The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,105
year olds were still doing better in school than those who didn’t. Even after controlling for things like parent’s education, family size, and preschool vocabulary level, the Sesame Street watchers did better in high school in English, math, and science and they were also much more likely to read books for leisure than those who didn’t watch the show, or who watched the show less. According to the study, for every hour per week of Sesame Street viewing, high school grade point averages increased by .052, which means that a child who watched five hours of Sesame Street a week at age five was earning, on average, about one quarter of a grade level higher than a child of similar background who never watched the show. Somehow a single television show an hour long, watched over the course of no more than two or three years, was still making a difference twelve and fifteen years later.
This research is summarized in “Effects of Early Childhood Media Use on Adolescent Achievement” by the “Recontact” Project of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Kansas, Lawrence (1995).
See also: John C. Wright and Aletha C. Huston, “Effects of educational TV viewing of lower income preschoolers on academic skills, school readiness, and school adjustment one to three years later,” A Report to Children’s Television Workshop, University of Kansas (1995).
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Lester Wunderman has written a perfectly wonderful autobiography that tells the story of Columbia Record House and many other tales of direct marketing.
Lester Wunderman, Being Direct: Making Advertising Pay (New York: Random House, 1996), chapters 10 and 11.
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Howard Levanthal, Robert Singer, and Susan Jones, “Effects on Fear and Specificity of Recommendation Upon Attitudes and Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1965), vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 20–29.
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The best summary of the “active” theory of television watching is:
Daniel Anderson and Elizabeth Lorch, “Looking at Television: Action or Reaction?” in Children’s Understanding of Television: Research on Attention and Comprehension (New York: Academic Press, 1983).
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Palmer’s work is written up in a number of places. For example: Edward Palmer, “Formative Research in Educational Television Production: The Experience of CTW,” in W. Schramm (ed.), Quality in Instructional Television (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1972), pp. 165–187.
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Barbara Flagg’s eye movement research on “Oscar’s Blending” and “Hug” is summarized in Barbara N. Flagg, “Formative Evaluation of Sesame Street Using Eye Movement Photography,” in J. Baggaley (ed.), Experimental Research in Televised Instruction, vol. 5 (Montreal, Canada: Concordia Research, 1982).
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Ellen Markman, Categorization and Naming in Children (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
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Nelson, Katherine (ed.), Narratives from the Crib (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). See essays by Bruner and Lucariello, and Feldman.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE POWER OF CONTEXT (PART ONE)
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The best accounts of the Goetz shooting can be found in: George P. Fletcher, A Crime of Self Defense (New York: Free Press, 1988).
Also: Lillian Rubin, Quiet Rage: Bernie Goetz in a Time of Madness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).
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For a good summary of New York City crime statistics see: Michael Massing, “The Blue Revolution,” in New York Review of Books, November 19, 1998, pp. 32–34.
William Bratton, Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 141.
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Malcolm Gladwell, “The Tipping Point,” The New Yorker, June 3, 1996, pp. 32–39. This article is archived at www.gladwell.com. There is another good discussion of the anomalous nature of the New York crime drop in William Bratton and William Andrews, “What We’ve Learned About Policing,” in City Journal, Spring 1999, p. 25.
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George L. Kelling and Catherine M. Coles, Fixing Broken Windows (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 20.
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The description of the Zimbardo experiments comes from Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology (1973), no. 1, p. 73. The quotes from guards and Zimbardo come from CBS 60 Minutes, August 30, 1998, “The Stanford Prison Experiment.”
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For a good summary of the cheating experiments on schoolchildren, see: Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May, “Studies in the Organization of Character,” in H. Munsinger (ed.), Readings in Child Development (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 190–197.
Their complete findings can be found in Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May, Studies in the Nature of Character, vol. 1, Studies in Deceit (New York: Macmillan, 1928).
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The vervet and card game work is described in Robin Dunbar, The Trouble with Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapters six and seven.