The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference [A Book Report]
Introduction
In 2016, Pokémon Go, an augmented reality game, defied all expectations to become a near-global phenomenon. With around 230 million players in its release month of July 2016 alone, and then since breaking a number of records in sales and usage statistics, the game has grossed billions of dollars for video game and console developer Nintendo. Nobody predicted it. Even the game’s developers were shocked by their success. The popularity of the game spawned myriad subcultures and real-life social events which gathers sometimes thousands of people, all around the world. How do we make sense of unprecendented and unexpected trends like this? They seem to come out of nowhere, rapidly gathering up supporters before reaching a critical mass and stabilising into a kind of norm. What causes, say, the rapid rise in crime rates, in particular parts of particular cities, during certain decades — like the crime wave of New York in the mid 80’s? What made the Marlboro ads of the 1960’s so much better than that of their competitors? Gladwell argues that the best way to think of these strange events, trends or phenomena is that they are like epidemics. Mass behaviours, ideas, products, and trends — there is a basic underlying pattern in all of these social epidemics. Furthermore, they tend to be composed of a set of common denominators.
The Law of the Few
It was April 18th, 1775. A stable boy overheard talk of a British invasion on the east coast of what would later become the United States of America. Two men were sent upon horseback to warn the colonists of the impending invasion: a charismatic silversmith named Paul Revere; and an ordinary tanner by the name of William Dawes. They both rode off, in separate directions, to accomplish the same task. Only one of these two men was successful in galvanising the locals to act against the British. Despite his best efforts, Dawes could not convince enough people to prepare for battle. Revere, within a few hours of riding, started an idea virus that spread throughout neighbouring farmlands — and even beyond. And, thus, through Paul Revere, we are introduced to two of Gladwell’s three kinds of special Tipping Point character archetypes required for a social epidemic. These types are as follows: Connectors, the people who bring others togeher; Mavens, the information specialists; and Salesmen, the persuasion masters.
“The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are responsibile for starting word-of-mouth edpidemics… No one else matters.”
Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen
Why was Paul Revere successful and William Dawes not? Paul Revere, by historical accounts, was a paragon of not just a Connector but also a Maven! After the Boston Tea Party of 1773, Revere was one of the men who served as a networking hub between otherwise disparate revolutionary groups; he was regularly attending meetings all along the east coast, from New Hampshire to Philadelphia. The “Whigs”, as they were called in those days, were revolutionary factions — composed of around 250 men each. 80% of these men belonged to just one group. Revere, on the hand, belonged to five! This alone made Paul Revere a sort of paragon Connector.
So, we have just described the first of the three important types of people who make social epidemics happen. The Connector’s role is relatively easy to see: they essentially specialise in people. They have the unique ability to bring people together, those individuals who would otherwise be likely never to meet, to facilliate them coming together, through the Connector’s uniquely wide array of acquaintances, perhaps to achieve an important end. But what good is that if there is not a means by which these Connectors, and the social epidemic which they serve, can have access to information and/or insights related to their cause? This is where Mavens are crucial.
“Sprinkled among every walk of life, in other words, are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. They are Connectors.”
Mavens are the people who accumulate information and then try to collate that into useful hints and tips to benefit those around them; they relish the opportunity to learn new things about their domains of interest, and also to instruct and demonstrate their vast repertoire of knowledge. Mavens are the types of people who narrowly focus in on a few areas and become experts in them. They are those folks who, by example, memorise all of the stats of their favourite boxers, or perhaps have mastered miniature ship building skills and knowledge, or enjoy spending hours researching and comparing the specifications of various types of index funds and investments. Mavens take a unique pleasure in finding out, storing and then showing off all the infinitesmal details of their fields of expertise.
Now, returning to Revere: what made him both a Maven and a Connector? Well, he was not just the man in colonial Boston with the ‘biggest Rolodex,’ as we described earlier, capable of finding just the right people to instigate an authentic movement; he was also part of a secret society created with the chief objective of monitoring and gathering intel on British army movements. He and his cohorts had been covertly meeting and working together for years, aiming at thwarting British initatives to quell the nascent American colonial independence movement. In a sense, he was a military intelligence Maven, operating stealthily, accumulating and passing on information among his fellow agents. Despite his unique talents, however, Revere, the Maven-Connector, required another specialty to light the match that began his social epidemic: he needed someone or someones to sell his idea virus.
In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is a select group of people — Salesmen — with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing…”
This is where the Salesman comes in. Consider the direct consequences of Revere’s ride, in 1775. Surely, not everyone who heard the news was in total agreement with the information provided by this Maven-Connector? As popular and charismatic as he was, there must have been doubters. Or, if not that, then people who doubted the efficacy of going up against arguably the most powerful military of that time, with nothing but local militia? Here, according to the Tipping Point theory, the Salesman’s role is to assuage hesitation, to emphasise the positive, and sympathise, to curate and pitch the proposition: it is their role to sell to those who have not yet bought in.
