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

by Malcolm Gladwell

with. Hush Puppies had suddenly exploded, and it all started with a handful of kids in the East Village and Soho.

Those first few kids, whoever they were, weren’t deliberately trying to promote Hush Puppies. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them.

But then something strange happened. At some mysterious and critical point, the crime rate began to turn. It tipped. Within five years, murders had dropped 64.3 percent to 770 and total crimes had fallen by almost half to 355,893.

How can a change in a handful of economic and social indices cause murder rates to fall by two-thirds in five years?

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

First of all, they are clear examples of contagious behavior.

Those kids simply wore the shoes when they went to clubs or cafes or walked the streets of downtown New York, and in so doing exposed other people to their fashion sense. They infected them with the Hush Puppies “virus.”

Somehow a large number of people in New York got “infected” with an anti-crime virus in a short time.

The second distinguishing characteristic of these two examples is that in both cases little changes had big effects.

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

Crime did not taper off. It didn’t gently decelerate. It hit a certain point and jammed on the brakes.

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 —are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school clas...

The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.

Can the flu virus do that? Contagiousness, in other words, is an unexpected property of all kinds of things, and we have to remember that, if we are to recognize and diagnose epidemic

change.

The second of the principles of epidemics—that little changes can somehow have big effects—is a...

Epidemics are another example of geometric progression: when a virus spreads through a population, it doubles and doubles again, until it has (figuratively) grown from a single sheet of paper all the way to the sun in fifty steps.

This possibility of sudden change is at the center of the idea of the Tipping Point and might well be the hardest of all to accept.

The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.

the world of the Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is—contrary to all our expectations—a certainty.

Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don’t? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?

In the mid-1990s, the city of Baltimore was attacked by an epidemic of syphilis. In the space of a year, from 1995 to 1996, the number of children born with the disease increased by 500 percent. If you look at Baltimore’s syphilis

What caused Baltimore’s syphilis problem to tip? According to the Centers for Disease Control, the problem was crack cocaine.

John Zenilman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, an expert on sexually transmitted diseases, has another explanation: the breakdown of medical services in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

When there were 36,000 patient visits a year in the STD clinics of Baltimore’s inner city, in other words, the disease was kept in equilibrium. At some point between 36,000 and 21,000 patient visits a year, according to Zenilman, the disease erupted.

Suddenly, people who might have been infectious for a week before getting treated were now going around

infecting others for two or three or four weeks before they got cured. The breakdown in treatment made syphilis a much bigger issue than it had been before.

What happened was a kind of hollowing out. This fueled the diaspora. For years syphilis had been confined to a specific region of Baltimore, within highly confined sociosexual networks.

It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic’s equilibrium.

in other words. Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious

agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating.

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

what we are really saying is that in a given process or system some people matter more than others.

In other words, in all of the city of Colorado Springs—a town of well in excess of 100,000 people—the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basically frequenting the same six bars.

Randy Shilts discusses at length the so-called Patient Zero of AIDS, the French-Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas, who claimed to have 2,500 sexual partners all

over North America, and who was linked to at least 40 of the earliest cases of AIDS in California and New York. These are the kinds of people who make epidemics of disease tip.

Social epidemics work in exactly the same way. They are also driven by the efforts of a han...

It’s things like how sociable they are, or how energetic or knowledgeable or influ...

But with the cutbacks, syphilis increasingly became a chronic disease, and the disease’s carriers had three or four or five times longer to pass on their infection.

This is a well-known principle in virology. The strains of flu

that circulate at the beginning of each winter’s flu epidemic are quite different from the strains of flu that circulate at the end.

Once it infected you, you stayed infected. It stuck. This idea of the importance of stickiness in tipping has enormous implications for the way we regard social epidemics as well.

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. Stickiness means that a message makes an impact. You can’t get it out of your head.

Unless you remember what I tell you, why would you ever change your behavior or buy my product or go to see my movie?

What they found, surprisingly, was that the one factor above all else that predicted helping behavior was how many witnesses there were to the event.

When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused.

Point—the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context—offer a way of making sense of epidemics.

But it is safe to say that word of mouth is—even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns—still the most important form of human communication.

If it were only the news itself that mattered in a word-of-mouth epidemic, Dawes would now be as famous as Paul Revere. He isn’t. So why did Revere succeed where Dawes failed?