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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Sesame Street was built about a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them.

Children didn’t just sit and stare. They could divide their attention between a couple of different activities.

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.

“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.”

They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused. If you are in the business of educational television, this is a critical difference.

Palmer’s innovation was something he called the Distracter. He would play an

episode of Sesame Street on a television monitor, and then run a slide show on a screen next to it, showing a new slide every seven and a half seconds.

The Distracter was a stickiness machine.

One of the standard myths about children’s television, for example, had always been that kids love to watch animals. “The producers would bring in a cat or an anteater or an otter and show it and let it cavort around,”

But our Distracter showed that it was a bomb every time.”

The Distracter showed that no single segment of the Sesame Street format

should go beyond four minutes, and that three minutes was probably optimal.

“We found to our surprise that our preschool audience didn’t like it when the adult cast got into a contentious discussion,” he remembers. “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.

But it was just adults doing things and talking about stuff and the kids weren’t interested. We were getting incredibly low attention levels.

Why did the show fail? The problem, at root, is with the premise of the show—the essential joke that Big Bird doesn’t want to be known as a big bird. That’s the kind of wordplay that a preschooler simply doesn’t understand.

A child who learns the word elephant knows, with absolute certainty, that it is something different from a dog. Each new word makes the child’s knowledge of the world more precise.

But it becomes easy to understand how you would make a children’s show even stickier than Sesame Street. You’d make it perfectly literal, without any wordplay or comedy that would confuse preschoolers. And you’d teach kids how to think in the same way that kids teach themselves how to think—in the form of the story.

To help the audience unlock the puzzle, Blue leaves behind a series of clues, which are objects tattooed with one of her paw prints.

So putting these ideas together, that kids are interested in being intellectually active when they watch TV, and given the opportunity they’ll be behaviorally active, that created the philosophy for Blue’s Clues.”

The second thing that Blue’s Clues took from Sesame Street was the idea of repetition.

But to preschoolers repetition isn’t boring, because each time they watch something they are experiencing it in a completely different way.

They showed it five days in a row to a large group of preschoolers, and attention and comprehension actually increased over the course of the week—with

So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it’s a search for understanding and predictability,”

They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, they not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth.

At the same time, it can’t be so complex that the first time around it baffles the children and turns them off.

The layering of the show is what makes it possible for a child to watch the show four and five times: on each successive watching they master more and more, guessing correctly deeper into the program, until, by the end, they can anticipate every answer.

Blue’s Clues got rid of the cleverness and originality that made Sesame Street the most beloved television program of its generation, created a plodding, literal show, and repeated each episode five 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...

Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the prese...

The line between hostility and acceptance, in other words, between an epidemic that tips and one that does not, is sometimes a lot narrower than it seems.

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.

FOUR The Power of Context (Part One)

BERNIE GOETZ AND THE RISE AND FALL OF NEW YORK CITY CRIME

This idea of crime as an epidemic, it must be said, is a little strange. We talk about “epidemics of violence” or crime waves, but it’s not clear that we really believe that crime follows the same rules of epidemics as, say, Hush Puppies did, or Paul Revere’s ride.

Criminals do not, in other words, sound like the kind of people who could be swept up by the infectious winds of an epidemic.

The answer lies in the third of the principles of epidemic transmission, the Power of Context. The Law of the Few looked at the kinds of people who are critical in spreading information. The chapter on Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues looked at the question of Stickiness, suggesting that in order to be capable of sparking epidemics, ideas have to be memorable and move us to action.

Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.

But 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.

The most intriguing candidate for that “something else” is called the Broken Windows theory.

In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes:

Muggers and robbers, whether opportunistic or professional, believe they reduce their chances of being caught or even identified if they operate on streets where potential victims are already intimidated by prevailing conditions.

This is an epidemic theory of crime. It says that crime is contagious—just as a fashion trend is contagious—that it can start with a broken window and spread to an entire community.

The Tipping Point in this epidemic, though, isn’t a particular kind of person—a Connector like Lois Weisberg or a Maven like Mark Alpert. It’s something physical like graffiti.

But Gunn insisted. “The graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system,”

Without winning that battle, all the management reforms and physical changes just weren’t going to happen.

Gunn made it a rule that there should be no retreat, that once a car was “reclaimed” it should never be allowed to be vandalized again.

It was a message to them. If you want to spend three nights of your time vandalizing a train, fine. But it’s never going to see the light of day.”

With felonies—serious crimes—on the subway system at an all-time high, Bratton decided to crack down on fare-beating. Why? Because he believed that, like graffiti, fare-beating could be a signal, a small expression of disorder that invited much more serious crimes.

And once one or two or three people began cheating the system, other people—who might never otherwise have considered evading the law—would join in, reasoning that if some people weren’t going to pay, they shouldn’t either, and the problem would snowball.