The Power of Context
In 1964, Queens, New York, a young woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death in front of thirty eight eye witnesses. Not one of them called for police or emergency services. Not one of these thirty eight fellow human beings made a move to save the young woman. They simply stood there, and watched from their windows, as a young woman was brutally murdered.
Months later, an editor from the New York Times wrote on the incident, saying that this murder was the symptom of an alienation and despair which hallmarked population-dense, modern urban life. Kitty Genovese, the editor declared, died despite having thirty eight potential saviours, because those people were themselves victims of a pernicious malaise. They were suffering under the unique, numbing blight of modern life in a big city. Subsequently, two psychologists were not convinced. They sought to investigate.
Bibb Latane and John Darley, both New York City psychologists from local universities conducted a series of experiments to investigate this ‘bystander effect’ (a term they coined). What they found was that, instead of a problem of urban moral deterioration, it was a problem of bystander numbers. If Kitty Genovese had been murdered in front of only a single bystander, their results showed, she perhaps would have had an 85% chance of receiving aid. The chief problem with too many bystanders is that we tend to disperse responsibility; each of us in the bystanding crowd instinctually thinks (or feels) that the more of us there are, the more likely it is that at least one of us must have called for help or will intervene.
“It could even be argued that the success of Paul Revere’s ride — in some way — owed itself to the fact that it was made at night.”
In 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot four assailants on a New York subway train. Goetz turned himself in a few weeks later. The four assailants were largely viewed as ‘thugs’ typical of the rise in violent crime characterising life in New York City around those years. After Mr Goetz was acquitted on charges of assault and attempted murder, he arrived home to crowds of people who had gathered to celebrate his release. He was seen as an avenging angel. The papers called him the ‘Subway Vigilante’ or the ‘Death Wish Shooter’. Again, we should understand this within its time and place: it was one of the worst eras for crime in the country in general, and for New York City in particular. But then, without prediction, within less than a decade, the situation tipped; the epidemic of violence and crime was drastically reversed.
By 1996, New York had become one of the safest cities in the country: subway felonies were down around 75%; murders dropped by two-thirds; total felonies halved. Ten years prior, a civilian, Bernhard Goetz had pulled a gun on a subway train and shot four ‘thugs,’ and was called a hero for it. What was it that had happened in the intervening years? Had the criminals left, en masse, from New York City? Was there a massive increase in the number of police officers patrolling the streets? Was their a gun restriction law passed? This is where the Power of Context is potent, says Gladwell, because it is the subtle, seemingly innocuous set of variables that can have the most drastic effects on even the most developed of social trends.
Gladwell raises the research of James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, who posited the Broken Windows theory of crime. Their research showed that crime and criminal thinking tended to correlate with the physical presence of disorder. Broken windows, the presence of panhandlers, graffiti and so on, these physical factors compound into a sort of a criminality conducive contextual collage. Because, for one thing, criminally-inclined minds tend to deduce that they can get away with crimes if the social environment is unable to take care of something as simple as graffiti or litter, argues Wilson and Kelling. The tipping point factor here isn’t a Connector, like Paule Revere; what makes the subtle but powerful difference here is in the context — the specific, strange, physical force of the environmental factor.
“…but 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.”
George Kelling was hired by the New York Transit Authority around the mid 80’s. Together with David Gunn, the new head, he was brought in to try to deal with the anarchic violence. At the insistence of Kelling, they elected to employ the Broken Windows theory of crime to the New York subway situation. They tackled grafitti first, on a single train. They made sure that ‘dirty’ cars would not be allowed on the tracks. This grafitti-focused cleanup expanded and continued all the way to 1990. At that point, William Bratton was brought in as head of transit police.
Bratton was a disciple of the Broken Windows theory. Bratton initally focussed on a single aspect of disorder in the transit system: farebeating. At his time of institution, it was estimated that around 170,000 people per day were cheating the system by various means. This cost the New York Transit Authority hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year. Bratton’s approach was simple, direct and in keeping with the principles of Kelling and Wilson’s theory of crime. He installed plain-clothed police at turnstiles, patrolled the more notorious subway cars himself, fare-beaters would be handcuffed on the spot and made to stand in humiliation while officers continued to make stops and arrests, Bratton retrofitted a city bus to turn it into a rolling station so arrests could be made within a turnaround time of an hour. In short, by leveraging the Power of Context, Bratton — with the indispensable assistance of George Kelling and James Q. Wilson! — was able to drastically and rapidly reverse a desperately violent trend.
