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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

little changes had big effects.

they were incremental changes. The crack trade leveled off. The population got a little older. The police force got a little better.

both changes happened in a hurry. They didn’t build steadily and slowly.

These three characteristics—one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment

These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

But the hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn’t go in one ear and out the other.

The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.

When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused. They assume that someone else will make the call, or they assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem—the seizure-like sounds from the other room, the smoke from the door—isn’t really a problem.

In general, people chose friends of similar age and race. But if the friend lived down the hall, then age and race became a lot less important.

Proximity overpowered similarity. Another study, done on students

what they actually share is similar activities. We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble.

We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do.

It was that he didn’t think of his people collection as a business strategy.

He’s not one of those overly social, back-slapping types for whom the process of acquiring

acquaintances is obvious and self-serving. He’s

He simply likes people, in a genuine and powerful way, and he finds the patterns of acquaintanceship and interaction in which people arrange themselves to be endlessly fascinating.

Rod Steiger is the best-connected actor in history because he has managed to move up and down and back and forth among all the different worlds and subcultures and niches and levels that the acting profession has to offer.

one reason or another, they manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches.

something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.

Lois and the other people like her have some instinct that helps them relate to the people they meet.

only 16.7 percent saw that contact “often”—as they would if the contact were a good friend—and

They were getting them through their acquaintances.

when it comes to finding out about new jobs—or, for that matter, new information, or new ideas—“weak

weak ties” are always more important tha...

Your acquaintances, on the other hand, by definition occupy a very different

world than you.

the strength of weak ties.

represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.

If you look closely at social epidemics, however, it becomes clear that just as there are people we rely upon to connect us to other people, there are also people we rely upon to connect us with new information. There are people specialists, and there are information specialists.

They read more magazines than the rest of us, more newspapers, and they may be the only people who read junk mail.

Mavens have the knowledge and the social skills to start word-of-mouth epidemics.

The one thing that a Maven is not is a persuader. Alpert’s motivation is to educate and to help.

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.

what separates a great salesman from an average one is the number and quality of answers they have to the objections commonly raised by potential clients.

“if you don’t try, you’ll never succeed.”

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.”

And once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable.

An adult considers constant repetition boring, because it requires reliving the same experience over and again. But to preschoolers repetition isn’t boring, because each time they watch something they are experiencing it in a completely different way.

times in a row. 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.

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.

Broken Windows theory.

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

In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows,

What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn’t a fundamental trait, or what they called a “unified” trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation. “Most children,” they wrote,

All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way.

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.

Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.