The Tipping Point Quotes

“Horchow's daughter, Sally, told me a story of how she once took her father to a new Japanese restaurant where a friend of hers was a chef. Horchow liked the food, and so when he went home he turned on his computer, pulled up the names of acquaintances who lived nearby, and faxed them notes telling them of a wonderful new restaurant he had discovered and that they should try it. 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.”
― Malcom Gladwell, The Tipping Point: Cum lucruri mici pot provoca schimbări de proporţii

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don't understand-things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability," says Anderson. "For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, the not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth. And Blue's Clues doubles that feeling, because they also feel like they are participating in something. They feel like they are helping Steve.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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. This”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“...as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“The Power of Context is an environmental argument. It says that behavior is a function of social context.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. This, too, contradicts some of the most ingrained assumptions we hold about ourselves and each other. We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament. But if you add up the examples of Salesmen and Connectors, of Paul Revere's ride and Blue's Clues, and the Rule of 150 and the New York subway cleanup and the Fundamental Attribution Error, they amount to a very different conclusion about what it means to be human. We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us. Taking the graffiti off the walls of New York's subways turned New Yorkers into better citizens. Telling seminarians to hurry turned them into bad citizens. The suicide of a charismatic young Micronesian set off an epidemic of suicides that lasted for a decade. Putting a little gold box in the corner of a Columbia Record Club advertisement suddenly made record buying by mail seem irresistible. To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That's why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Stories about suicides resulted in an increase in single-car crashes where the victim was the driver. Stories about suicide-murders resulted in an increase in multiple-car crashes in which the victims included both drivers and passengers. Stories about young people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving young people. Stories about older people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving older people. These patterns have been demonstrated on many occasions. News coverage of a number of suicides by self-immolation in England in the late 1970's, for example, prompted 82 suicides by self-immolation over the next year. The "permission" given by an initial act of suicide, in other words, isn't a general invitation to the vulnerable. It is really a highly detailed set of instructions, specific to certain people in certain situations who choose to die in certain ways. It's not a gesture. It's speech.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of vervetish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of information.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“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,.....”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Of course, kids don't always like repetition. Whatever they are watching has to be complex enough to allow, upon repeated exposure, for deeper and deeper levels of comprehension. At the same time, it can't be so complex that the first time around it baffles the children and turns them off.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“A Maven is a person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places. This person likes to initiate discussions with consumers and respond to requests," Price says. "They like to be helpers in the marketplace. They distribute coupons. They take you shopping. They go shopping for you....They distribute about four times as many coupons as other people. This is the person who connects people to the marketplace and has the inside scoop on the marketplace. They know where the bathroom is in retail stores. That's the kind of knowledge they have." They are more than experts. An expert, says Price, will "talk about, say, cars because they love cars. But they don't talk about cars because they love you, and want to help you with your decision. The Market Maven will. They are more socially motivated.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves — and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day — dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults — with the voices of their peers. That is a world ruled by the logic of word of mouth, by the contagious messages that teens pass among themselves. Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That's why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“There are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one. "Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people," Spokane told me. "When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another." The Hutterites, obviously, didn't get this idea from contemporary evolutionary psychology. They've been following the 150 rule for centuries. But their rationale fits perfectly with Dunbar's theories. At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens-something indefinable but very real-that somehow changes the nature of community overnight. "In smaller groups people are a lot closer. They're knit together, which is very important if you want to be be effective and successful at community life," Gross said. "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." Gross spoke from experience. He had been in Hutterite colonies that had come near to that magic number and seen firsthand how things had changed. "What happens when you get that big is that the group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan." He made a gesture with his hands, as if to demonstrate division. "You get two or three groups within the larger group. That is something you really try to prevent, and when it happens it is a good time to branch out.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8-or roughly 150. "The figure 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“The point about Connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Rod Steiger is the best connected actor in history because he has managed to move up and down and back and forth among all the different worlds and subcultures and niches and levels that the acting profession has to offer.

This is what Connectors are like. They are the Rod Steigers of everyday life. They are people whom all of us can reach in only a few steps because, for one reason or another, they manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference