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January 8 - February 18, 2024
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
We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out.
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?
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.
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.
This is the kind of environmental explanation that makes intuitive sense to us. The anonymity and alienation of big-city life makes people hard and unfeeling.
When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused.
The three rules of the Tipping Point—the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context—offer
Think, for a moment, about the last expensive restaurant you went to, the last expensive piece of clothing you bought, and the last movie you saw. In how many of those cases was your decision about where to spend your money heavily influenced by the recommendation of a friend?
because of the sheer ubiquity of marketing efforts these days, word-of-mouth appeals have become the only kind of persuasion that most of us respond to anymore.
Most of us don’t have particularly broad and diverse groups of friends.
Proximity overpowered similarity.
Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
Connectors know lots of people.
The idea behind the game is to try to link any actor or actress, through the movies they’ve been in, to the actor Kevin Bacon in less than six steps.
He found that 56 percent of those he talked to found their job through a personal connection.
Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.
Connector might tell ten friends where to stay in Los Angeles, and half of them might take his advice. A Maven might tell five people where to stay in Los Angeles but make the case for the hotel so emphatically that all of them would take his advice.
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.
The subtle pro-Reagan bias in Jennings’s face seems to have influenced the voting behavior of ABC viewers.
But as soon as listeners started nodding, it became very persuasive. In
“television advertisements would be most effective if the visual display created repetitive vertical movement of the television viewers’ heads (e.g., bouncing ball).”
of cultural microrhythms—is
Even before he attempted to persuade me with his words, he had forged a bond with me with his movements and his speech.
“I had always been very much into fitting
how you teach to what you know about the child,”
In just the past decade, the time devoted to advertisements in a typical hour of network television has grown from six minutes to nine minutes,
and it continues to climb every year.
clutter has made it harder and harder to get any one message to stick.
“Because the audience is not all that verbal or even preverbal, it is important to tell the story visually,”
She would create a story to try to integrate events, actions, and feelings into one structure—a
But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin,
with the presentation of their ideas, by putting the Muppet behind the H-U-G, by mixing Big Bird with the adults, by repeating episodes and skits more than once, by having Steve pause just a second longer than normal after he asks a question, by putting a tiny gold box in the corner of the ad.
In 1984, an encounter between an angry subway rider and four young black youths led to bloodshed. Today, in
New York’s subways, that same encounter doesn’t lead to violence anymore. How did that happen?
graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes:
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.
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 there is very little you can do to prevent
crime from happening in the first place.
peer influence and community influence are more important than family influence in determining how children turn out.
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.
There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our
a group under 150, “orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts.”
Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss.
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
“There was a marked tendency for any picture or story to gravitate in memory toward what was familiar to the subject in his own life, consonant with his own culture, and above all, to what had some special emotional significance for him,”
They smoke even though they overestimate the risk of smoking.
The process is essentially similar to that whereby a person uses a word in a spoken language.
Interestingly, smokers also seem to be more honest about themselves than nonsmokers.
