The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,63

at my readings.”

Why did Ya Ya Sisterhood turn into an epidemic? In retrospect, the answer seems fairly straightforward. The book itself is heartwarming and beautifully written, a compelling story of friendship and mother daughter relationships. It spoke to people. It’s sticky. Then there’s the fact that Wells herself is an actress. She didn’t read from her novel as she traveled across the country so much as she acted it out, playing each character with such skill that she turned her readings into performances. Wells is a classic Salesman. But there is a third, less obvious, factor here, which has to do with the last of the principles of epidemics. The success of Ya Ya is a tribute to the Power of Context. More specifically, it is testimony to the power of one specific aspect of context, which is the critical role that groups play in social epidemics.

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In a way, this is an obvious observation. Anyone who has ever been to the movies knows that the size of the crowd in the theater has a big effect on how good the movie seems: comedies are never funnier and thrillers never more thrilling than in a packed movie house. Psychologists tell us much the same thing: that when people are asked to consider evidence or make decisions in a group, they come to very different conclusions than when they are asked the same questions by themselves. Once we’re part of a group, we’re all susceptible to peer pressure and social norms and any number of other kinds of influence that can play a critical role in sweeping us up in the beginnings of an epidemic.

Have you ever wondered, for example, how religious movements get started? Usually, we think of them as a product of highly charismatic evangelists, people like the Apostle Paul or Billy Graham or Brigham Young. But the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, the Methodist movement became epidemic in England and North America, tipping from 20,000 to 90,000 followers in the U.S. in the space of five or six years in the 1780s. But Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, was by no means the most charismatic preacher of his era. That honor belonged to George Whitfield, an orator of such power and charisma that, it was said, he once charmed a five pound contribution out of Benjamin Franklin—who was, of course, the furthest thing from a churchgoer. Nor was Wesley a great theologian, in the tradition of, say, John Calvin or Martin Luther. His genius was organizational. Wesley would travel around England and North America delivering open air sermons to thousands of people. But he didn’t just preach. He also stayed long enough in each town to form the most enthusiastic of his converts into religious societies, which in turn he subdivided into smaller classes of a dozen or so people. Converts were required to attend weekly meetings and to adhere to a strict code of conduct. If they failed to live up to Methodist standards, they were expelled from the group. This was a group, in other words, that stood for something. Over the course of his life, Wesley traveled ceaselessly among these groups, covering as much as four thousand miles a year by horseback, reinforcing the tenets of Methodist belief. He was a classic Connector. He was a super Paul Revere. The difference is, though, that he wasn’t one person with ties to many other people. He was one person with ties to many groups, which is a small but critical distinction. Wesley realized that if you wanted to bring about a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced and expressed and nurtured.

This, I think, helps to explain why the Ya Ya Sisterhood tipped as well. The first bestseller list on which Ya Ya Sisterhood appeared was the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s list. Northern California, as Wells said, was where 700 and 800 people first began showing up at her readings. It was where the Ya Ya epidemic began. Why? Because, according to Reverand, the San Francisco area is home to one of the country’s strongest book group cultures, and from the beginning Ya Ya was what publishers refer to as a “book group book.” It was