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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Those first few kids, whoever they were, weren’t deliberately trying to promote Hush Puppies. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. Then the fad spread to two fashion designers who used the shoes to peddle something else—haute couture.

No one was trying to make Hush Puppies a trend. Yet, somehow, that’s exactly what happened. The shoes passed a certain point in popularity and they tipped.

The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

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 —are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter.

Of the three, the third trait—the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment—is the most important,

To appreciate the power of epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.

This possibility of sudden change is at the center of the idea of the Tipping Point and might well be the hardest of all to accept.

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

All epidemics have Tipping Points. Jonathan Crane, a sociologist at the University of Illinois, has looked at the effect the number of role models in a community—the professionals, managers, teachers whom the Census Bureau has defined as “high status”—has on the lives of teenagers in the same neighborhood.

world of the Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is—contrary to all our expectations—a certainty.

The point of all of this is to answer two simple questions that lie at the heart of what we would all like to accomplish as educators, parents, marketers, business people, and policymakers.

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?

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

Social epidemics work in exactly the same way. They are also driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people. In this case, it’s not sexual appetites that set them apart. It’s things like how sociable they are, or how energetic or knowledgeable or influential among their peers.

The Law of the Few says the answer is that one of these exceptional people found out about the trend, and through social connections and energy and enthusiasm and personality spread the word about Hush Puppies

Stickiness means that a message makes an impact. You can’t get it out of your head. It sticks in your memory.

To this day, if you say to most Americans “Winston tastes good,” they can finish the phrase, “like a cigarette should.” That’s a classically sticky advertising line, and stickiness is a critical component in tipping. Unless you remember what I tell you, why would you ever change your behavior or buy my product or go to see my movie?

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 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.

When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused. They assume that someone else will make the call, or they assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem—the seizure-like sounds from the other room, the smoke from the door—isn’t really a problem.

despite the fact that thirty-eight people heard her scream; it’s that no one called because thirty-eight people heard her scream.

The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.

The three rules of the Tipping Point—the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context—offer a way of making sense of epidemics.

Paul Revere’s ride is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic. A piece of extraordinary news traveled a long distance in a very short time, mobilizing an entire region to arms. Not all word-of-mouth epidemics are this sensational, of course.

But it is safe to say that word of mouth is—even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns—still the most important form of human communication.

word-of-mouth remains very mysterious. People pass on all kinds of information to each other all the time.

Why is it that some ideas and trends and messages “tip” and others don’t?

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.

Most of us don’t have particularly broad and diverse groups of friends.

if the friend lived down the hall, then age and race became a lot less important. Proximity overpowered similarity.

study, done on students at the University of Utah, found that if you ask someone why he is friendly with someone else, he’ll say it is because he and his friend share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the two of them on their attitudes, you’ll find out that what they actually share is similar activities.

We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who oc...

People in Omaha are not, as a rule, friends with people who live half...

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.

College students don’t have as wide a circle of acquaintances as people in their forties. It makes sense that between the ages of twenty and forty the number of people you know should roughly double, and that upper-income professionals should know more people than lower-income immigrants.

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.

Horchow has an instinctive and natural gift for making social connections. He’s not aggressive about it. He’s not one of those overly social, back-slapping types for whom the process of acquiring acquaintances is obvious and self-serving.

He’s more an observer, with the dry, knowing manner of someone who likes to remain a little bit on the outside. He simply likes people, in a genuine and powerful way, and he finds the patterns of acquaintanceship and interaction in which people arrange themselves to be endlessly fascinating.

when I went to see Lee Gershwin, we mentioned that we had just been to see Mildred Knopf. She said—You know her? Oh, why haven’t we met before? She gave us the rights immediately.

This is not normal social behavior. It’s a little unusual. Horchow collects people the same way others collect stamps.

Horchow is quite different. 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. More than that, he’s happy with the weak tie. After I met Horchow, I felt slightly frustrated. I wanted to know him better, but I wondered whether I would ever have the chance.

I don’t think he shared the same frustration with me. I think he’s someone who sees value and p...

in the case of Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.

The point about Connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.

The point is that Lois found him interesting, because, in some way, she finds everyone interesting.

Oh, I’ve met the most wonderful person. You are going to love her,’ and she is as enthused about this person as she was about the first person she has met and you know what, she’s usually right.” Helen Doria, another of her friends, told me that “Lois sees things in you that you don’t even see in yourself,” which is another way of saying the same thing, that by some marvelous quirk of nature, Lois and the other people like her have some instinct that helps them relate to the people they meet.