Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

by Malcolm Gladwell

Revenge of the Tipping Point is an attempt to do a forensic investigation of social epidemics.

Social epidemics are propelled by the efforts of an exceptional few—people who play outsize social roles—

In epidemiology there is a term called the “index case,” which refers to the person who kicks off an epidemic.

How your doctor treats you, in many cases, has less to do with where your doctor was trained, or how well he or she did in medical school, or what kind of personality your doctor has, than with where your doctor lives.

What he found instead were medical clusters, where the doctors in one hospital district took on a common identity, as if they had all been infected by the same contagious idea.

Whatever contagious belief unites the people in those instances has the discipline to stop at the borders of their community. There must be a set of rules, buried somewhere below the surface.

The Waldorf school casts a spell over its members, and the longer you stay at a Waldorf, the deeper the hold the spell has on you.

Actually, the word story isn’t quite right. A better word is overstory. An overstory is the upper layer of foliage in a forest, and the size and density and height of the overstory affect the behavior and development of every species far below on the forest floor. I think that small-area variation—such as what distinguishes Waldorf schools from other schools and what sets Boulder apart from Buffalo—is more like an overstory than a story. It’s not something explicit that’s drilled into every inhabitant. The overstory is made up of things way up in the air, in many cases outside our awareness. We tend to forget about the overstory because we’re so focused on the life going on in front of and around us. But overstories turn out to be really, really powerful.

In medicine there is a term for the kind of illness that is caused by the intervention of doctors: iatrogenesis. You treat someone with a drug, and the side effects turn out to be worse than the disease.

The Magic Third turns up in all kinds of places. Take corporate boards, for example. They are among the most powerful institutions in the modern economy. Virtually every company of consequence has a group of (typically) around nine experienced businesspeople, who provide guidance to the chief executive officer. Historically, boards have been all male. But slowly doors have opened to women, and a body of research shows that having women on a board makes the board different. The research suggests that women on boards are more willing to ask difficult questions. They value collaboration more. They are better listeners.

The magic seems to occur when three or more women serve on a board together. Three out of nine people. The Magic Third!

“So is three the right number?” she said. “I’m not sure, but I do know there’s a number where that person ceases to be distinct because of their differences, where there’s so many of them in the room that you don’t even think about it.” One person, she said, felt lonely. Two felt like a friendship. But three was a team.

We have looked, so far, at two elements of epidemics. The first is the overstory. The overstory casts a shadow over whatever is happening on the ground. The second element is group proportions. The mix of people in a group determines when and if that group tips. Both of those elements were on display in the Poplar Grove suicide epidemic. Poplar Grove has its own particular overstory—an extreme ethic of achievement—that had devastating side effects. And its group proportions were all wrong. It was a monoculture. It needed alternative identities in which students overwhelmed by the norms of the school could find safe haven. But there was a third factor. Remember what one of the sociologists studying Poplar Grove, Seth Abrutyn, said: In at least three of the four clusters, there was a high-status student that was very visible, who very much embodied the ideal of Poplar Grove’s youth.… A lot of the youth who had died by suicide seemed like they were perfect, and then were just gone. So it was sort of like, “Well, if they can’t survive in this context, how can I?” One of the engines of the Poplar Grove epidemic was that the students who started the school’s suicide cluster had special status: They occupied a significant position in the school’s hierarchy. I talked about this idea in The Tipping Point. I called it the Law of the Few.