42 pages • 1 hour read
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
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Themes
The Big Impact of Small Changes
Early in The Tipping Point, Gladwell sets up the idea that small changes can have huge effects as a “radical notion” (10) and discusses the importance of understanding that “sometimes big changes follow from small events” (11) if people want to trace the roots of social epidemics. He provides numerous examples of this throughout his narrative and urges readers to remember this idea above almost anything else.
Epidemics are delicate phenomena, and even “the smallest of changes” can “shatter an epidemic’s equilibrium” (18). This includes the activities of a few individuals whose impact is incredibly outsized. Gladwell gives the examples of a Colorado Springs gonorrhea epidemic in which the STI epidemic “tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods […] frequenting the same six bars” (20). The same is true for social epidemics. A small group of special people whom Gladwell identifies under the rubric of his Law of the Few—Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen—are indispensable for promulgating word-of-mouth epidemics, yet they represent a tiny proportion of the overall population. Gladwell discusses the rise of Hush Puppies shoes in the 1990s, tracing their resurgence to a few trendsetting New York City hipsters who made an unexpected fashion choice and triggered an epidemic of wearing retro shoes.
Tweaking a message or product through intense focus-testing or other forms of research can yield substantial results and tip something into epidemic status. This is an aspect of Gladwell’s message that is easily applicable to corporate profitmaking and veers beyond his focus on effecting positive community change through small actions. He provides the example of two children’s shows, Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, whose developers used these research methods to create programming that captures the attention of children by focusing on what they notice and focus on. Blue’s Clues, in particular, maximized stickiness by constantly making minor changes, such as tweaking the difficulty of the puzzles featured on the program or changing the order of events on the screen, in response to research on children's attentiveness.
Gladwell emphasizes the disproportionate impact of small actions in unexpected places. For this reason, studying epidemics includes the “need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken” (80). This applies in the case of charismatic Salesmen like Tom Gau, whose facial and bodily movements during interactions with people demonstrate “a kind of super-reflex, a fundamental ability of which we are barely aware” that helps him “draw others into [their] own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interactions” (82). Activity at this micro-sociological level affects the spread of word-of-mouth epidemics. Gladwell offers another example of news anchor Peter Jennings, whose subtle approving facial reactions affected the voting patterns of his viewing audience.
The Uniquely “Social” Aspect of Epidemics
Gladwell makes overt comparisons between the traditional spread of infectious disease and the social epidemics that he focuses on in The Tipping Point, but his ultimate task is to emphasize the social aspect of epidemics and why they are worth studying.
Gladwell introduces human socialization as a stumbling block to truly understanding the nature of social epidemics: People are “socialized to make a rough approximation between cause and effect” (10), which obstructs the ability to understand the subtle mechanisms by which social epidemics operate and grow. Social epidemics often “tip” suddenly and unpredictably. The day before an epidemic tips, life might appear normal, but the next day, everything changes. Gladwell offers the example of white flight in the 1970s, when white families began to move out of their suburban neighborhoods as they became more racially integrated. Often, a slow trickle of white families' departures suddenly tipped, and all the white families left.
According to the author, epidemics of disease and social epidemics operate similarly when it comes to the people who are responsible for their spread. He offers the example of the alleged Patient Zero who was identified as being responsible for spreading HIV in North America, although later research debunked this claim. A Colorado Springs gonorrhea study that he cites demonstrates the outsized importance of a few individuals in the STI's spread. However, unlike public health crises, social epidemics are spread by individuals who are extremely specialized. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are perceived as "cool" and charismatic specialists whose natural personalities happen to suit the needs of word-of-mouth epidemics perfectly. A Connector’s joy in building a rolodex of acquaintances, a Maven’s wish to help others make the right decision with her trove of secret information and a Salesman’s unfailing ability to ease every concern and answer every question prevent social epidemics from fizzling out at the root.
Other social epidemics, like teen smoking and the Micronesian teen suicide epidemic, are less directly related to disease epidemics and are quintessentially social phenomenon. In both of these cases, a crucial aspect of their spread and persistence is the specific meaning in the specific context of the teen communities in which these activities take place. These activities become a language, a shorthand that is understand by the group. Gladwell demonstrates, for example, that suicide notes written by Micronesian teens need not be overly long or dramatic because the entire peer group understands them based on the unspoken language that the suicide communicates.
The Unintuitive Importance of Context
Gladwell ranks The Power of Context as one of the three agents of change in social epidemics. Human beings “are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem” (29), and social epidemics “are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur” (139). Without understanding context at the micro and macro levels, social epidemics cannot be understood.
The example of Goetz encapsulates the importance of context at both the small scale of the individual and the larger structural scale. Goetz shot four young Black men on a New York subway train on December 22, 1984, a moment that crystallized “a particular, dark moment in New York City’s history, the moment when the city’s crime problem reached epidemic proportions” (135). Goetz claimed that several years prior to his attack, he was a victim of a violent mugging at another subway station that left him with permanent health complications. This experience provides personal context for his violent actions, and Gladwell also focuses on Goetz's fixation on cleaning up the city. His context drove him to anticipate crime and violence and created a heightened sensitivity to threats that may have influenced his reaction on the subway. Goetz fled the scene of his crime, and his actions prompted a public debate related to the question of vigilantism and racist violence.
At the meta level, Gladwell focuses on the physical urban landscape to discuss the rise and fall of New York City crime, specifically through a discussion of Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows theory. In this view, graffiti, broken windows, aggressively asking strangers for money, and other visual indicators of failing infrastructure and law enforcement encourage more crime. These physical features of a city give permission for people who might otherwise not enact their desire to commit crimes to go through with it, and they may lead people who are likely to commit petty crimes to commit more serious or violent ones. New York City crime was high in the 1980s. To explain the sudden improvement in the city's crime statistics in the 1990s, Gladwell explores the ways that local policing and municipal policy adopted broken windows theory. In the subways, New York Transit Authority Director David Gunn focused on cleaning subway cars of all graffiti, with zero tolerance for any defacement of property. William Bratton, another broken windows believer, was hired as head of transit police and cracked down on fare evasion. When Bratton was appointed head of the NYPD, he enacted broken windows policy citywide, cracking down on petty crimes like squeegee car cleaning at intersections. He directed officers to arrest people for "quality-of-life crimes" (146) such as public intoxication or urination and sent them to jail. This had the effect of changing the visual landscape of the city and, according to Gladwell, helped to rapidly change the crime statistics. These practices are criticized for disproportionately targeting Black and Latino populations and for the lack of empirical studies demonstrating that policing procedures based in broken windows theory reduced violent crime.
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