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

by Malcolm Gladwell

The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.

It was like going into the transit version of Dante’s Inferno.

the lesson of the Power of Context is that we are more than just sensitive to changes in context. We’re exquisitely sensitive to them. And the kinds of contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very different than we might ordinarily suspect.

If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes. In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows,

The impetus to engage in a certain kind of behavior is not coming from a certain kind of person but from a feature of the environment.

“When you looked at the process of rebuilding the organization and morale, you had to win the battle against graffiti. Without winning that battle, all the management reforms and physical changes just weren’t going to happen. We were about to put out new trains that were worth about ten million bucks apiece, and unless we did something to protect them, we knew just what would happen. They would last one day and then they would be vandalized.”

Bratton is a colorful, charismatic man, a born leader, and he quickly made his presence felt.

Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment. This is, if you think about it, quite a radical idea. Think back, for instance, to the encounter between Bernie Goetz and those four youths on the subway: Allen, Ramseur, Cabey, and Canty. At least two of them, according to some reports, appear to have been on drugs at the time of the incident. They all came from the Claremont Village housing project in one of the worst parts of the South Bronx. Cabey was, at the time, under indictment for armed robbery. Canty had a prior felony arrest for possession of stolen property. Allen had been previously arrested for attempted assault. Allen, Canty, and Ramseur also all had misdemeanor convictions, ranging from criminal mischief to petty larceny. Two years after the Goetz shooting, Ramseur was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for rape, robbery, sodomy, sexual abuse, assault, criminal use of a firearm, and possession of stolen property. It’s hard to be surprised when people like this wind up in the middle of a violent incident.

The Power of Context is an environmental argument. It says that behavior is a function of social context.

But the Power of Context says that what really matters is little things.

The second study showed how people who were charismatic could—without saying anything and with the briefest of exposures—infect others with their emotions. The implications of those two studies go to the heart of the Law of the Few, because they suggest that what we think of as inner states—preferences and emotions—are actually powerfully and imperceptibly influenced by seemingly inconsequential personal influences, by a newscaster we watch for a few minutes a day or by someone we sit next to, in silence, in a two-minute experiment.

The essence of the Power of Context is that the same thing is true for certain kinds of environments—that in ways that we don’t necessarily appreciate, our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances. The field of psychology is rich with experiments that demonstrate this fact.

Most psychologists believe that nature—genetics—accounts for about half of the reason why we tend to act the way we do. His point is simply that there are certain times and places and conditions when much of that can be swept away, that there are instances where you can take normal people from good schools and happy families and good neighborhoods and powerfully affect their behavior merely by changing the immediate details of their situation.

But what Zimbardo and Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we’re deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior.

The difference is that it is framed in a way that makes it about people, instead of about numbers, and as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. We will always reach for a “dispositional” explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation.

There is something in all of us that makes us instinctively want to explain the world around us in terms of people’s essential attributes: he’s a better basketball player, that person is smarter than I am.

We do this because, like vervets, we are a lot more attuned to personal cues than contextual cues. The FAE also makes the world a much simpler and more understandable place.

The birth order myth is an example of the FAE in action. But you can see why we are so drawn to it. It is much easier to define people just in terms of their family personality. It’s a kind of shorthand. If we constantly had to qualify every assessment of those around us, how would we make sense of the world? How much harder would it be to make the thousands of decisions we are required to make about whether we like someone or love someone or trust someone or want to give someone advice?

When we observe a woman who seems hostile and fiercely independent some of the time but passive, dependent and feminine on other occasions, our reducing valve usually makes us choose between the two syndromes. We decide that one pattern is in the service of the other, or that both are in the service of a third motive. She must be a really castrating lady with a facade of passivity—or perhaps she is a warm, passive-dependent woman with a surface defense of aggressiveness. But perhaps nature is bigger than our concepts and it is possible for the lady to be a hostile, fiercely independent, passive, dependent, feminine, aggressive, warm, castrating person all-in-one. Of course which of these she is at any particular moment would not be random or capricious—it would depend on who she is with, when, how, and much, much more. But each of these aspects of her self may be a quite genuine and real aspect of her total being.

Character, then, isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized.

Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is th...

Epidemics are, at their root, about this very process of transformation. When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic, convert them from hostility to acceptance. That can be done through the influence of special kinds of people, people of extraordinary personal connection. That’s the Law of the Few. It can be done by changing the content of communication, by making a message so memorable that it sticks in someone’s mind and compels them to action. That is the Stickiness Factor. I think that both of those laws make intuitive sense. But we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature.

Once you understand that context matters, however, that specific and relatively small elements in the environment can serve as Tipping Points, that defeatism is turned upside down. Environmental Tipping Points are things that we can change: we can fix broken windows and clean up graffiti and change the signals that invite crime in the first place. Crime can be more than understood. It can be prevented. There is a broader dimension to this.

But in reality it is no more than an obvious and commonsensical extension of the Power of Context, because it says simply that children are powerfully shaped by their external environment, that the features of our immediate social and physical world—the streets we walk down, the people we encounter—play a huge role in shaping who we are and how we act.

“In a situation like this, you’re in a combat situation,” Goetz told his neighbor Myra Friedman, in an anguished telephone call just days after the shooting. “You’re not thinking in a normal way. Your memory isn’t even working normally. You are so hyped up. Your vision actually changes. Your field of view changes. Your capabilities change. What you are capable of changes.”

Psychologists tell us much the same thing: that when people are asked to consider evidence or make decisions in a group, they come to very different conclusions than when they are asked the same questions by themselves. Once we’re part of a group, we’re all susceptible to peer pressure and social norms and any number of other kinds of influence that can play a critical role in sweeping us up in the beginnings of an epidemic.

