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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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

The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.

John Zenilman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, an expert on sexually transmitted diseases, has another explanation: the breakdown of medical services in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. “In 1990–91, we had thirty-six thousand patient visits at the city’s sexually transmitted disease clinics,” Zenilman says. “Then the city decided to gradually cut back because of budgetary problems. The number of clinicians [medical personnel] went from seventeen to ten. The number of physicians went from three to essentially nobody. Patient visits dropped to twenty-one thousand. There also was a similar drop in the amount of field outreach staff. There was a lot of politics—things that used to happen, like computer upgrades, didn’t happen. It was a worst-case scenario of city bureaucracy not functioning. They would run out of drugs.”

These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

The ones causing the epidemic to grow—the ones who were infecting two and three and four and five others with their disease—were the remaining 168. In other words, in all of the city of Colorado Springs—a town of well in excess of 100,000 people—the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basically frequenting the same six bars.

The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. Revere’s news tipped and Dawes’s didn’t because of the differences between the two men. This is the Law of the Few, which I briefly outlined in the previous chapter. But there I only gave examples of the kinds of people—highly promiscuous, sexually predatory—who are critical to epidemics of sexually transmitted disease. This chapter is about the people critical to social epidemics and what makes someone like Paul Revere different from someone like William Dawes. These kinds of people are all around us. Yet we often fail to give them proper credit for the role they play in our lives. I call them Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

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.

Not only is my social circle not a circle, but it’s not “mine” either. It belongs to Jacob. It’s more like a club that he invited me to join. These people who link us up with the world, who bridge Omaha and Sharon, who introduce us to our social circles—these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize—are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

What makes someone a Connector? The first—and most obvious—criterion is that Connectors know lots of people. They are the kinds of people who know everyone. All of us know someone like this.

But even in that group there are people whose social circle is four or five times the size of other people’s. Sprinkled among every walk of life, in other words, are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. They are Connectors.

He has mastered what sociologists call the “weak tie,” a friendly yet casual social connection. More than that, he’s happy with the weak tie.

Granovetter argues that it is because when it comes to finding out about new jobs—or, for that matter, new information, or new ideas—“weak ties” are always more important than strong ties.

Paul Revere was a Connector. But he was also—and this is the second of the three kinds of people who control word-of-mouth epidemics—a Maven. The word Maven comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge.

“For the cops it was a bonanza,” Bratton writes. “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 a while the bad guys wised up and began to leave their weapons home and pay their fares.” Under Bratton, the number of ejections from subway stations—for drunkenness, or improper behavior—tripled within his first few months in office. Arrests for misdemeanors, for the kind of minor offenses that had gone unnoticed in the past, went up fivefold between 1990 and 1994. Bratton turned the transit police into an organization focused on the smallest infractions, on the details of life underground.

The birth order myth is an example of the FAE in action.

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. The words “Oh, you’re late” had the effect of making someone who was ordinarily compassionate into someone who was indifferent to suffering—of turning someone, in that particular moment, into a different person.

Crime can be more than understood. It can be prevented.

It’s called the Rule of 150, and it is a fascinating example of the strange and unexpected ways in which context affects the course of social epidemics.

Dunbar has actually developed an equation, which works for most primates, in which he plugs in what he calls the neocortex ratio of a particular species—the size of the neocortex relative to the size of the brain—and the equation spits out the expected maximum group size of the animal. If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8—or roughly 150. “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. Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

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. “Although it is probably more romantic to cast this process as one of interpersonal revelation and acceptance, it can also be appreciated as a necessary precursor to transactive memory.” 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,” he writes. “They once were able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding....They once could count on access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and this, too, is gone....The loss of transactive memory feels like losing a part of one’s own mind.”

What that associate is talking about is the psychological preconditions for transactive memory: it’s knowing someone well enough to know what they know, and knowing them well enough so that you can trust them to know things in their specialty. It’s the re-creation, on an organization-wide level, of the kind of intimacy and trust that exists in a family.

That’s the advantage of adhering to the Rule of 150. You can exploit the bonds of memory and peer pressure.

“If the goal of visionaries is to make a quantum leap forward, the goal of pragmatists is to make a percentage improvement—incremental, measurable, predictable progress,”

Of all the teenagers who experiment with cigarettes, only about a third ever go on to smoke regularly. Nicotine may be highly addictive, but it is only addictive in some people, some of the time. More important, it turns out that even among those who smoke regularly, there are enormous differences in the stickiness of their habit.

As psychiatric problems increase, the correlation with smoking grows stronger. About 80 percent of alcoholics smoke. Close to 90 percent of schizophrenics smoke.

Telling William Dawes that the British were coming did nothing for the colonists of New England. But telling Paul Revere ultimately meant the difference between defeat and victory. The creators of Blue’s Clues developed a sophisticated, half-hour television show that children loved. But they realized that there was no way that children could remember and learn everything they needed to remember and learn from a single viewing. So they did what no one had ever done in television before. They ran the same show five times in a row. Sadler didn’t try to reach every woman in San Diego all at once. She took what resources she had and put them all into one critical place—the beauty salon.

Who would have known, beforehand, that Big Bird had to be on the same set as the adult characters? Or who could have predicted that going from 100 to 150 workers in a plant isn’t a problem, but going from 150 to 200 is a huge problem? In the phone book names test that I gave, I’m not sure anyone would have predicted that the high scores would have been over 100 and the low scores under 10. We think people are different, but not that different.