Top Quotes: “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” — Malcolm Gladwell

Introduction

“In 1992, there were 2,154 murders in NYC and 626,000 serious crimes, with the weight of those crimes falling hardest in places like Brownsville and East NY. But then something strange happened. At some mysterious and critical point, the crime rate began to turn. It tipped. Within five years, murders had dropped 64% to 770 and total crimes had fallen by almost half to 356,000. In Brownsville and East NY, the sidewalks filled up again, the bicycles came back, and old folks reappeared on the stoops. ‘There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to hear rapid fire, like you would hear somewhere in the jungle in Vietnam,’ says Inspector Edward Messadri, who commands the police precinct in Brownsville. ‘I don’t hear gunfire anymore.’

The NYPD will tell you that what happened in NY was that the city’s policing strategies dramatically improved. Criminologists point to the decline of the crack trade and the aging of the population. Economists, meanwhile, say that the gradual improvement in the city’s economy over the course of the 90s had the effect of employing those who might otherwise have become criminals. These are the conventional explanations for the rise and fall of social problems, but in the end none is any more satisfying than the statement that kids in the East Village caused the Hush Puppies revival. The changes in the drug trade, the population, and the economy are all long-term trends, happening all over the country. They don’t explain why crime plunged in NYC so much more than in other cities across the country, and they don’t explain why it all happened in such an extraordinarily short time. As for the improvements made by police, they’re important too. But there’s a puzzling gap between the scale of the changes in policing and the size of the effect on places like Brownsville and East NY. After all, crime didn’t just slowly ebb in NY as conditions gradually improved. It plummeted. How can a change in a handful of economic and social indices cause murder rates to fall by two-thirds in five years?

The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It’s that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teen smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

The rise of Hush Puppies and the fall of NY’s crime rates 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’re clear examples of contagious behavior. No one took out an ad and told people that the traditional 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 NY, and in so doing exposed other people to their fashion sense. They infected them with the Hush Puppies ‘virus.’

The crime decline in NY 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 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 very differently, and that behavior somehow spread to other would-be criminals in similar situations. Somehow a larger number of New Yorkers 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 NY’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? 20? 50? 100 — 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’s instructive to look at a chart of the crime rate in NYC from, say, the mid-60s to the late-90s. It looks like a giant arch. In 1965, there were 200k 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 650k crimes a year in the mid-70s. It stays steady at that level for the next two decades, before plunging downward in 1992 as sharply as it rose 30 years earlier. Crime didn’t taper off. It hit a certain point and jammed on the brakes.

These three characteristics — one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes 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’s 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 at once is the Tipping Point.”

“We’re 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 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’ve refolded the original paper 50 times. How tall do you think the final stack is going to be? In answer to that question, most 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're really courageous, they’ll say that it would be as tall as fridge. 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 math 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 50 steps. As humans, we have a hard time with this kind of progression, because the end result 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 prep ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.

This possibility of sudden change is at the center of the idea of the Tipping Point and might well be the hardest of all to accept. The expression first came into popular use in the 70s to describe white flight to the suburbs in the Northeast. When the number of incoming black Americans in a particular neighborhood reached a certain point — 20%, 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.”

“Sharp introduced the first low-priced fax machine in 1984, and sold about 80,000 of them in the U.S. in that first year. For the next three years, businesses slowly and steadily bought more and more faxes, until, in 1987, enough people had faxes that it made sense for everyone to get a fax. 1987 was the fax machine Tipping Point. A million machines were sold that year, and by 1989 two million new machines had gone into operation. Cell phones followed the same trajectory. Through the 90s, they got smaller and cheaper, and service got better util 1998, when the tech hit a Tipping Point and suddenly everyone had one.

All epidemics have Tipping Points. Sociologist Jonathan Crane has looked at the effect of the number of role models in a community — the professionals, managers, teachers whom the Census has defined as ‘high status’ — has on the lives of teens in the same neighborhood. He found little difference in pregnancy or dropout rates in neighborhoods of between 40 and 5% of high-status workers. But when the number of professionals dropped below 5%, the problems exploded. For black schoolchildren, for example, as the percentage of high-status workers falls just 2% — from 5.5% to 2.5% — dropout rates more than double. At the same Tipping Point, the rates of childbearing for teens — which barely moves at all up to that point — nearly double.”

The Three Rules of Epidemics

“In the mid-90s, Baltimore was attacked by an epidemic of syphilis. In the space of a year (1995–1996), the number of children born with the disease increased by 500%. If you look at Baltimore’s syphilis rates on a graph, the line runs straight for years and then, when it hits 1995, rises almost at a right angle.

