The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,42

any impression. It wasn’t sticking.

Why did the show fail? The problem, at root, is with the premise of the show—the essential joke that Big Bird doesn’t want to be known as a big bird. That’s the kind of wordplay that a preschooler simply doesn’t understand. Preschoolers make a number of assumptions about words and their meaning as they acquire language, one of the most important of which is what the psychologist Ellen Markman calls the principle of mutual exclusivity. Simply put, this means that small children have difficulty believing that any one object can have two different names. The natural assumption of children, Markman argues, is that if an object or person is given a second label, then that label must refer to some secondary property or attribute of that object. You can see how useful this assumption is to a child faced with the extraordinary task of assigning a word to everything in the world. A child who learns the word elephant knows, with absolute certainty, that it is something different from a dog. Each new word makes the child’s knowledge of the world more precise. Without mutual exclusivity, by contrast, if a child thought that elephant could simply be another label for dog, then each new word would make the world seem more complicated. Mutual exclusivity also helps the child think clearly. “Suppose,” Markman writes, “a child who already knows ‘apple’ and ‘red’ hears someone refer to an apple as ‘round.’ By mutual exclusivity, the child can eliminate the object (apple) and its color (red) as the meaning of ‘round’ and can try to analyze the object for some other property to label.”

What this means, though, is that children are going to have trouble with objects that have two names, or objects that change names. A child has difficulty with, say, the idea that an oak is both an oak and a tree; he or she may well assume that in that case “tree” is a word for a collection of oaks.

The idea, then, that Big Bird no longer wants to be called Big Bird but instead wants to be called Roy is almost guaranteed to befuddle a preschooler. How can someone with one name decide to have another name? Big Bird is saying that Big Bird is merely a descriptive name of the type of animal he is, and that he wants a particular name. He doesn’t want to be a tree. He wants to be an oak. But three and four year olds don’t understand that a tree can also be an oak. To the extent that they understand what is going on at all, they probably think that Big Bird is trying to change into something else—into some other kind of animal, or some other collection of animals. And how could he do that?

There’s a deeper problem. Sesame Street is a magazine show. A typical show consists of at least forty distinct segments, none more than about three minutes—street scenes with the actors and Muppets, animation, and short films from outside the studio. With shows like “Roy,” in the late 1990s, the writers of the show attempted, for the first time, to link some of these pieces together with a common theme. For most of the show’s history, though, the segments were entirely autonomous; in fact new Sesame shows were constructed, for the most part, by mixing together fresh street scenes with animated bits and filmed sequences from the show’s archives.

The show’s creators had a reason for wanting to construct Sesame Street this way. They thought preschoolers did not have the attention span to handle anything other than very short, tightly focused segments. “We looked at the viewing patterns of young children, and we found that they were watching Laugh In,” says Lloyd Morrisett, who was one of the show’s founders. “That had a very strong effect on the early Sesame Street. Zany, relatively quick one liners. The kids seemed to love it.” Sesame Street’ s creators were impressed even more by the power of television commercials. The sixties were the golden age of Madison Avenue, and at the time it seemed to make perfect sense that if a 60 second television spot could sell breakfast cereal to a four year old, then it could also sell that child the alphabet. Part of the appeal of Jim Henson and the Muppets to the show’s creators, in fact, was that in the 1960s Henson had been running a highly successful advertising shop. Many of the most