William Bratton was appointed head of New York Police Department after Rudi Giuliani became Mayor. In this position, he applied the exact same principles he learned from his time working for the New York Subway. He stepped up enforcement of seemingly minor infractions, like littering, public drunkenness, public urination and so on. As mentioned above, this had demonstrably and dramatically positive results in terms of crime reduction. Gladwell makes a point of noting that these two openly conservative political figures were actually applying somewhat liberal sensibilities and/or theories here, by addressing environmental, social angles to solve their problems and achieve their goal of a law-abiding, ordered society.
The Stickiness Factor
What does Gladwell mean by ‘stickiness’? It is the amorphous quality of an idea, a motto, an argument or a piece of instruction to stay in the mind of the listener or audience, to hold their attention and to make them do something with it, to make it part of their thinking and/or behaviour, in some sense. The major marketers and commercial coporations of the world tend to try to induce stickiness through repetition and proliferation of their message. Coca-Cola and Adidas spent millions of dollars each year to get their brand exposed to as many people as often as possible. But this is an expensive, somewhat cumbersome means by which to get a message to ‘stick’ in the mind of your targets for an epidemic. In fact, it is not nearly as effective some of the examples Gladwell offers to present his conception of ‘stickiness’.
Against the grain, against the expectations of experts, from several related fields, including education, where it was commonly held that learning something on television was ‘low involvement’ and therefore far less effective as a teaching tool for young learners, Sesame Street became a literacy education epidemic and a wildly successful show. Joan Ganz Cooney, a television producer, with Gerald Lesser, a Harvard University psychologist, and Lloyd Morissett, an experimental psychologist, mastered the means of making small, subtle but impacting adjustments to the presentation of their learning material on television, such that pre-schoolers could overcome the obvious weakness of TV as a learning tool. In short, these three people figured out how to make television ‘sticky’.
Several studies were done on Sesame Street. Many focussed on the effects it had on concentration and literacy outcomes. Barbara Flagg, of Harvard University, for example, was called to track the eyes movement of kids as they watched certain sequences of the show, to see where their attention went and was held. The subtle choices that the directors made, in lieu of their own psychological research, heuristics and hunches, proved to be demonstrably effective. The producers experimented with various applications of the same learning material, to make it longer or shorter, to blend reality into the fictional world or not. They noticed that children tended to prefer to follow along a narrative, for example, and, that they preferred to feel involved, even if in seemingly unimportant ways. Suffice to say, the legacy of the success of Sesame Street was this: stickiness could be improved substantially through meticulously tinkering, while observing attention tendencies in the audience, with the format, presentation and structure of your material.
The hit children’s show, Blue’s Clues, might not seem like it, but it is, in some sense, the spiritual successor to Sesame Street. It took some key concepts, while keeping in mind the wealth of psychological research that had been yielded from examining the show itself, and its effects on children, and the development of childhood psychology. Children, it was found, despite what the famous psychologist Jean Piaget contended, could indeed follow along a narrative. In fact, it was one of the salient points to keep their attention. So, the producers of Blue Clues tried to take the sticky elements of Sesame Street and make them even more efficient. They stripped the show construction down to basic elements, kept the host right in front of the camera, talking into the lens, directly to children; they eschewed content catering to adults, incorporated more audience participation, including long pauses after prompts from the host. Finally, and perhaps crucially, repetition was employed. That is, not only within an episode itself, but, whole episodes were played, on repeat.
“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 goes on to cite another case studies of stickiness in effect. Howard Levanthal, a Yale University professor indirectly discovered stickiness in his so-called Fear Experiments, where he tested the likelihood of students to get Tetanus shots depending on the fearfulness of the instructions they received. The surprising deciding factor wasn’t high-fear vs low-fear presentations; it was the presence of a map to the clinic and of a timetable, whereby students could pragmatically orient themselves for an inoculation, that was the major difference between those who decided to get inocluated and those who did not. Again, the stickiness of one presentation made more of an impact.
Conclusion
Gladwell argues that the theory of Tipping Points requires us to reframe the manner in which we think about the world and the events, trends and people within it. In a human-populated reality, with human idosyncracies at play, the answers to problems are very rarely straightforward; we are almost always, in any given situation, dealing with myriad opaque factors, subtle variables, errors in appraisal, and ambivalent human minds. We metabolize reality, think and function and communicate in a complex, ever-changing set of contexts. And, crucially, these contexts matter — they frame, they influence, they change the way we think and act. Furthermore, it only takes a small orientation of special people to tip an epidemic. And finally, there is a subtle quality that holds our attention and makes us inclined to act, a ‘stickiness’, about a mind-virus that is as important as the other laws of the theory of Tipping Points.