What caused Baltimore’s syphilis problem to tip? According to the CDC, the problem was crack. Crack is known to cause a dramatic increase in the kind of risky sexual behavior that leads to the spread of STIs. It brings far more people into poor areas to buy drugs, which then increases the likelihood that they will take an infection home with them to their own neighborhood. It changes the patterns of social connections between neighborhoods. Crack, the CDC said, was the little push that the syphilis problem needed to turn into a raging epidemic.

STI expert John Zenilman has another explanation: the breakdown of medical services in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. ‘In 1990–91, we had 36,000 patient visits at the city’s STI clinics,’ Zenilman says. ‘Then the city decided to gradually cut back because of budgetary problems. The number of clinicians went from 17 to 10. The number of physicians went from three to essentially nobody. Patient visits dropped to 21,000. There was also a similar drop in the amount of field outreach staff. There was a lot of politics — things that used to happen, like computer upgrades, didn’t happen. It was a worst-case scenario of city bureaucracy not functioning. They would run out of drugs.’

When there were 36,000 patient visits a year, in other words, the disease was kept in equilibrium. At some point between 36,000 and 21,000 patient visits a year, according to Zenilman, the disease erupted. It began spilling out of the inner city, up the streets and highways that connect those neighborhoods to the rest of the city. Suddenly, people who migh thave been infectious for a week before getting treated were now going around infecting others for 2 or 3 or 4 weeks before they got ured. The breakdown in treatment made syphilis a much bigger issue than it’d been before.

There's a third theory, which belongs to epidemiologist John Potterat. His culprits are the physical changes in those years affecting East and West Baltimore, the heavily depressed neighborhoods on either side of downtown, where the syphilis problem was centered. In the mid-90s, he points out, Baltimore embarked on a highly publicized policy of dynamiting the old 60s-style public housing high-rises in East and West Baltimore. Two of the most publicized demolitions — Lexington Terrace in West Baltimore and Lafayette Courts in East Baltimore — were huge projects, housing hundreds of families, that served as centers for crime and infectious disease. At the same time, people began to move out of the old row houses in East and West Baltimore, as those began to deteriorate as well.

‘It was absolutely striking,’ he says, of the first time he toured East and West Baltimore. ‘50% of the row houses were boarded up, and there was also a process where they destroyed the projects. What happened was a kind of hollowing out. This fueled the diaspora. For years syphilis had been confined to a specific region of Baltimore, within highly confined sociosexual networks. The housing dislocation process served to move these people to other parts of Baltimore, and they took their syphilis and other behaviors with them.’

What’s interesting about these three explanations is that none of them is at all dramatic. The CDC thought that crack was the problem. But it wasn’t as if crack came to Baltimore for the first time in 1995. It had been there for years. What they were saying is that there was a subtle increase in the severity of the crack problem in the mid-90s, and that change was enough to set off the syphilis epidemic. Zenilman, likewise, was talking about a scaling down, not a shutdown. And Potterat wasn’t saying that all Baltimore was hollowed out. All it took, he said, was the demolition of a handful of housing projects and the abandoment of homes in key downtown neighborhoods to send syphilis over the top. It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic’s equilibrium.

The second, and perhaps more interesting, fact about these explanations is that all of them are describing a very different way of tipping an epidemic. The CDC is talking about the overall context for the disease — how the intro and growth of an addictive drug can so change the environment of a city that it can cause a disease to tip. Zenilman is talking about the disease itself — when the clinics were cut back, syphilis was given a second life and became a chronic infection that lingered around for weeks. Potterat, for his part, was focused on the people carrying syphilis. Syphilis, he was saying, was a disease carried by a certain kind of person in Baltimore — a very poor, probably drug-using, sexually-active individual. If that kind of person was suddenly transported form their old neighborhood to a new one — to a new part of town, where syphilis had never been a problem before — the disease would have the opportunity to tip.

There's more than one way to tip an epidemic, in other words. 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’s jolted out of equilibrium, it tips because something has happened, some change has occurred in one (or 2 or 3) of those areas. These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.”

“Social epidemics work in exactly the same way — they’re driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people. In this case, it’s not sexual appetites that set them apart. It’s things like how sociable they are, or how energetic or knowledgeable or influential among their peers. In the case of Hush Puppies, the great mystery is how those shoes went from something worn by a few fashion-forward downtown Manhattan hipsters to being sold in malls across the country. The Law of the Few says the answer is that one of these exceptional people found out about the trend, and through social connections and energy and enthusiasm, and personality spread the word about Hush Puppies just as people are able to spread HIV.”