It was where the Ya-Ya epidemic began. Why? Because, according to Reverand, the San Francisco area is home to one of the country’s strongest book-group cultures, and from the beginning Ya-Ya was what publishers refer to as a “book-group book.” It was the kind of emotionally sophisticated, character-driven, multi-layered novel that invites reflection and discussion, and book groups were flocking to it.

There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information.

As human beings, in other words, we can only handle so much information at once. Once we pass a certain boundary, we become overwhelmed. What I’m describing here is an intellectual capacity—our ability to process raw information. But if you think about it, we clearly have a channel capacity for feelings as well. Take a minute, for example, to make a list of all the people you know whose death would leave you truly devastated. Chances are you will come up with around 12 names. That, at least, is the average answer that most people give to that question. Those names make up what psychologists call our sympathy group. Why aren’t groups any larger? Partly it’s a question of time. If you look at the names on your sympathy list, they are probably the people whom you devote the most attention to—either on the telephone, in person, or thinking and worrying about. If your list was twice as long, if it had 30 names on it, and, as a result, you spent only half as much time with everyone on it, would you still be as close to everyone?

Dunbar’s argument is that brains evolve, they get bigger, in order to handle the complexities of larger social groups. If you belong to a group of five people, Dunbar points out, you have to keep track of ten separate relationships: your relationships with the four others in your circle and the six other two-way relationships between the others. That’s what it means to know everyone in the circle. You have to understand the personal dynamics of the group, juggle different personalities, keep people happy, manage the demands on your own time and attention, and so on. If you belong to a group of twenty people, however, there are now 190 two-way relationships to keep track of: 19 involving yourself and 171 involving the rest of the group. That’s a fivefold increase in the size of the group, but a twentyfold increase in the amount of information processing needed to “know” the other members of the group. Even a relatively small increase in the size of a group, in other words, creates a significant additional social and intellectual burden.

Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.

“The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

The same pattern holds true for military organization. “Over the years military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb which dictates that functional fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men,”

But at a bigger size you have to impose complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to try to command loyalty and cohesion. But below 150, Dunbar argues, it is possible to achieve these same goals informally: “At this size, orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups, this becomes impossible.”

“Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people,” Bill Gross, one of the leaders of a Hutterite colony outside Spokane told me. “When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another.”

“What happens when you get that big is that the group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan.” He made a gesture with his hands, as if to demonstrate division. “You get two or three groups within the larger group. That is something you really try to prevent, and when it happens it is a good time to branch out.”

At Gore there are no titles. If you ask people who work there for their card, it will just say their name and underneath it the word “Associate,” regardless of how much money they make or how much responsibility they have or how long they have been at the company. People don’t have bosses, they have sponsors—mentors—who watch out for their interests.

Gore is, in short, a very unusual company with a clear and well-articulated philosophy. It is a big established company attempting to behave like a small entrepreneurial start-up. By all accounts, that attempt has been wildly successful. Whenever business experts make lists of the best American companies to work for, or whenever consultants give speeches on the best-managed American companies, Gore is on the list. It has a rate of employee turnover that is about a third the industry average.

Gore has managed to create a small-company ethos so infectious and sticky that it has survived their growth into a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees. And how did they do that? By (among other things) adhering to the Rule of 150.

“People used to ask me, how do you do your long-term planning,” Hen said. “And I’d say, that’s easy, we put a hundred and fifty parking spaces in the lot, and when people start parking on the grass, we know it’s time to build a new plant.” That new plant doesn’t have to be far away. In Gore’s home state of Delaware, for instance, the company has three plants within sight of each other.

Gore doesn’t need formal management structures in its small plants—it doesn’t need the usual layers of middle and upper management—because in groups that small, informal personal relationships are more effective. “The pressure that comes to bear if we are not efficient at a plant, if we are not creating good earnings for the company, the peer pressure is unbelievable,”

“This is what you get when you have small teams, where everybody knows everybody. Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss. Many, many times more powerful. People want to live up to what is expected of them.”

The advantage of a Gore plant is that every part of the process for designing and making and marketing a given product is subject to the same group scrutiny.

Here’s two people. One is trying to make the product, one is trying to get the product out. They go head to head and talk about it. That’s peer pressure.

What Buckley is referring to here is the benefit of unity, of having everyone in a complex enterprise share a common relationship. There is a useful concept in psychology that, I think, makes it much clearer what he’s speaking about. This is what University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Wegner calls “transactive memory.” When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains.

“Relationship development is often understood as a process of mutual self-disclosure,” he writes. “Although it is probably more romantic to cast this process as one of interpersonal revelation and acceptance, it can also be appreciated as a necessary precursor to transactive memory.” Transactive memory is part of what intimacy means.

When Jim Buckley says, then, that working at Gore is a “different kind of experience,” what he is talking about, in part, is that Gore has a highly effective institutional transactive memory. Here, for example, is how one Gore associate describes the kind of “knowing” that emerges in a small plant: “It’s not just do you know somebody. It’s do you really know them well enough that you know their skills and abilities and passions. That’s what you like, what you do, what you want to do, what you are truly good at. Not, are you a nice person.”

It makes the company incredibly efficient. It means that cooperation is easier. It means that you move much faster to get things done or create teams of workers or find out an answer to a problem. It means that people in one part of the company can get access to the impressions and expertise of people in a completely different part of the company.

“One of the immediate reactions we get when we talk to people is ‘Man, your system sounds chaotic. How in the devil can you do anything with no obvious authority?’ But it’s not chaos. It isn’t a problem,” Burt Chase said. “It’s hard to appreciate that unless you are working in it. It’s the advantage of understanding people’s strengths. It’s knowing—where can I get my best advice? And if you have some knowledge about people, you can do that.”