Books: The Tipping Point (Malcom Gladwell)

What makes a youtube video "go viral", a fashion trend take off, or a story become breaking news? In The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell attempts to explain how these and other social epidemics occur, or "tip" so to speak. Although not really a scientific analysis of the phenomenon, The Tipping Point offers insightful commentary into human nature and social behavior. It can also be thought of as a marketing text written for laypeople, as it basically describes how to build up a brand. Gladwell lays out three rules of the Tipping Point - the Law of Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. I will elaborate on these three rules below:

The Law of Few

Gladwell proposes that a relatively few number of people are necessary to start social epidemics on a societal scale. These people are special kinds of individuals described by Gladwell as "Connectors", "Mavens", and "Salesmen":

1) "Connectors" are people who know a lot of people. They are the vehicles of transmission for messages on trends, products, and all the good gossip. Connectors are masters of the 'weak tie'- "friendly yet casual social connection." Connectors are the people with thousands of Facebook friends. Ask a connector if they know someone who...and they'll usually be able to get you in touch with who your looking for.

2) "Mavens" are information specialists. They are the ones who do their homework on products, events, and other on-goings and becomes experts. Their opinions are informed and worthwhile. They are motivated to educate and help the people in their lives. They are the ones who come up with the content of social epidemics.

3) "Salesmen" are the persuaders. They are the ones to pitch an idea, and they have the uncanny ability to make anything sound good and desirable. Salesman are powerfully persuasive people, who are good at matching conversation patterns with whoever they meet. They can easily engage others in social interaction because of their ability to "infect" others with their emotional state; in other words, expressive Salesmen can effectively transmit their emotions to another individual. Therefore if a Salesman is talking to you about something she's really excited about, more than likely you'll become excited about it too!

Stickiness Factor

Another important ingredient to tip something is that whatever is being tipped needs to have "stickiness factor", in other words, the ability to stick in people's consciousness. I think the important take away here is that people engage with material they can understand and remember. Therefore an effective advertisement not only needs to be attention grabbing but easily understood and absorbed.

The Power of Context

The rule describes how powerfully our physical environments influence our psyches. The example used to describe the Power of Context was the Broken Windows theory. This theory states that minor, seemingly insignificant crimes (e.g. broken windows, graffiti, "squeegee men", etc.) are tipping points for violent crimes in that they create an atmosphere of neglect and lawlessness that criminals take advantage of.

"...the criminal - far from being someone who acts for fundamental, intrinsic reasons and who lives in his own world - is actually someone acutely sensitive to his environment, who is alert to all kinds of cues, and who is prompted to commit crimes based on his perception of the world around him."

Gladwell goes on to talk about why people act the way they do in what I found to be some of the most fascinating passages of the book. Essentially Gladwell argues that human behavior at any given moment is much more context dependent than personality dependent. Yet humans tend to think of character as a fundamental, predictable quality. Gladwell describes several social experiments that indicate that personal convictions are less important in guiding actions than the immediate context of your behavior.

"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. I have a lot of fun at dinner parties. As a result, I throw a lot of dinner parties and my friends see me there and think that I'm fun."

Finally, in The Power of Context chapter Gladwell brings up the importance of the number of 150 in group dynamics. Apparently 150 is the maximum number of people that can function effectively as a unit. Over 150, people become disconnected from one another. 150 is the number of employees in divisions of successful companies and is also the number of citizens in old hunter-gatherer societies. Gladwell attributes this limit to the size of our brains and how social interactions require a large amount of brain space.

"The figure of 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. Putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar."

Overall, The Tipping Point was a very interesting read. I'm not entirely convinced that Gladwell has completely and categorically explained the phenomena of social epidemics, but he poses some interesting theories that are good platforms for further discussion and research.