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

by Malcolm Gladwell

The only thing that really mattered was whether the student was in a rush. Of the group that was, 10 percent stopped to help. Of the group who knew they had a few minutes to spare, 63 percent stopped.

What this study is suggesting, in other words, is that the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behavior.

When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic, convert them from hostility to acceptance.

But we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature.

But there is a world of difference between being inclined toward violence and actually committing a violent act.

For a crime to be committed, something extra,

something additional, has to happen to tip a troubled person toward violence, and what the Power of Context is saying is that those Tipping Points may be as simple and trivial as everyda...

The old understanding of handling crime epidemics leads inevitably to a preoccupation with defensive measures against crime.

Once you understand that context matters, however, that specific and relatively small elements in the environment can serve as Tipping Points, that defeatism is turned upside down.

Environmental Tipping Points are things that we can change: we can fix broken windows and clean up graffiti and change the signals that invite crime in the first place.

Judith Harris has convincingly argued that peer influence and community influence are more important than family influence in...

a child is better off in a good neighborhood and a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled ne...

Power of Context, because it says simply that children are powerfully shaped by their external environment, that the features of our immediate social and physical world—the streets we walk down, the people we encounter—play a huge role in shaping who we are and how we act.

they suggest that it is possible to be a better person on a clean

street or in a clean subway than in one littered with trash and graffiti.

The Power of Context (Part Two) THE MAGIC NUMBER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY

More specifically, it is testimony to the power of one specific aspect of context, which is the critical role that groups play in social epidemics.

Anyone who has ever been to the movies knows that the size of the crowd in the theater has a big effect on how good the movie seems: comedies are never funnier and thrillers never more thrilling than in a packed movie house.

when people are asked to consider evidence or make decisions in a group, they come to very different conclusions than when they are asked the same questions by themselves.

Once we’re part of a group, we’re all susceptible to peer pressure and social norms and any number of other kinds of influence that can play a critical role in swe...

But the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power.

But he didn’t just preach. He also stayed long enough in each town to form the most enthusiastic of his converts into religious societies, which in turn he subdivided into smaller classes of a dozen or so people. Converts were required to attend weekly meetings and to adhere to a strict code of conduct. If they failed to live up to Methodist standards, they were expelled from the group. This was a group, in other words, that stood for something.

He was a super Paul Revere. The difference is, though, that he wasn’t one person with ties to many other people. He was one person with ties to many groups, which is a small but critical distinction.

Wesley realized that if you wanted to bring about a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced and expressed and nurtured.

It was the kind of emotionally sophisticated, character-driven, multi-layered novel that invites reflection and discussion, and book groups were flocking to it.

The word about Ya-Ya was spreading in the same way, from reading group to reading group, from Ya-Ya group to Ya-Ya group and from one of Wells’s readings to another, because for over a year she stopped everything else and toured the country nonstop.

The lesson of Ya-Ya and John Wesley is that small, close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic potential of a message or idea.

Is there a simple rule of thumb that distinguishes a group with real social authority from a group with little power at all? As it turns out, there is. It’s called the Rule of 150,

There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information.

Most people can divide tones into only about six different categories before they begin to make mistakes and start lumping different tones in the same category.

If I make you drink twenty glasses of iced tea, each with a different amount of sugar in it, and ask you to sort them into categories according to sweetness, you’ll only be able to divide them into six or seven different categories before you begin to make mistakes.

“There seems to be some limitation built into us either by learning or by the design of our nervous systems, a limit that keeps our channel capacities in this general range,”

As human beings, in other words, we can only handle so much information at once. Once we pass a certain boundary, we become overwhelmed.

But if you think about it, we clearly have a channel capacity for feelings as well.

If your list was twice as long, if it had 30 names on it, and, as a result, you spent only half as much time with everyone on it, would you still be as close to everyone? Probably not. To be someone’s best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy.

At a certain point, at somewhere between 10 and 15 people, we begin to overload,

Most of human evolution took place before the advent of agriculture when men lived in small groups, on a face-to-face basis. As a result human biology has evolved as an adaptive mechanism to conditions that have largely ceased to exist. Man evolved to feel strongly about few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time; and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him.

So what does correlate with brain size? The answer, Dunbar argues, is group size.

Dunbar’s argument is that brains evolve, they get bigger, in order to handle the complexities of larger social groups.

If you belong to a group of five people, Dunbar points out, you have to keep track of ten separate relationships: your relationships with the four others in your circle and the six other two-way relationships between the others. That’s what it means to know everyone in the circle.

Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.

“The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.

Then there is the example of the religious group known as the Hutterites, who for hundreds of years have lived in self-sufficient agricultural colonies in Europe and, since the early twentieth century, in North America. The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one.

“When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another.” The Hutterites, obviously, didn’t get this idea from contemporary evolutionary psychology.

At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens—something indefinable but very real—that somehow changes the nature of community overnight.

“If you get too large, you don’t have enough work in common. You don’t have enough things in common, and then you start to become strangers and that close-knit fellowship starts to get lost.”

“What happens when you get that big is that the group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan.” He made a gesture with his hands, as if to demonstrate division. “You get two or three groups within the larger group. That is something you really try to prevent, and when it happens it is a good time to branch out.”

We have seen, in this book, how a number of relatively minor changes in our external environment can have a dramatic effect on how we behave and who we are. Clean up graffiti and all of a sudden people who would otherwise commit crimes suddenly don’t. Tell a seminarian that he has to hurry and all of a sudden he starts to ignore bystanders in obvious distress. The Rule of 150 suggests that the size of a group is another one of those subtle contextual factors that can make a big difference.

Once that line, that Tipping Point, is crossed, they begin to behave very differently.

this tells us that we’re probably better off building lots of little schools than one or two big ones.