The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

by Malcolm Gladwell

there is something about the personal, disinterested, expert opinion of a Maven that makes us all sit up and listen. And why are the Zagat restaurant guides so popular? Partly it is because they are a convenient guide to all the restaurants in a given town. But their real power derives from the fact that the reviews are the reports of volunteers—of diners who want to share their opinions with others. Somehow that represents a more compelling recommendation than the opinion of an expert whose job it is to rate restaurants.

A Connector might tell ten friends where to stay in Los Angeles, and half of them might take his advice. A Maven might tell five people where to stay in Los Angeles but make the case for the hotel so emphatically that all of them would take his advice. These are different personalities at work, acting for different reasons. But they both have the power to spark word-of-mouth epidemics.

The one thing that a Maven is not is a persuader. Alpert’s motivation is to educate and to help. He’s not the kind of person who wants to twist your arm.

Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know. For a social epidemic to start, though, some people are actually going to have to be persuaded to do something.

In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people—Salesmen—with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.

Donald Moine, a behavioral psychologist who has written widely on the subject of persuasion, told me to look up Gau because Gau is “mesmerizing.” And so he is. Tom Gau happens to sell financial planning services. But he could, if he wanted to, sell absolutely anything. If we want to understand the persuasive personality type, Gau seems a good place to start.

Gau shook my hand. But as he told me later, usually when he meets someone he gives him a hug or—if it is a woman—a big kiss. As you would expect from a great salesman, he has a kind of natural exuberance.

I can also imagine that same person, over time, getting familiar enough with the material that he begins to judge, very well, what kinds of responses work best with what kinds of people. If you transcribed that person’s interactions with his clients, he would sound just like Tom Gau because he would be using all of Tom Gau’s words. According to the standard ways by which we measure persuasiveness—by the logic and appropriateness of the persuader’s arguments—that should make the people using the script book every bit as persuasive as Tom Gau.

He seems to have some kind of indefinable trait, something powerful and contagious and irresistible that goes beyond what comes out of his mouth, that makes people who meet him want to agree with him. It’s energy. It’s enthusiasm. It’s charm. It’s likability. It’s all those things and yet something more. At one point I asked him whether he was happy, and he fairly bounced off his chair.

“Very. I’m probably the most optimistic person you could ever imagine. You take the most optimistic person you know and take it to the hundredth power, that’s me. Because you know what, the power of positive thinking will overcome so many things. There are so many people who are negative. Someone will say, you can’t do that. And I’ll say, what do you mean I can’t do that?

The worst thing they can say is no. I’m not going to insult them. I’m going to give them my little pitch of here’s why I’m doing this. I’m going to make it clear what I’m suggesting. And you know what? They accepted the offer.”

They were simply asked to score the emotional content of the expressions of these three men on a 21-point scale, with the lowest being “extremely negative” and the highest point on the scale “extremely positive.” The results were fascinating. Dan Rather scored 10.46—which translates to an almost perfectly neutral expression—when he talked about Mondale, and 10.37 when he talked about Reagan. He looked the same when he talked about the Republican as he did when he talked about the Democrat.

Again, the opposite seemed to be true. On the “happy” segments inserted for comparison purposes, he scored 14.13, which was substantially lower than both Rather and Brokaw. The only possible conclusion, according to the study, is that Jennings exhibited a “significant and noticeable bias in facial expression” toward Reagan.

Simple physical movements and observations can have a profound effect on how we feel and think.

The third—and perhaps most important—implication of these studies is that persuasion often works in ways that we do not appreciate. It’s not that smiles and nods are subliminal messages. They are straightforward and on the surface. It’s just that they are incredibly subtle.

If we want to understand what makes someone like Tom Gau so persuasive, in other words, we have to look at much more than his obvious eloquence. We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.

What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because that’s the basic context in which all persuasion takes place. We know that people talk back and forth. They listen. They interrupt. They move their hands. In the case of my meeting with Tom Gau, we were sitting in a modest-size office. I was in a chair pulled up in front of his desk.

To carefully study the organization and sequence of this, the approach must be naturalistic or ethological. You just sit and look and look and look for thousands of hours until the order in the material begins to emerge. It’s like sculpturing....Continued study reveals further order. When I was looking at this film over and over again, I had an erroneous view of the universe that communication takes place between people. Somehow this was the model. You send the message, somebody sends the message back. The messages go here and there and everywhere. But something was funny about this.

Condon spent a year and a half on that short segment of film, until, finally, in his peripheral vision, he saw what he had always sensed was there: “the wife turning her head exactly as the husband’s hands came up.” From there he picked up other micromovements, other patterns that occurred over and over again, until he realized that in addition to talking and listening, the three people around the table were also engaging in what he termed “interactional synchrony.”

At the same time the other people around the table were dancing along as well, moving their faces and shoulders and hands and bodies to the same rhythm. It’s not that everyone was moving the same way, any more than people dancing to a song all dance the same way. It’s that the timing of stops and starts of each person’s micromovements—the jump and shifts of body and face—were perfectly in harmony.

What linguists call speech rate—the number of speech sounds per second—equalizes. So does what is known as latency, the period of time that lapses between the moment one speaker stops talking and the moment the other speaker begins. Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.

So what made my encounter with him different, so much more compelling than the conversational encounters I have every day? It isn’t that Gau was deliberately trying to harmonize himself with me.

And like all specialized human traits, some people have much more mastery over this reflex than others. Part of what it means to have a powerful or persuasive personality, then, is that you can draw others into your own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction.

“They know when the crowds are with them, literally in synchrony with them, in movements and nods and stillness in moments of attention.” It is a strange thing to admit, because I didn’t want to be drawn in. I was on guard against it.

