screen. By paying attention to things like the length of segments and the kinds of characters that appeared on screen and by focus-testing episodes with groups of children, the creators were able to adjust their content to maximize its accessibility and impact on children. Their efforts show that through calculated effort, it is possible to manually affect the stickiness of messages and products.

“Blue’s Clues succeeds as a story of discovery only if the clues are in proper order. The show has to start out easy—to give the viewers confidence—and then get progressively harder and harder, challenging the preschoolers more and more, drawing them into the narrative.”

The Blue’s Clues example is the most detailed one Gladwell gives in this chapter regarding tweaking a television program for maximum stickiness. The creators workshopped episodes with preschoolers to discover details about the correct order of puzzles and the need to ascend gradually in difficulty. The creators managed to create such a memorable or sticky product that they could get away with rerunning the same episode all week; many children would tune in again and again for the familiarity and to feel accomplished as they cracked the puzzles faster than before.

“The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”

Gladwell reiterates the main hope of the book, which is that change is attainable. People can feel overwhelmed by believing that change is possible only through massive structural transformation, so Gladwell presents a formula that can be utilized in the reader's real-world circumstances. On the other hand, change requires being part of a unique minority of charismatic Connectors, Mavens, or Salesmen, and many of the examples Gladwell provides for tweaking stickiness focus on enhancing corporate products for consumption, not on social change.

“[…] the lesson of the Power of Context is that we are more than just sensitive to changes in context. We’re exquisitely sensitive to them. And the kinds of contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very different than we might ordinarily expect.”

Gladwell combines a psychological observation with a sociological one. He explains that individuals are shockingly sensitive to subtle changes in their environments, which suggests that something in brain structure and chemistry is built to notice and react to anything that deviates from normal routines and patterns. At the same time, he explains that small shifts in human environments can prompt enough responses from individuals to create social epidemics, which are clearly sociological phenomena.

“[…] the criminal—far from being someone who acts for fundamental, intrinsic reasons and who lives in his own world—is actually someone acutely sensitive to his environment, who is alert to all kinds of cues, and who is prompted to commit crimes based on his perception of the world around him.”

The author’s primary anchor for his belief in the sensitivity of criminals to their environments is broken windows theory, which states that distressed urban environments with graffiti and bad infrastructure grant permission to people who are inclined to commit crimes to do so. This passage tries to dispel the belief that criminals are fundamentally antisocial individuals who derive pleasure from theft and physical assault and to shift the narrative toward the effect of environment on behavior.

“There is something in all of us that makes us instinctively want to explain the world around is in terms of people’s essential attributes: he’s a better basketball player, that person is smarter than I am.”

This is a psychological argument about how human beings interpret their world that Gladwell will undermine later in the chapter. The idea that people have fundamental, permanent character traits does not stand up to scrutiny. In addition to explaining how character traits actually work later in the book, Gladwell will write another book, Outliers, that refutes traditional ideas about talent and success.

“Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.”

Gladwell derives this conclusion from research including the Good Samaritan study undertaken by John Darley and Daniel Batson of Princeton University, which demonstrates that theology students' ethical choices—helping somebody who was slumped over and suffering while they walk to their destination—are based on circumstances rather than essential character qualities. The study revealed that, overall, people would not stop if they were made to feel in a rush, and they were more likely to help if the circumstances made it more convenient to do so.

“[…] the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behavior.”

Gladwell does not go so far as to say that inherent characteristics and beliefs add up to nothing when it comes to real-world behavior, but he places most of the causal influence on environments. It would be difficult to measure the actual effect of personal morality and convictions on action.

“[…] it is possible to be a better person on a clean street or in a clean subway than in one littered with trash and graffiti.”

Gladwell reiterates his optimism about the possibility of real change in society. Cleaning city streets is an attainable goal that voting and local organizing can realistically achieve in many places. Gladwell later admitted in interviews to relying excessively on broken windows theory in this book. His analysis omits the role of structural inequality and other socioeconomic factors in understanding the roots of violent or maladaptive behaviors in society.

“What Gore has created, in short, is an organized mechanism that makes it far easier for new ideas and information moving around the organization to tip—to go from one person or one part of the group to the entire group all at once.”

This is the power of the Rule of 150, the idea that human organizations that hover around or below 150 members are capable of having greater feelings of solidarity among individuals and being more effective in accomplishing goals in a coordinated way. Gore-Tex factories limit their plants to 150 people in order to maximize the potential of each subgroup within the company. This is a corporate decision arrived at through trial and error. Beyond corporate implementation, Gladwell explains that Hutterite communities arrived at the same rule for their own purposes, as populations above 150 people are more likely to become strangers to each other.

“What Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning.”

This breakdown of how the individuals who comprise The Law of the Few go about their business also illustrates the dark side of epidemics. This power to change and exaggerate source content to make it more contagious or stickier can have ruinous effects, as in the case of perpetuating false rumors. Gladwell offers the example of the Chinese tourist in Maine toward the end of the Second World War who, due to the process Gladwell outlines in this excerpt, was constructed as a Japanese spy by the local population, despite there being no evidence for this conclusion. The unique powers of Connectors, Salesmen, and Mavens can as easily be used for evil as for good.

“What if smoking, instead of following the rational principles of the marketplace, follows the same kind of mysterious and complex social rules and rituals that govern teen suicide?”

Gladwell treats teen suicide and the AIDS epidemic in a relatively clinical manner as he tries to find the underlying principle that links disparate. The first major sociological study ever published, Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, also set out to explain something suicide in terms of external social factors.

“[…] R was the Tipping Person, the Salesman, the one whose experience ‘overwrote’ the experience of those who followed him. The power of his personality and the circumstances of his death combined to make the force of his example endure years beyond his death.”

Gladwell writes about the powerful influence of R, a teenager who died by suicide in Micronesia in 1966 and who Gladwell claims largely influenced its unusual teen suicide culture. R’s action inspired other suicides among young people. He started a private language of suicide that other teens related to and implicitly understood. Gladwell offers this as an example of an individual’s actions causing distressing change for an entire population.

“Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool.”

Gladwell rejects common ideas regarding teen smoking. To understand the allure of teen smoking and the notorious difficulty involved in making teenagers give it up, Gladwell suggests examining the influence of smokers themselves rather than fixating on the activity of smoking. Teenagers are influenced by the charisma of slightly older smokers who are deemed cool. If these charismatic older smokers were doing something else besides smoking, such as wearing certain clothes or playing certain games, the teens who idolize them might pick up those habits instead.

“Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.”

Gladwell makes a distinction between contagiousness and stickiness. A message or product becomes contagious because of the people involved in its spread. The most important people involved are likely to be Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. Even if the message or product were boring or uncool before, the way that these unique individuals transform the original message or product and communicate it to the world makes it cool. Stickiness, on the other hand, has to do with the product or message itself. A corporate jingle, for example, can be tweaked to the point that people hum it for the rest of their lives, regardless of how they learned about it.

“Teenage smoking is about being a teenager, about sharing in the emotional experience and expressive language and rituals of adolescence, which are as impenetrable and irrational to outsiders as the rituals of adolescent suicide in Micronesia.”

Gladwell characterizes communication among teenagers as a form of private language. The act of smoking with a peer group conveys a message that is understood clearly by others in the peer group and not understood by everybody else. Here, Gladwell is trying to discuss experiences that feel intensely personal and emotional to those who participate in them.

“Those smokers who are depressed, in short, are essentially using tobacco as a cheap way of treating their own depression, of boosting the level of brain chemicals they need to function normally […] Here is stickiness with a vengeance: not only do some smokers find it hard to quit because they are addicted to nicotine, but also because without nicotine they run the risk of a debilitating psychiatric illness.”

Gladwell cites the link between smoking and depression or other emotional problems, especially the theory that a disposition for smoking may have the same genetic foundation as emotional problems. Nicotine can both satisfy a craving and alleviate the symptoms of depression for smokers, making it the perfect drug for them. Gladwell’s statements include compassion and empathy for the smoker who embarks on a smoking cessation program or otherwise decides to quit.

“What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.”

Gladwell’s optimism about the possibilities of change crescendos in the closing pages of his narrative. Not only can people change, but it is in their nature to do so. With just a little help from others and from their environments, people can become the best versions of themselves.