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

by Malcolm Gladwell

showed two groups of five-year-olds an episode of Sesame Street. The kids in the second group, however, were put in a room with lots of very attractive toys on the floor. As you would expect, the kids in the room without the toys watched the show about 87 percent of the time, while the kids with the toys watched only about 47 percent of the show. Kids are distracted by toys. But when they tested the two groups to see how much of the show the children remembered and understood, the scores were exactly the same. This result stunned the two researchers. Kids, they realized, were a great deal more sophisticated in the way they watched than had been imagined. “We were led to the conclusion,” they wrote, “that the five-year-olds in the toys group were attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they looked at what for them were the most informative parts of the program. This strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention.”