Gladwell, Malcolm. The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference. . Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. p.7
The rise of Hush Puppies and the Fall of New York's crime rate are textbook examples of epidemics in action. Although they may sound as if they don't have very much in common, they share a basic underlying pattern.
First of all, they are clear examples of contagious behavior. No one took out an advertisement and told people that the traditional Hush Puppies were cool and they should start wearing them. Those kids simply word the shoes when they went to the clubs or cafes or walked the streets of downtown New York, in so doing exposed other people to their fashion sense. They infected them with the Hush Puppies "virus."
The crime decline in New York surely happened the same way. It wasn't that some huge percentage of would be murderers suddenly sat up in 1993 and decided not to commit any more crimes. Nor was it that the police managed magically to intervene in a huge percentage of situations that would otherwise have turned out deadly. What happened is that the small number of people in the small number of situations in which the police or the new social forces had some impact started behaving differently, and that behavior somehow spread to other would-be criminals in similar situations. Somehow a large number of people in New York got "infected" with an anti-crime virus in a short time.
The second distinguishing characteristic of these two examples is that in both cases little changes had big effects. All of the possible reasons for why New York's crime rate dropped are changes that happened at the margin; they were incremental changes. The crack trade leveled off, the population got a little older. The police force got a little better. Yet the effect was dramatic. So too with Hush Puppies. How many kids are we talking about who began wearing the shoes in downtown Manhattan? Twenty? Fifty? One hundred - at the most? Yet their actions seem to have single-handedly started an international fashion trend.
Finally, both changes happened in a hurry. They didn't build steadily and slowly. IT is instructive to look at a chart of the crime rate in New York City from, say, the mid 1960's to the late 1990's. It looks like a giant arch. In 1965, there were 200,000 crimes in the city and from that point on the number begins a sharp rise, doubling in two years and continuing almost unbroken until it hits 650,000 crimes a year in the mid - 1970's. It stays steady at that level for the next two decades, before plunging downward in 1992 as sharply as it rose thirty years earlier. Crime did not taper off. It didn't gently decelerate. It hit a certain point and jammed on the brakes.
These three characteristics - one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment - are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter. Of the three, the third trait - the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment - is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does. The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference. . Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. pp 7-9
The second of the principles of epidemics - that little changes can somehow have big effects - is also a fairly radical notion. We are, as humans, heavily socialized to make a kind of rough approximation between cause and effect. If we want to communicate a strong emotion, if we want to convince someone that, say, we love them, we realize that we need to speak passionately and forthrightly. If we want to break bad news to someone, we lower our voices and choose our words carefully. We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out. Consider, for example, the following puzzle. I give you a large piece of paper, and I ask you to fold it over once, and then take that folded paper and fold it over again, and then again, and again, until you have refolded the original paper 50 times. How tall do you think the final stack is going to be? In answer to that question, must people will fold the sheet in their mind's eye, and guess that the pile would be as thick as a phone book or, if they are courageous, they'll say that it would be as tall as a refrigerator. But the real answer is that the height of the stack would approximate the distance to the sun. And if you folded it over one more time, the stack would be as high as the distance to the sun and back. This is an example of what in mathematics is called a geometric progression. Epidemics are another example of geometric progression: when a virus spreads through a population, it doubles and doubles again, until it has (figuratively) grown from a single sheet of paper all the way to the sun in fifty steps. As human beings we have a hard time with this kind of progression, because the end result - the effect - seems far out of proportion to the cause. To appreciate the power of epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference. . Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. pp 10-11
The expression (Tipping Point) first came into popular use in the 1970s to describe the flight to the suburbs of whites living in the older cities of the American Northeast. When the number of incoming African Americans in a particular neighborhood reached a certain point - 20 percent, say - sociologists observed that the community would "tip": most of the remaining whites would leave almost immediately. The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference. . Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. p 12
Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating. And when an epidemic tips, when it is jolted out of equilibrium, it tips because something has happened, some change has occurred in one (or two or three) of those areas. These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference. . Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. pp 18-19
The Law of the Few
When we say that a handful of East Village kids started the Hush Puppies epidemic, or that the scattering of the residents of a few housing projects was sufficient to start Baltimore's syphilis epidemic, what we are really saying is that in a given process or system some people matter more than others. This is not, on the face of it, a particularly radical notion. Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the "work" will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of the criminals commit 80 percent of the crimes. Twenty percent of the motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of all beer. When it comes to epidemics, though, this dis-proportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference. . Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. p 19
Stickiness
We tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make messages more contagious - how to reach as many people as possible with our product or ideas. But the hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn't go in one ear and out the other.Gladwell, Malcolm. The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference. . Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. p24-25
Unless you remember what I tell you, why would you ever change your behavior or buy my product or go to see my movie? The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference. . Reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. p25
2002TTPMG
