The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,89

study isn’t saying that genes explain everything and that environment doesn’t matter. On the contrary, all of the results strongly suggest that our environment plays as big—if not bigger—a role as heredity in shaping personality and intelligence. What it is saying is that whatever that environmental influence is, it doesn’t have a lot to do with parents. It’s something else, and what Judith Harris argues is that that something else is the influence of peers.

Why, Harris asks, do the children of recent immigrants almost never retain the accent of their parents? How is it the children of deaf parents manage to learn how to speak as well and as quickly as children whose parents speak to them from the day they were born? The answer has always been that language is a skill acquired laterally—that what children pick up from other children is as, or more, important in the acquisition of language as what they pick up at home. What Harris argues is that this is also true more generally, that the environmental influence that helps children become who they are—that shapes their character and personality—is their peer group.

This argument has, understandably, sparked a great deal of controversy in the popular press. There are legitimate arguments about where—and how far—it can be applied. But there’s no question that it has a great deal of relevance to the teenage smoking issue. The children of smokers are more than twice as likely to smoke as the children of nonsmokers. That’s a well known fact. But—to follow Harris’s logic—that does not mean that parents who smoke around their children set an example that their kids follow. It simply means that smokers’ children have inherited genes from their parents that predispose them toward nicotine addiction. Indeed studies of adopted children have shown that those raised by smokers are no more likely to end up as smokers themselves than those raised by nonsmokers. “In other words, effects of rearing variation (e.g. parents’ lighting up or not, or having cigarettes in the home or not) were essentially nil by the time the children reached adulthood,” the psychologist David Rowe writes in his 1994 book summarizing research on the question, The Limits of Family Influence. “The role of parents is a passive one—providing a set of genes at loci relevant to smoking risk, but not socially influencing their offspring.”

To Rowe and Harris, the process by which teens get infected with the smoking habit is entirely bound up in the peer group. It’s not about mimicking adult behavior, which is why teenage smoking is rising at a time when adult smoking is falling. Teenage smoking is about being a teenager, about sharing in the emotional experience and expressive language and rituals of adolescence, which are as impenetrable and irrational to outsiders as the rituals of adolescent suicide in Micronesia. How, under the circumstances, can we expect any adult intervention to make an impact?

“Telling teenagers about the health risks of smoking—It will make you wrinkled! It will make you impotent! It will make you dead!—is useless,” Harris concludes. “This is adult propaganda; these are adult arguments. It is because adults don’t approve of smoking—because there is something dangerous and disreputable about it—that teenagers want to do it.”

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If trying to thwart the efforts of Salesmen—if trying to intervene in the internal world of adolescents—doesn’t seem like a particularly effective strategy against smoking, then what of stickiness? Here the search for Tipping Points is very different. We suspect, as I wrote previously, that one of the reasons some experimenters never smoke again and some turn into lifelong addicts is that human beings may have very different innate tolerances for nicotine. In a perfect world we would give heavy smokers a pill that lowered their tolerance to the level of, say, a chipper. That would be a wonderful way of stripping smoking of its stickiness. Unfortunately we don’t know how to do that. What we do have is the nicotine patch, which delivers a slow and steady dose of nicotine so that smokers don’t have to turn to the dangers of cigarettes to get their fix. That’s an anti sticky strategy that has helped millions of smokers. But it is fairly clear that the patch is far from perfect. The most exhilarating way for an addict to get his fix is in the form of a “hit”—a high dose delivered quickly, that overwhelms the senses. Heroin users don’t put themselves on a heroin intravenous drip: they shoot up two or three or