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

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.

The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.

We will always reach for a “dispositional” explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation.

We do this because, like vervets, we are a lot more attuned to personal cues than contextual cues.

But the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, the Methodist movement became epidemic in England and North America, tipping from 20,000 to 90,000 followers in the U.S. in the space of five or six years in the 1780s. But Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, was by no means the most charismatic preacher of his era. That

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.”

“These are kids who are outcasts in some way,” Gordon says. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually true. They feel that way. They always felt like they were different. If you ask kids what worries them, the trendsetter kids pick up on things like germ warfare, or terrorism. They pick up on bigger-picture things, whereas the mainstream kids think about being overweight, or their grandparents dying, or how well they are doing in school. You see more activists in trendsetters. People with more passion.

geneticists have shown that most of the character traits that make us who we are—friendliness, extroversion, nervousness, openness, and so on—are about half determined by our genes and half determined by our environment, and the assumption has always been that this environment that makes such a big difference in our lives is the environment of the home.

Drugs like Zoloft and Prozac work because they prompt the brain to produce more serotonin: they compensate, in other words, for the deficit of serotonin that some depressed people suffer from. Nicotine appears to do exactly the same thing with the other two key neurotransmitters—dopamine and norepinephrine. Those smokers who are depressed, in short, are essentially using tobacco as a cheap way of treating their own depression, of boosting the level of brain chemicals they need to function normally. This effect is strong enough that when smokers with a history of psychiatric problems give up cigarettes, they run a sizable risk of relapsing into depression. Here is stickiness with a vengeance: not only do some smokers find it hard to quit because they are addicted to nicotine, but also because

Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas. The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are responsible for starting word-of-mouth epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word-of-mouth epidemic, your resources ought to be solely concentrated on those three groups. No one else matters.