The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,95
have predicted that going from 100 to 150 workers in a plant isn’t a problem, but going from 150 to 200 is a huge problem? In the phone book names test that I gave, I’m not sure anyone would have predicted that the high scores would have been over 100 and the low scores under 10. We think people are different, but not that different.
The world—much as we want it to—does not accord with our intuition. This is the second lesson of the Tipping Point. Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions. Without the evidence of the Distracter, which told them that their intuition about fantasy and reality was wrong, Sesame Street would today be a forgotten footnote in television history. Lester Wunderman’s gold box sounded like a silly idea until he proved how much more effective it was than conventional advertising. That no one responded to Kitty Genovese’s screams sounded like an open and shut case of human indifference, until careful psychological testing demonstrated the powerful influence of context. To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.
What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. This, too, contradicts some of the most ingrained assumptions we hold about ourselves and each other. We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament. But if you add up the examples of Salesmen and Connectors, of Paul Revere’s ride and Blue’s Clues, and the Rule of 150 and the New York subway cleanup and the Fundamental Attribution Error, they amount to a very different conclusion about what it means to be human. We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us. Taking the graffiti off the walls of New York’s subways turned New Yorkers into better citizens. Telling seminarians to hurry turned them into bad citizens. The suicide of a charismatic young Micronesian set off an epidemic of suicides that lasted for a decade. Putting a little gold box in the corner of a Columbia Record Club advertisement suddenly made record buying by mail seem irresistible. To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That’s why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.
But if there is difficulty and volatility in the world of the Tipping Point, there is a large measure of hopefulness as well. Merely by manipulating the size of a group, we can dramatically improve its receptivity to new ideas. By tinkering with the presentation of information, we can significantly improve its stickiness. Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics. In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.
AFTERWORD
Tipping Point Lessons
from the Real World
Not long after The Tipping Point came out, I happened to talk to an epidemiologist, a man who had spent the better part of his professional life battling the AIDS epidemic. He was a thoughtful fellow, and frustrated in the way that you can imagine someone would be who has had to deal, on a daily basis, with such a terrible disease. We were sitting in a café talking about my book, which he had read, and then he said something startling. “I wonder if we would have been better off if we had never discovered the AIDS virus at all?” I don’t think he meant that literally, or that he regretted the countless lives that have been saved or prolonged by anti HIV drugs and the AIDS test. What he meant was this: that the AIDS epidemic is fundamentally