“Stickiness is a critical component in tipping. 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 info that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.”

“The Power of Context says that humans are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.”

Connectors, Mavens, & Salespeople

“In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal. When Milgram analyzed his experiment, for example, he found that many of the chains from Omaha to Sharon followed the same asymetrical pattern. 24 letters reached the stockbroker at his home in Sharon, and of those, 16 were given to him by the same person, a clothing merchant Milgram calls Mr. Jacobs. The balance of letters came to the stockbroker at his office, and of those the majority came through two other men, whom Milgram calls Mr. Brown and Mr. Jones. In all, half of the responses that came back to the stockbroker were delivered by these same three people. Think of it. Dozens of people, chosen at random from a large Midwestern city, send out letters independently. Some go through college acquaintances. Some send their letters to relatives. Some send them to old workmates. Everyone has a different strategy. Yet when all of those separate and idiosyncratic chains were completed, half of those letters ended up in the hands of Jacobs, Jones, and Brown. Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.”

“These people who link us up with the world, who introduce us to our social circles — these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize — are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”

“Horchow keeps on his computer a roster of 1,600 names and addresses, and on each entry is a note describing the circumstances under which he met the person. When we were talking, he took out a little red pocket diary. ‘If I met you and like you and you happen to mention your birthday, I write it in and you’ll get a birthday card from Roger Horchow.’

Most of us, I think, shy away from this kind of cultivation of acquaintances. We have our circle of friends, to whom we are devoted. Acquaintances we keep at arm’s length. The reason we don’t send birthday cards to people we don’t really care a great deal about is that we don’t want to feel obliged to have a dinner with them or to see a movie with them or visit them when they’re sick. The purpose of making an acquaintance, for most of us, is to evaluate whether we want to turn that person into a friend; we don’t feel we have the time or energy to maintain meaningful contact with everyone. Horchow is quite different. The people he puts in his diary or on his computer are acquaintances — people he might run into only once a year or once every few years — and he doesn’t shy away from the obligation that that connection requires. He’s mastered the ‘weak tie,’ a friendly yet casual social connection. More than that, he’s happy with the weak tie. After I met him, I felt slightly frustrated — I wanted to know him better, but I wondered whether I’d ever have the chance. I don’t think he shared the same frustration with me — I think he’s someone who sees value and pleasure in a casual meeting.

Why is Horchow so different from the rest of us? He thinks it has something to do with being an only child whose father was often away.”

“If you look closely at social epidemics, it becomes clear that just as there are people we rely upon to connect us to other people, there are also people we rely upon to connect us with new info. There are people specialists, and there are info specialists.

Sometimes, of course, these two specialties are one and the same. Part of the particular power of Paul Revere, for example, was that he wasn’t just a networker; he wasn’t just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston. He was also actively engaged in gathering info about the British. In fall 1774, he set up a secret group that met regularly with the express purpose of monitoring British troop movements. In December of that year, the group learned that the British intended to seize a cache of ammunition being stored by a colonial militia near the entrance to Portsmouth Harbor, 50 miles north of Boston. On the icy morning of 12/13, Revere rode north through deep snow to warn the local militia that the British were on their way. He helped find out the intelligence, and he passed it on. Paul Revere was a Connector. But he was also — and this is the second of the three kinds of people who control word-of-mouth epidemics — a Maven.

The word Maven comes from Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge.”

“In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there’s also a select group of people — Salespeople — with the skills to persuade us when we’re unconvinced of what we’re hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.”

“In a study, students were asked, ‘What do you feel would be an appropriate dollar amount for undergrad tuition per year?’

The students who kept their heads still were unmoved by the editorial. The tuition amount that they guessed was appropriate was $582 — or just about where the tuition was already. Those who shook their heads from side to side as they listened to the editorial — even though they thought they were simply testing headset quality — disagreed strongly with the proposed increase. They wanted tuition to fall on average to $467 a year. Those who were told to nod their heads up and down, meanwhile, found the editorial very persuasive. They wanted tuition to rise, on average, to $646. The simple act of moving their heads up and down, ostensibly for another reason entirely — was sufficient to cause them to recommend a policy that would take money out of their own pockets.”

“When two people talk, their volume and pitch fall into balance. What linguists call speech rate — the number of speech sounds per second — equalizes. So does latency, the period of time that lapses between the moment one speaker stops talking and the moment the other speaker begins. Two people may arrive at a convo with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.”

