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

by Malcolm Gladwell

When Weisberg looks out at the world or when Roger Horchow sits next to you on an airplane, they don’t see the same world that the rest of us see. They see possibility, and while most of us are busily choosing whom we would like to know, and rejecting the people who don’t look right or who live out near the a...

Of those who used a contact to find a job, only 16.7 percent saw that contact “often”—as they would if the contact were a good friend—and 55.6 percent saw their contact only “occasionally.” Twenty-eight percent saw the contact “rarely.” People weren’t getting their jobs through their friends. They were getting them through their acquaintances.

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.

Your friends, after all, occupy the same world that you do. They might work with you, or live near you, and go to the same churches, schools, or parties. How much, ...

Your acquaintances, on the other hand, by definition occupy a very different world than you. They are much more likely to know something that you don’t. To capture this apparent paradox, Granovetter coined a marvelous phrase: the strength of weak ties. Acquaintances, in short, represent a source ...

Connectors like Lois Weisberg and Roger Horchow—who are masters of the weak tie—are extraordinarily powerful. We rely on them to give us access to opportu...

This principle holds for more than just jobs, of course. It also holds for restaurants, movies, fashion trends, or anything else that moves by word of mouth. It isn’t just the case that the closer someone is to a Connector, the more powe...

their long lists of weak ties, their role in multiple worlds and subcultures, they must have been able to take those shoes and send them in a thousand directions at once—to make them really tip.

perhaps one of the reasons why so many fashion trends don’t make it into mainstream America is that simply, by sheerest bad fortune, they never happen to meet the approval of a Connector along the way.

This is, in a nutshell, what word of mouth is. It’s not me telling you about a new restaurant with great food, and you telling a friend and that friend telling a friend. Word of mouth begins when somewhere along that chain, someone tells a person like Roger Horchow.

What makes people like Mark Alpert so important in starting epidemics? Obviously they know things that the rest of us don’t.

A 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. These are different personalities at work, acting for different reasons. But they both have the power to spark word-of-mouth epidemics.

The one thing that a Maven is not is a persuader. Alpert’s motivation is to educate and to help. He’s not the kind of person who wants to twist your arm. As we talked, in fact, there were several key moments when he seemed to probe me for information, to find out what I knew, so he could add it to his own formidable database.

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. Who are these Salesmen?

He seems to have some kind of indefinable trait, something powerful and contagious and irresistible that goes beyond what comes out of his mouth, that makes people who meet him want to agree with him. It’s energy. It’s enthusiasm. It’s charm. It’s likability. It’s all those things and yet something more.

I think, very important clues as to what makes someone like Tom Gau—or, for that matter, any of the Salesmen in our lives—so effective. The first is that little things can, apparently, make as much of a difference as big things.

It would never have occurred to them that they could be persuaded to reach a conclusion by something so arbitrary and seemingly insignificant as a smile or a nod from a newscaster.

Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground. We all do it, all the time.

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.

What I felt with Gau was that I was being seduced, not in the sexual sense, of course, but in a global way, that our conversation was being conducted on his terms, not mine. I felt I was becoming synchronized with him.

“Skilled musicians know this, and good speakers,” says Joseph Cappella, who teaches at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “They know when the crowds are with them, literally in synchrony with them, in movements and nods and stillness in moments of attention.”

It is a strange thing to admit, because I didn’t want to be drawn in. I was on guard against it. But the essence of Salesmen is that, on some level, they cannot be resisted. “Tom can build a level of trust and rapport in five t...

There is another, more specific dimension to this. When two people talk, they don’t just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry. If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they’ll smile or frown back, although perhaps only in musc...

We imitate each other’s emotions as a way of expressing support and caring and, even more basically, as a way of communicating with each other.

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. Scientists who have studied faces, for example, report that there are huge differences among people in the location of facial muscles, in their form, and also—surprisingly—even in their prevalence.

“There are carriers, people who are very expressive, and there are people who are especially susceptible. It’s not that emotional contagion is a ...

the Affective Communication Test to measure this ability to send emotion, to be contagious.

The test is a self-administered survey, with thirteen questions relating to things like whether you can keep still when you hear good dance music, how loud your laugh is, whether you touch friends when you talk to them, how good you are at sending seductive glances, whether you like to be the center of attention.

Friedman found that in just two minutes, without a word being spoken, the low-scorers ended up picking up the moods of the high-scorers. If the charismatic person started out depressed, and the inexpressive person started out happy, by the end of the two minutes the inexpressive person was depressed as well.

But it didn’t work the other way. Only the charismatic person could infect the other people in the room with his or her emotions.

pair of shoes or a warning or an infection or a new movie can become highly contagious and tip simply by being associated with a particular kind of person.

Stickiness sounds as if it should be straightforward. When most of us want to make sure what we say is remembered, we speak with emphasis. We talk loudly, and we repeat what we have to say over and over again.

Marketers feel the same way. There is a maxim in the advertising business that an advertisement has to be seen at least six times before anyone will remember it.

But it’s not all that useful for, say, a group of people trying to spark a literacy epidemic with a small budget and one hour of programming on public television. Are there smaller, subtler, easier ways to make something stick?

Reaching the consumer with the message is not the hard part of direct marketing. What is difficult is getting consumers to stop, read the advertisement, remember it, and then act on it. To figure out which ads work the best, direct marketers do extensive testing.

Conventional advertisers have preconceived ideas about what makes an advertisement work: humor, splashy graphics, a celebrity endorser.

Direct marketers, by contrast, have few such preconceptions, because the number of coupons that are mailed back or the number of people who call in on an 800 number in response to a television commercial gives them an objective, iron-clad measure of effectiveness.

In the advertising world, direct marketers are the real students of stickiness, and some of the most intriguing conclusions about how to rea...

Sesame Street was built about a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them.

“We were led to the conclusion,” they wrote, “that the five-year-olds in the toys group were attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they looked at what for them were the most informative parts of the program. This strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention.”

Kids don’t watch when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused. If you are in the business of educational television, this is a critical difference.

It means if you want to know whether—and what—kids are learning from a TV show, all you have to do is to notice what they are watching. And if you want to know what kids aren’t learning, all you have to do is notice what they aren’t watching.

“We found to our surprise that our preschool audience didn’t like it when the adult cast got into a contentious discussion,” he remembers. “They didn’t like it when two or three people would be talking at once. That’s the producers’ natural instinct, to hype a scene by creating confusion. It’s supposed to tell you that this is exciting. The fact is that our kids turned away from that kind of situation. Instead of picking up on the signal that something exciting is going on, they picked up on the signal that something confusing is going on. And they’d lose interest.

You know Darwin’s terms about the survival of the fittest? We had a mechanism to identify the fittest and decide what should survive.”

“The street was supposed to be the glue,” Lesser said. “We would always come back to the street. It pulled the show together. But it was just adults doing things and talking about stuff and the kids weren’t interested. We were getting incredibly low attention levels. The kids were leaving the show.

Levels would pop back up if the Muppets came back, but we couldn’t afford to keep losing them like that.”

“That’s when Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch and Snuffleupagus were born,” said Palmer.

What we now think of as the essence of Sesame Street—the artful blend of fluffy monsters and earnest adults—grew out of a desperate desire to be sticky.

“Oscar was very active. He was really making a fuss in the background, and the word is not close to him at all. He’s moving his mouth a lot, moving his hands. He has things in his hands. There is a great deal of distraction. The kids don’t focus on the letters at all because Oscar is so interesting.” Oscar was sticky. The lesson wasn’t.