The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,86

word of mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic began, because of the extraordinary influence of Pam P. and Billy G. and Maggie and their eq

uivalents—the smoking versions of R. and Tom Gau and Gaetan Dugas. In this epidemic, as in all others, a very small group—a select few—are responsible for driving the epidemic forward.

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The teen smoking epidemic does not simply illustrate the Law of the Few, however. It is also a very good illustration of the Stickiness Factor. After all, the fact that overwhelming numbers of teenagers experiment with cigarettes as a result of their contacts with other teenagers is not, in and of itself, all that scary. The problem—the fact that has turned smoking into public health enemy number one—is that many of those teenagers end up continuing their cigarette experiment until they get hooked. The smoking experience is so memorable and powerful for some people that they cannot stop smoking. The habit sticks.

It is important to keep these two concepts—contagiousness and stickiness—separate, because they follow very different patterns and suggest very different strategies. Lois Weisberg is a contagious person. She knows so many people and belongs to so many worlds that she is able to spread a piece of information or an idea a thousand different ways, all at once. Lester Wunderman and the creators of Blue’s Clues, on the other hand, are specialists in stickiness: they have a genius for creating messages that are memorable and that change people’s behavior. Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.

Smoking is no different. Whether a teenager picks up the habit depends on whether he or she has contact with one of those Salesmen who give teenagers “permission” to engage in deviant acts. But whether a teenager likes cigarettes enough to keep using them depends on a very different set of criteria. In a recent University of Michigan study, for example, a large group of people were polled about how they felt when they smoked their first cigarette. “What we found is that for almost everyone their initial experience with tobacco was somewhat aversive,” said Ovide Pomerleau, one of the researchers on the project. “But what sorted out the smokers to be from the never again smokers is that the smokers to be derived some overall pleasure from the experience—like the feeling of a buzz or a heady pleasurable feeling.” The numbers are striking. Of the people who experimented with cigarettes a few times and then never smoked again, only about a quarter got any sort of pleasant “high” from their first cigarette. Of the ex smokers—people who smoked for a while but later managed to quit—about a third got a pleasurable buzz. Of people who were light smokers, about half remembered their first cigarette well. Of the heavy smokers, though, 78 percent remembered getting a good buzz from their first few puffs. The questions of how sticky smoking ends up being to any single person, in other words, depends a great deal on his or her own particular initial reaction to nicotine.

This is a critical point, and one that is often lost in the heated rhetoric of the war on smoking. The tobacco industry, for instance, has been pilloried for years for denying that nicotine is addictive. That position, of course, is ridiculous. But the opposite notion often put forth by anti smoking advocates—that nicotine is a deadly taskmaster that enslaves all who come in contact with it—is equally ridiculous. Of all the teenagers who experiment with cigarettes, only about a third ever go on to smoke regularly. Nicotine may be highly addictive, but it is only addictive in some people, some of the time. More important, it turns out that even among those who smoke regularly, there are enormous differences in the stickiness of their habit. Smoking experts used to think that 90 to 95 percent of all those who smoked were regular smokers. But several years ago, the smoking questions on the federal government’s national health survey were made more specific, and researchers discovered, to their astonishment, that a fifth of all smokers don’t smoke every day. There are millions of Americans, in other words, who manage to smoke regularly and not be hooked—people for whom smoking is contagious but not sticky. In the past few years, these “chippers”—as they have been dubbed—have been exhaustively studied, with the bulk of the work being done by University of Pittsburgh psychologist Saul Shiffman. Shiffman’s definition of a chipper