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

by Malcolm Gladwell

the three people around the table were also engaging in what he termed “interactional synchrony.” Their conversation had a rhythmic physical dimension.

Each person would, within the space of one or two or three 1⁄45th-of-a-second frames, move a shoulder or cheek or an eyebrow or a hand, sustain that movement, stop it, change direction, and start again.

Subsequent research has revealed that it isn’t just gesture that is harmonized, but also conversational rhythm. When two people talk, their volume and pitch fall into balance. What linguists call speech rate — the number of speech sounds per second — equalizes.

So does what is known as latency, the period of time that lapses between the moment one speaker stops talking and the moment the other speaker begins. Two people may arrive at a conversation

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.

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 ...

In the late 1960s, a television producer named Joan Gantz Cooney set out to start an epidemic. Her target was three-, four-, and five-year-olds. Her agent of infection was television, and the “virus” she wanted to spread was literacy.

The show would last an hour and run five days a week, and the hope was that if that hour was contagious enough it could serve as an educational Tipping Point: giving children from disadvantaged homes a leg up once they began elementary school,

She called her idea Sesame Street.

Sesame Street aimed higher and tried harder than any other children’s show had, and the extraordinary thing was that it worked.

Virtually every time the show’s educational value has been tested — and Sesame Street has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history — it has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers.

The creators of Sesame Street accomplished something extraordinary, and the story of how they did that is a marvelous illustration of the second of the rules of the Tipping Point, the Stickiness Factor.

Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.

Roger Horchow, likewise, faxed all his friends about the restaurant his daughter took him to, performing the first step in creating a word-of-mouth epidemic. But obviously, for that epidemic to take off, the restaurant itself had to remain a good restaurant.

In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of “stickiness.”

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

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.

In the advertising world, direct marketers are the real students of stickiness, and some of the most intriguing conclusions about how to reach consumers have come from their work.

The key to Wunderman’s success was something he called the “treasure hunt.” In every TV Guide and Parade ad, he had his art director put a little gold box in the corner of the order coupon.

Viewers were told that if they could find the gold box in their issues of Parade and TV Guide, they could write in the name of any record on the Columbia list and get that record free.

The gold box, Wunderman writes, “made the reader/viewer part of an interactive advertising system. Viewers were not just an audience but had become participants.

According to this view, it is the formal features of television — violence, bright lights, loud and funny noises, quick editing cuts, zooming in and out, exaggerated action, and all the other things we associate with commercial TV — that hold our attention.

In other words, we don’t have to understand what we are looking at, or absorb what we are seeing, in order to keep watching.

If you take these two studies together — the toys study and the editing study — you reach quite a radical conclusion about children and television. 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.

This was the legacy of Sesame Street: If you paid careful attention to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness.

Todd Kessler, had actually worked on Sesame Street and left the show dissatisfied. He didn’t like the fast-paced “magazine” format of the show. “I love Sesame Street,” he says. “But I always believed that kids didn’t have short attention spans, that they could easily sit still for a half an hour.”

What they came up with is a show called Blue’s Clues. It is half an hour, not an hour. It doesn’t have an ensemble cast. It has just one live actor, Steve,

The script is punctuated with excruciatingly long pauses. There is none of the humor or wordplay or cleverness that characterizes Sesame Street.

It is difficult, as an adult, to watch Blue’s Clues and not wonder how this show could ever represent an improvement over Sesame Street.

An adult considers constant repetition boring, because it requires reliving the same experience over and again. But to preschoolers repetition isn’t boring, because each time they watch something they are experiencing it in a completely different way.

At CTW, the idea of learning through repetition was called the James Earl Jones effect.

Blue’s Clues is essentially a show built around the James Earl Jones effect. Instead of running new episodes one after another, and then repeating them as reruns later in...

Blue’s Clues succeeds as a story of discovery only if the clues are in proper order. The show has to start out easy — to give the viewers confidence — and then get progressively harder and harder, challenging the preschoolers more and more, drawing them into the narrative.

episode five times in a row. We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present.

But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying.

Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas, by putting the Muppet behind the H-U-...

The line between hostility and acceptance, in other words, between an epidemic that tips and one that does not, is sometimes a lot narrower than it seems.

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.

This is an epidemic theory of crime. It says that crime is contagious — just as a fashion trend is contagious — that it can start with a broken window and spread to an entire community.

The Tipping Point in this epidemic, though, isn’t a particular kind of person — a Connector like Lois Weisberg or a Maven like Mark Alpert. It’s something physical like graffiti.

The impetus to engage in a certain kind of behavior is not coming from a certain kind of person but from...

Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.

Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment.

The essence of the Power of Context is that the same thing is true for certain kinds of environments — that in ways that we don’t necessarily appreciate, our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances.

Control your environment and your thoughts

What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn’t a fundamental trait, or what they called a “unified” trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation.