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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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.

It can be assumed, however, that their apathy was indeed one of the big-city variety. It is almost a matter of psychological survival, if one is surrounded and pressed by millions of people, to prevent them from constantly impinging on you, and the only way to do this is to ignore them as often as possible. Indifference to one’s neighbor and his troubles is a conditioned reflex in life in New York as it is in other big cities.

In general, people chose friends of similar age and race. But if the friend lived down the hall, then age and race became a lot less important. Proximity overpowered similarity.

We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do.

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.

The people he puts in his diary or on his computer are acquaintances—people he might run into only once a year or once every few years—and he doesn’t shy away from the obligation that that connection requires. He has mastered what sociologists call the “weak tie,” a friendly yet casual social connection.

television advertisements would be most effective if the visual display created repetitive vertical movement of the television viewers’ heads (e.g., bouncing ball).” Simple physical movements and observations can have a profound effect on how we feel and think.

What we are talking about is a kind of super-reflex, a fundamental physiological ability of which we are barely aware. And like all specialized human traits, some people have much more mastery over this reflex than others. Part of what it means to have a powerful or persuasive personality, then, is that you can draw others into your own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction. In some studies, students who have a high degree of synchrony with their teachers are happier, more enthused, interested, and easygoing.

Mimicry, they argue, is also one of the means by which we infect each other with our emotions. In other words, if I smile and you see me and smile in response—even a microsmile that takes no more than several milliseconds—it’s not just you imitating or empathizing with me. It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you. Emotion is contagious.

If we think about emotion this way—as outside-in, not inside-out—it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people “senders.” Senders have special personalities. They are also physiologically different.

In experiments, children who are asked to read a passage and are then tested on it will invariably score higher than children asked to watch a video of the same subject matter. Educational experts describe television as “low involvement.”

The New York–based firm Media Dynamics estimates that the average American is now exposed to 254 different commercial messages in a day, up nearly 25 percent since the mid-1970s.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gore is, in short, a very unusual company with a clear and well-articulated philosophy. It is a big established company attempting to behave like a small entrepreneurial start-up. By all accounts, that attempt has been wildly successful. Whenever business experts make lists of the best American companies to work for, or whenever consultants give speeches on the best-managed American companies, Gore is on the list. It has a rate of employee turnover that is about a third the industry average.

connection between this kind of organizational structure and the unusual, free-form management style of Gore. The kind of bond that Dunbar describes in small groups is essentially a kind of peer pressure: it’s knowing people well enough that what they think of you matters.

“The pressure that comes to bear if we are not efficient at a plant, if we are not creating good earnings for the company, the peer pressure is unbelievable,” Jim Buckley, a longtime associate of the firm, told me. “This is what you get when you have small teams, where everybody knows everybody. Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss.

Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system—a transactive memory system—which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things. “Relationship development is often understood as a process of mutual self-disclosure,” he writes.

Transactive memory is part of what intimacy means. In fact, Wegner argues, it is the loss of this kind of joint memory that helps to make divorce so painful. “Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems,”

All kinds of high-tech products fail, never making it beyond the Early Adopters, because the companies that make them can’t find a way to transform an idea that makes perfect sense to an Early Adopter into one that makes perfect sense to a member of the Early Majority.

In countless studies since Eysenck’s groundbreaking work, this picture of the smoking “type” has been filled out. Heavy smokers have been shown to have a much greater sex drive than nonsmokers. They are more sexually precocious; they have a greater “need” for sex, and greater attraction to the opposite sex. At age nineteen, for example, 15 percent of nonsmoking white women attending college have had sex. The same number for white female college students who do smoke is 55 percent.

smokers also seem to be more honest about themselves than nonsmokers. As David Krogh describes it in his treatise Smoking: The Artificial Passion, psychologists have what they call “lie” tests in which they insert inarguable statements—“I do not always tell the truth” or “I am sometimes cold to my spouse”—and if test-takers consistently deny these statements, it is taken as evidence that they are not generally truthful. Smokers are much more truthful on these tests.

a fifth of all smokers don’t smoke every day. There are millions of Americans, in other words, who manage to smoke regularly and not be hooked—people for whom smoking is contagious but not sticky.

language is a skill acquired laterally—that what children pick up from other children is as, or more, important in the acquisition of language as what they pick up at home.

psychiatric problems increase, the correlation with smoking grows stronger.

the same kinds of things that would make someone susceptible to the contagious effects of smoking—low self-esteem, say, or an unhealthy and unhappy home life—are also the kinds of things that contribute to depression.

More tantalizing, though, is some preliminary evidence that the two problems might have the same genetic root. For example, depression is believed to be the result, at least in part, of a problem in the production of certain key brain chemicals, in particular the neurotransmitters known as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. These are the chemicals that regulate mood, that contribute to feelings of confidence and mastery and pleasure.