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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Bratton retrofitted a city bus and turned it into a rolling station house, with its own fax machines, phones, holding pen, and fingerprinting facilities. Soon the turnaround time on an arrest was down to an hour. Bratton also insisted that a check be run on all those arrested. Sure enough, one out of seven arrestees had an outstanding warrant for a previous crime,

“Every arrest was like opening a box of Cracker Jack. What kind of toy am I going to get? Got a gun? Got a knife? Got a warrant? Do we have a murderer here?...After

He instructed his officers to crack down on quality-of-life crimes: on the “squeegee men” who came up to drivers at New York City intersections and demanded money for washing car windows, for example, and on all the other above-ground equivalents of turnstile-jumping and graffiti.

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.

He had to spend six hours in the station house, talking to police, while his assailant was released after two hours and charged, in the end, with only a misdemeanor.

Here, in short, was a man with an authority problem, with a strong sense that the system wasn’t working, who had been the recent target of humiliation.

By focusing it on the external world, he need not deal with his internal one.

On the popular side, there are endless numbers of books by conservatives talking about crime as a consequence of moral failure—of communities and schools and parents who no longer raise children with a respect for right and wrong.

the criminal is a personality type—a personality type distinguished by an insensitivity to the norms of normal society.

People who grow up poor, fatherless, and buffeted by racism don’t have the same commitment to social norms as those from healthy middle-class homes.

But what do Broken Windows and the Power of Context suggest? Exactly the opposite. They say that the criminal—far from being someone who acts for fundamental, intrinsic reasons and who lives in his own world—is actually someone acutely sensitive to his environment, who is alert to all kinds of cues, and who is prompted to commit crimes based on his perception of the world around him.

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

In the 1960s, liberals made a similar kind of argument, but when they talked about the importance of environment they were talking about the importance of fundamental social factors: crime, they said, was the result of social injustice, of structural economic inequities, of unemployment, of racism, of decades of institutional and social neglect,

But the Power of Context says that what really matters...

everything to do with the message sent by the graffiti on the walls and the disorder at the turnstiles. The Power of Context says you don’t have to solve the big problems to solve crime.

Giuliani and Bratton—far from being conservatives, as they are commonly identified—actually represent on the question of crime the most extreme liberal position imaginable, a position so extreme that it is almost impossible to accept. How can it be that what was going on in Bernie Goetz’s head doesn’t matter?

Peter Jennings on ABC were more likely to vote Republican than people who watched either Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather because, in some unconscious way, Jennings was able to signal his affection for Republican candidates. 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,

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 purpose of the experiment was to try to find out why prisons are such nasty places. Was it because prisons are full of nasty people, or was it because prisons are such nasty environments that they make people nasty?

how much influence does immediate environment have on the way people behave?

“What we were unprepared for was the intensity of the change and the speed at which it happened,” Zimbardo says.

The key word here is situation. Zimbardo isn’t talking about environment, about the major external influences on all of our lives.

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.

The tests were given in only a fraction of the time usually needed for completion, so most children had lots of unanswered questions,

This time, though, the students were given an answer key and, under minimal supervision, told to grade their own papers.

Their first conclusion is, unsurprisingly, that lots of cheating goes on. In one case, the scores on tests where cheating was possible were 50 percent higher, on average, than the “honest” scores.

Smart children cheat a little less than less-intelligent children. Girls cheat about as much as boys. Older children cheat more than younger children, and those from stable and happy homes cheat a bit less than those from unstable and unhappy homes.

But the consistency isn’t nearly as high as you might expect. There isn’t one tight little circle of cheaters and one tight little circle of honest students.

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,

will deceive in certain situations and not in others.

Whether a child will practice deceit in any given situation depends in part on his intelligence, age, home background, and the like and in part on the nature of the situation itself and his particular relation to it.

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. 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.

A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of vervetish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of information. The same is true of humans.

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.

Invariably, the Contestants rate the Questioners as being a lot smarter than they themselves are.

This happens even when you give people a clear and immediate environmental explanation of the behavior they are being asked to evaluate: that the gym, in the first case, has few lights on; that the Contestant is being asked to answer the most impossibly biased and rigged set of questions.

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.

When they are away from their families—in different contexts—older siblings are no more likely to be domineering and younger siblings no more likely to be rebellious than anyone else.

The psychologist Walter Mischel argues that the human mind has a kind of “reducing valve” that “creates and maintains the perception of continuity even in the face of perpetual observed changes in actual behavior.”

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.

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.

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 that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.

and it is an important demonstration of how the Power of Context has implications for the way we think about social epidemics of all kinds, not just violent crime.

Along the way to the presentation, each student ran into a man slumped in an alley, head down, eyes closed, coughing and groaning.

In some of the cases, as he sent the students on their way, the experimenter would look at his watch and say, “Oh, you’re late.