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

by Malcolm Gladwell

All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way.

But what Zimbardo and Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we’re deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior.

The difference is that it is framed in a way that makes it about people, instead of about numbers, and as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE),

when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimat...

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

There is something in all of us that makes us instinctively want to explain the world around us in terms of people’s essential attributes: he’s a better basketball player, that person is smarter than I am.

Looking for a cause

We do this because, like vervets, we are a lot more attuned to personal cues than contextual cues. The FAE also makes the world a much simpler and more understandable place.

Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.

The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.

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.

Set up your context for success

remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature.

For a crime to be committed, something extra, something additional, has to happen to tip a troubled person toward violence, and what the Power of Context is saying is that those Tipping Points may be as simple and trivial as everyday signs of disorder like graffiti and fare-beating.

that the features of our immediate social and physical world — the streets we walk down, the people we encounter — play a huge role in shaping who we are and how we act.

Wesley’s Methodism spread like wildfire through England and America because Wesley was shuttling back and forth among hundreds and hundreds of groups, and each group was then taking his message and making it even stickier.

There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information.

If I make you drink twenty glasses of iced tea, each with a different amount of sugar in it, and ask you to sort them into categories according to sweetness, you’ll only be able to divide them into six or seven different categories before you begin to make mistakes.

“There seems to be some limitation built into us either by learning or by the design of our nervous systems, a limit that keeps our channel capacities in this general range,”

“The Magical Number Seven.” This is the reason that telephone numbers have seven digits.

What I’m describing here is an intellectual capacity — our ability to process raw information. But if you think about it, we clearly have a channel capacity for feelings as well.

The answer, Dunbar argues, is group size. If you look at any species of primate — at every variety of monkey and ape — the larger their neocortex is, the larger the average size of the groups they live with.

Dunbar’s argument is that brains evolve, they get bigger, in order to handle the complexities of larger social groups. If you belong to a group of five people, Dunbar points out, you have to keep track of ten separate relationships:

your relationships with the four others in your circle and the six other two-way relationships between the others. That’s what it ...

“In smaller groups people are a lot closer. They’re knit together, which is very important if you want to be effective and successful at community life,”

“If you get too large, you don’t have enough work in common. You don’t have enough things in common, and then you start to become strangers and that close-knit fellowship starts to get lost.”

We have seen, in this book, how a number of relatively minor changes in our external environment can have a dramatic effect on how we behave and who we are.

Clean up graffiti and all of a sudden people who would otherwise commit crimes suddenly don’t.

Tell a seminarian that he has to hurry and all of a sudden he starts to ignore bystan...

The Rule of 150 suggests that the size of a group is another one of those subtle contextual factors t...

Gore is, in short, a very unusual company with a clear and well-articulated philosophy. It is a big established company attempting to behave like a small entrepreneurial start-up.

he told an interviewer some years ago, so 150 employees per plant became the company goal.

“This is what you get when you have small teams, where everybody knows everybody. Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss. Many, many times more powerful. People want to live up to what is expected of them.”

When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains.

Most of us deliberately don’t memorize most of the phone numbers we need. But we do memorize where to find them

At Lucent, the 150 people in manufacturing may have their own memory network. But how much more effective would the company be if, like Gore, everyone in the plant was part of the same transactive system

if R&D was hooked into design and design into manufacturing and manufacturing into sales?

What Gore has created, in short, is an organized mechanism that makes it far easier for new ideas and information moving around the organization to tip

to go from one person or one part of the group to the entire group all at once. That’s the advantage of adhering to the Rule of 150.

You can exploit the bonds of memory and ...

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

The first two groups — the Innovators and Early Adopters — are visionaries. They want revolutionary change, something that sets them apart qualitatively from their competitors.

The Early Majority, by contrast, are big companies. They have to worry about any change fitting into their complex arrangement of suppliers and distributors.

They will undertake risks when required, but they first will put in place safety nets and manage the risks very closely.”

Moore’s argument is that the attitude of the Early Adopters and the attitude of the Early Majority are fundamentally incompatible.

How did they do it? How is it that all the weird, idiosyncratic things that really cool kids do end up in the mainstream?

This is where, I think, Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen play their most important role.

They are the ones who make it possible for innovations to overcome this problem of the chasm. They are translators: they take ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand.

This is what is meant by translation. What Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning.

he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.

The questions of how sticky smoking ends up being to any single person, in other words, depends a great deal on his or her own particular initial reaction to nicotine.