“Tom can build a level of trust and rapport in five to ten minutes that most people will take half an hour to do,” Moine says of Gau.

There is another, more specific dimension to this. When two people talk, they don’t just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry. If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they’ll smile or frown back, although perhaps only in musc...

Emotion is contagious. In a way, this is perfectly intuitive. All of us have had our spirits picked up by being around somebody in a good mood. If you think about this closely, though, it’s quite a radical notion. We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.

Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people “senders.” Senders have special personalities. They are also physiologically different. Scientists who have studied faces, for example, report that there are huge differences among people in the location of facial muscles, in their form, and also—surprisingly—even in their prevalence. “It is a situation not unlike in medicine,” says Cacioppo. “There are carriers, people who are very expressive, and there are people who are especially susceptible. It’s not that emotional contagion is a disease. But the mechanism is the same.”

If the charismatic person started out depressed, and the inexpressive person started out happy, by the end of the two minutes the inexpressive person was depressed as well. But it didn’t work the other way. Only the charismatic person could infect the other people in the room with his or her emotions.

At other times, he would chuckle as he spoke, making his words sing with laughter. In each of those modes his face would light up accordingly, moving, easily and deftly, from one state to another. There was no ambiguity in his presentation. Everything was written on his face. I could not see my own face, of course, but my guess is that it was a close mirror of his. It is interesting, in this context, to think back on the experiment with the nodding and the headphones.

The Law of the Few, which I talked about in the previous chapter, says that one critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the messenger.

But in all those examples, I took it as given that the message itself was something that could be passed on. Paul Revere started a word-of-mouth epidemic with the phrase “The British are coming.” If he had instead gone on that midnight ride to tell people he was having a sale on the pewter mugs at his silversmith shop, even he, with all his enormous personal gifts, could not have galvanized the Massachusetts countryside.

In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of “stickiness.” Is the message—or the food, or the movie, or the product—memorable? Is it so memorable, in fact, that it can create change, that it can spur someone to action?

Stickiness sounds as if it should be straightforward. When most of us want to make sure what we say is remembered, we speak with emphasis.

We talk loudly, and we repeat what we have to say over and over again. Marketers feel the same way. There is a maxim in the advertising business that an advertisement has to be seen ...

In the advertising world, direct marketers are the real students of stickiness, and some of the most intriguing conclusions about how to reach consumers have come from their work.

The gold box, Wunderman writes, “made the reader/viewer part of an interactive advertising system. Viewers were not just an audience but had become participants. It was like playing a game....The effectiveness of the campaign was startling. In 1977, none of Columbia’s ads in its extensive magazine schedule had been profitable. In 1978, with Gold Box television support, every magazine on the schedule made a profit, an unprecedented turnaround.”

If you look closely at epidemic ideas or messages, as often as not the elements that make them sticky turn out to be as small and as seemingly trivial as Wunderman’s gold box.

This may seem obvious, but it isn’t. Many critics of television, to this day, argue that what’s dangerous about TV is that it is addictive, that children and even adults watch it like zombies. According to this view, it is the formal features of television—violence, bright lights, loud and funny noises, quick editing cuts, zooming in and out, exaggerated action, and all the other things we associate with commercial TV—that hold our attention. In other words, we don’t have to understand what we are looking at, or absorb what we are seeing, in order to keep watching. That’s what many people mean when they say that television is passive. We watch when we are stimulated by all the whizzes and bangs of the medium. And we look away, or turn the channel, when we are bored.

“But once we began to look carefully at what children were doing, we found out that short looks were actually more common. There was much more variation. Children didn’t just sit and stare. They could divide their attention between a couple of different activities. And they weren’t being random. There were predictable influences on what made them look back at the screen, and these were not trivial things, not just flash and dash.”

Whatever Palmer learned, he fed back to the show’s producers and writers, so they could fine-tune the material accordingly.

“They didn’t like it when two or three people would be talking at once. That’s the producers’ natural instinct, to hype a scene by creating confusion. It’s supposed to tell you that this is exciting. The fact is that our kids turned away from that kind of situation. Instead of picking up on the signal that something exciting is going on, they picked up on the signal that something confusing is going on. And they’d lose interest.

Eye movement research is based on the idea that the human eye is capable of focusing on only a very small area at one time—what is called a perceptual span. When we read, we are capable of taking in only about one key word and then four characters to the left and fifteen characters to the right at any one time. We jump from one of these chunks to another, pausing—or fixating—on them long enough to make sense of each letter.

That’s why we move our eyes when we read: we can’t pick up much information about the shape, or the color, or the structure of words unless we focus our fovea directly on them. Just try, for example, to reread this paragraph by staring straight ahead at the center of the page. It’s impossible.

“TV is a great medium for education. But people up until now haven’t explored the potential of it. They’ve been using it in a rote way. I believed we could turn that around.”

Mutual exclusivity also helps the child think clearly. “Suppose,” Markman writes, “a child who already knows ‘apple’ and ‘red’ hears someone refer to an apple as ‘round.’ By mutual exclusivity, the child can eliminate the object (apple) and its color (red) as the meaning of ‘round’ and can try to analyze the object for some other property to label.”

But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them. “It’s the only way they have of organizing the world, of organizing experience,”

“They are not able to bring theories that organize things in terms of cause and effect and relationships, so they turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection. If they don’t catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn’t get remembered very well, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over.”

Feldman was referring to things like vocabulary and grammar and—most important—the structure of Emily’s monologues. She was making up stories, narratives, that explained and organized the things that happened to her. Sometimes these stories were what linguists call temporal narratives.

We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying.