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

Connectors are one of the three groups of special people, alongside Mavens and Salesmen, who make up Gladwell’s Law of the Few. These are the three agents of change in social epidemics. Connectors love to build up a portfolio of acquaintances and to introduce strangers to each other. Gladwell provides several examples of great Connectors, including the successful retailer and Broadway producer Roger Horchow, who had "an instinctive and natural gift for making social connections” (43), and Lois Weisberg, whose results as a Connector came from her presence in the mayor's office and in distinct social spheres for decades in Chicago. Connectors are the “social glue” (70) of epidemics.

While regular epidemics deal with the uncontrollable spread of viruses in a population, social epidemics refer to ideas or practices that go from relatively unknown to mainstream. Gladwell argues that epidemics feature three agents of change: People with unique skills that contribute to the spread; the “stickiness” of the subject matter; and the importance of context. It is possible not only to understand social epidemics but also to engineer them. Thus, people who manipulate the necessary blend of people, contagiousness, and context can start their own social epidemics. Conversely, they can use these elements to stifle negative ones before they spread.

Mavens are information specialists, most famously in the form of “market mavens” who know all the hottest deals and want to help as many people as possible with the information they accumulate. It is crucial for Mavens, such as marketing expert Mark Alpert, to be sincerely motivated by a genuine desire to help others and not simply to show off. An annoying Maven is not a real one, because their role in sparking epidemics relies on their ability to convince others to follow their advice. Being annoying or overbearing hinders this task. Mavens are the “data banks” (70) of social epidemics.

The Rule of 150 is based on the observation that human beings have a limited “amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information” (175). In other words, people have a “channel capacity” for things like the amount of meaningful relationships they can handle or the number of people in whom they can feel emotionally invested. Through trial and error, organizations as disparate as Hutterite religious communities and the Gore-Tex company found that 150 people is the upper limit for groups in which “we can have a genuinely social relationship” (179) and not become strangers to one another. The Rule of 150 is another illustration of The Power of Context: Subtle social dynamics can be irreparably ruined by adding just one or two people to a group that has equilibrium, and the possibilities and experiences that existed before for the group may no longer be available for it after this disruption.

Salesmen are charismatic individuals “with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing” (70). Good Salesmen have an answer to every question and can overcome all objections. Gladwell presents the financial planner Tom Gau as a quintessential Salesman who genuinely loves people, is endlessly persuasive, and has a “natural exuberance” (71). The subtlest skills of Salesmen, such as barely noticeable facial movements that suggest close listening and understanding, help them in their task. Gladwell provides research that shows that people who watch television news can be so enormously influenced by the body language of charismatic reporters that it affects their voting decisions in federal elections. (Throughout the book, Gladwell adheres to the non-gender-inclusive terms "Salesman" and “Salesmen,” rather than “Salesperson” or “Salespeople.”)

The Law of the Few refers to the handful of extremely special people who make word-of-mouth epidemics possible: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. Social epidemics rely on Connectors who know lots of people, bring them all together, and love getting to know more people. Mavens are experts about all the hottest deals or other types of information and take pleasure in telling as many people as possible about it. Charismatic Salesmen can convince people about anything and anticipate any concerns.

One of the most difficult aspects of epidemic transmission to control is the complicated contexts in which they emerge. The Power of Context refers to the fact that “we are more than just sensitive to changes in context. We’re exquisitely sensitive to them” (140). The subtle changes that can help tip epidemics are often unintuitive. Gladwell offers the example of crime and the observation that dilapidated-looking neighborhoods with graffiti are more likely to generate increasing levels of crime because these markers imply permission for people who are oriented toward committing crimes to go ahead and do them. A small change in context, which could include cleaning up graffiti as soon as it appears and arresting petty lawbreakers, can have the broader effect of reducing crime generally. This is an expression of “broken windows theory,” an idea for which Gladwell expresses much enthusiasm about in this book but which is criticized for being rooted in racist and classist assumptions and for the lack of empirical studies demonstrating its validity.

Stickiness refers to the how memorable a message is. A television program that is forgotten the moment it is over is completely "un-sticky," while an advertising jingle that people remember and repeat for the rest of their lives is maximally sticky. The stickiness of content can be adjusted based on trial and error, and “a subtle but significant change in presentation” (98) can make the defining difference in this quality. Gladwell offers examples of children’s shows like Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, whose showrunners mastered the art of stickiness in children’s programming by tweaking things like the length of segments and the relative difficulty of the content. Highly sticky content is more likely to tip an epidemic.