The Tipping Point

infobox Book
name = The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
orig title =
translator =


author = Malcolm Gladwell
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
classification = Non-Fiction
genre =
publisher = Little Brown
release_date = 2000
media_type = Print (Paperback)
pages = 304
isbn = ISBN 0-316-34662-4, ISBN 0-316-31696-2 (first edition)
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" (ISBN 0-316-31696-2) is a book by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little Brown in 2000.

Overview

"Tipping points" are "the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable." [cite news | last = Walsh | first = Bryan | title = A green tipping point | work = Time Magazine | date = 2007-10-12 | url = http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1670871,00.html | accessdate = 2007-12-29 ] Gladwell defines a tipping point as a sociological term, "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." [Gladwell, p. 12] The book seeks to explain and describe enormous and "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do." [Gladwell, p. 7] The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the dramatic drop in the New York City crime rate in the late 1990s.

The three rules of epidemics

Gladwell describes the "three rules of epidemics" (or "agents of change") in the tipping points of epidemics.

*"The Law of the Few": "The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social skills." [Gladwell, p. 33.] Gladwell describes these people in the following ways:

:*"Connectors" are the people who "link us up with the world ... people with a special gift for bringing the world together." [Gladwell, p. 38] To illustrate, Gladwell cites the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Milgram's experiments in the small world problem, Dallas businessman Roger Horchow, the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" trivia game, and Chicagoan Lois Weisberg. :* "Mavens" are "information specialists", or "people we rely upon to connect us with new information." [Gladwell, p. 19] They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others.

:* "Salesmen" are "persuaders", charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, that makes others want to agree with them. Gladwell's examples include California businessman Tom Gau and news anchor Peter Jennings, and he cites several studies about how people are persuaded.

*"The Stickiness Factor": the specific content of a message that makes it memorable and have impact. The children's television programs "Sesame Street" and "Blue's Clues" are specific instances of enhancing stickiness and systematically engineering stickiness into a message.

*"The Power of Context": Human behavior is sensitive to and strongly influenced by its environment. As Gladwell says, "Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur." [Gladwell, p. 129.] For example, "zero tolerance" efforts to combat minor crimes such as fare-beating and vandalism on the New York subway led to a decline in more violent crimes city-wide. Gladwell describes the bystander effect, and explains how Dunbar's number plays into the tipping point, using Rebecca Wells' novel "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood", evangelist John Wesley, and the high-tech firm Gore Associates.

Other key concepts

Gladwell also includes two chapters of case studies, situations in which tipping point concepts were used in specific situations. These situations include the athletic shoe company Airwalk, the diffusion model, how rumors are spread, decreasing the spread of syphilis in Baltimore, and teen suicide in Micronesia and teen smoking in the U.S.

Criticism

Much of Gladwell's analysis as to why the phenomenon of the "tipping point" occurs is based on the 1967 "Six Degrees of Separation" study by sociologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram gave letters to 160 people in Nebraska, with instructions to send them to a stockbroker in Boston by passing the letters to somebody socially closer to the target. The study found that it took an average of six links to deliver each letter. Of particular interest to Gladwell was the finding that just three friends of the stockbroker provided the final link for half of the letters that arrived successfully. [cite journal | last = Travers | first = Jeffrey | coauthors = Stanley Milgram | title = An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem | journal = Sociometry | volume = 32 | issue = 4 | pages = 425-443 | date = December 1969 | accessdate = 2008-08-06] This gave rise to Gladwell's theory that certain "types" of people are key to the dissemination of information.

In 2003, Duncan Watts, a network-theory scientist at Columbia University, repeated the Milgram study by using a web site to recruit 61,000 people to send messages to 18 targets worldwide. [cite news | last = Chang | first = Kenneth | title = With e-mail, it's not easy to navigate 6 degrees of separation | work = The New York Times | date = 2003-08-12 | url = http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E3D91031F931A2575BC0A9659C8B63 | accessdate = 2008-08-06] He successfully reproduced Milgram's results (the average length of the chain was approximately six links). However, when he examined the pathways taken, he found that "hubs" (highly connected people) were not crucial. Only 5% of the email messages had passed through one of the hubs.

Watts pointed out that, if it were as simple as finding the individuals that can disseminate information prior to a marketing campaign, advertising agencies would presumably have a far higher success rate than they do. He also stated that Gladwell's theory also does not square with much of his research into human social dynamics. [cite news | last = Thompson | first = Clive | title = Is the tipping point toast? | work = Fast Company | date = February 2008 | url = http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html?page=0%2C0 | accessdate = 2008-08-06]

ee also

*Catastrophe theory
*Epidemiology
*Hundredth Monkey Effect

References

External links

* [http://www.wikisummaries.org/The_Tipping_Point The Tipping Point Summary - WikiSummaries, free book summaries]
* [http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html The Tipping Point on Malcolm Gladwell's webpage]