Book Details

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

• Malcolm Gladwell
• Back Bay Books
• January 2002

Top

What is "The Tipping Point" about? (Web)

http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html

What is "The Tipping Point" about?

• It's a book about change. In particular, it's a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does.
• It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease.

  They are social epidemics. "The Tipping Point" is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us.

What does it mean to think about life as an epidemic?

• Because epidemics behave in a very unusual and counterintuitive way.
• That's typical behavior for epidemics: they can blow up and then die out really quickly, and even the smallest change like one child with a virus can get them started.
• My argument is that it is also the way that change often happens in the rest of the world.

  Things can happen all at once, and little changes can make a huge difference.

• That's a little bit counterintuitive.

  As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect.

Where did you get the idea for the book?

• Before I went to work for The New Yorker, I was a reporter for the Washington Post and I covered the AIDS epidemic.
• If you talk to the people who study epidemics--epidemiologists--you realize that they have a strikingly different way of looking at the world.
• The word "Tipping Point", for example, comes from the world of epidemiology.

  It's the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass.

  It's the boiling point. It's the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.

• What if everything has a Tipping Point?

  Wouldn't it be cool to try and look for Tipping Points in business, or in social policy, or in advertising or in any number of other nonmedical areas?

Are you talking about the idea of memes, that has become so popular in academic circles recently?

• It's very similar. A meme is a idea that behaves like a virus--that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects.
• I must say, though, that I don't much like that term.

  The thing that bothers me about the discussion of memes is that no one ever tries to define exactly what they are, and what makes a meme so contagious.

How would you classify The Tipping Point? Is it a science book?

• I like to think of it as an intellectual adventure story.

  It draws from psychology and sociology and epidemiology, and uses examples from the worlds of business and education and fashion and media.

• If I had to draw an analogy to another book, I'd say it was like Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence,

  in the sense that it takes theories and ideas from the social sciences and shows how they can have real relevance to our lives.

• I think it will appeal to anyone who wants to understand the world around them in a different way.

  I think it can give the reader an advantage--a new set of tools.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

• One of the things I'd like to do is to show people how to start "positive" epidemics of their own.
• The virtue of an epidemic, after all, is that just a little input is enough to get it started, and it can spread very, very quickly.

  That makes it something of obvious and enormous interest to everyone from educators trying to reach students, to businesses trying to spread the word about their product,

  or for that matter to anyone who's trying to create a change with limited resources.

• The point is that by the end of the book I think the reader will have a clear idea of what starting an epidemic actually takes.
• I think that The Tipping Point is a way of making sense of the world, because I'm not sure that the world always makes as much sense to us as we would hope.

  I spent a great deal of time in the book talking about the way our minds work--and the peculiar and sometimes problematic ways in which our brains process information.

Top

Introduction

Two Stories

• Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do
• 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:

  • They are clear examples of contagious behavior: (contagiousness)
    • No one took out an advertisement and told people that the tradictional Hush Puppies were cool and they should start wearing them.

      Those kids simply wore the shoes when they went to clubs or cafes or walked the streets of downtown New York,

         and 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.

      What happened is that the small number of people in the small number of situations

         in which the new social forces had some impacts started behaving very differently,

         and the 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 shor time.

  • In both cases, little changes had big effects: (little causes can have big effects)
    • 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 seemt to have single-handedly started an internation fashion trend.

    • All of the possible reasons for why New York's crime rate dropped are changes that happened at the margin, yet the effect was dramatic.
  • Both changes happened in a hurry, they didn't build steadily and slowly: (the change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment)
    • it is instructive to look at a chart of the crime rate in New York City from, say, the mid 1960s to the late 1990s. It looks like a giant arch.
• These three characteristics are the same three principles that define how measles move through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter.
• Of the three,