“Mimicry is also one of the means by which we infect each other with our emotions. If I smile and you see me and smile in response — even a microsmile that takes no more than several milliseconds — it’s not just you imitating or empathizing with me. It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you. Emotion is contagious. In a way, this is perfectly intuitive. All of us have had our spirits picked up by being around somebody in a good mood. If you think about this closely, though, it’s quite a radical notion. We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.

If we think about emotion this way — as outside-in, not inside-out — it’s possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we’re far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people ‘senders.’ Senders have special personalities. They’re also psychologically different. Scientists who’ve studied faces report that there are huge differences among people in the location of their facial muscles, in their form, and also — surprisingly — even in their prevalence. ‘It’s a situation not unlike in medicine,’ says Cacioppo. ‘There are carriers, people who are very expressive, and there are people who are especially susceptible. It’s not that emotional contagion is a disease. But the mechanism is the same.’

Psychologist Howard Friedman has developed what he calls the Affective Communication Test to measure this ability to send emotion to be contagious. The test is a self-administered survey, with 13 questions relating to things like whether you can keep still when you hear good dance music, how loud your laugh is, whether you touch friends when you talk to them, how good you are at sending seductive glances, whether you like to be the center of attention. The highest possible score ont he test is 117 points, with the average about 71.”

Stickiness & Context

“Virtually every time Sesame Street’s education value has been tested — and it’s been subject to more academic scrutiny than any TV show in history — it’s been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its viewers. There are few educators and child psychologists who don’t believe that the show managed to spread its infectious message well beyond the homes of those who watched it regularly. The creators accomplished something extraordinary, and the story of how they did that is a marvelous illustration of the second of the rules of the Tipping Point, the Stickiness Factor. They discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome TV’s weakness as a teaching tool and make what they had to say memorable. Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make TV sticky.”

“When Levanthal redid the experiment, one small change was sufficient to tip the vaccination rate up to 28%. It was simply including a map of the campus, with the university health building circled and the times that shots were available clearly listed.

There are two interesting results of this study. The first is that of the 28% who got inoculated, an equal number were from the high-fear and the low-fear group. Whatever extra persuasive muscle was found in the high-fear booklet was clearly irrelevant. The students knew, without seeing gory pics, what the dangers of tetanus were, and what they ought to be doing. The second interesting thing is that, of course, as seniors they must have already known where the health center was, and doubtless had visited it several times already. It is doubtful that any of them would ever actually have used the map. In other words, what the tetanus intervention needed in order to tip was not an avalanche of new or additional info. What it needed was a subtle but significant change in presentation. The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and the times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk — a lesson no different from the countless other academic lessons they had received over their academic career — to a practical and personal piece of medical advice. And once the advise became practical and personal, it became memorable.”

“During the 80s, NYC averaged well over 2k murders and 600k serious felonies a year. Underground, on the subways, conditions were chaotic. Before Bernie Goetz boarded the 2 train that day, he would have waited on a dimly lit platform, surrounded on all sides by dark, damp, graffiti-covered walls. Chances are his train was late, because in 1984 there was a fire somewhere on the NY system every day and a derailment every other week. Pictures of the crime scene show that the car Goetz sat in was filthy, its floor littered with trash and the walls and ceiling thick with graffiti, but that wasn’t unusual because in 1984 every one of the 6k cars in the fleet, with the exception of the midtown shuttle, was covered with graffiti — top to bottom, inside and out. IN the winter, the cars were cold because few were adequately heated. In the summer, the cars were stiflingly hot because none had AC. Today, the 2 train accelerates to over 40 miles an hour as it rumbles toward the Chambers St express stop. But it’s doubtful Goetz’s train went that fast. In 1984, there were 500 ‘red tape’ areas on the system — places where track damage had made it unsafe for trains to go more than 15 miles per hour. Fare-beating was so commonplace that it was costing as much as $150 million in lost revenue annually. There were about 15k felonies on the system a year — a number that would hit 20k a year by the end of the decade — and harassment of riders by panhandlers and petty criminals was so pervasive that ridership of the trains had sunk to its lowest level in the history of the subway system.”

“The lesson of the Power of Context is that we’re more than just sensitive to changes in context. We’re exquisitely sensitive to them. And the kinds of contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very different than what we might ordinarily suspect.”

“In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes.

Muggers and robbers, whether opportunistic or professional, believe they reduce their chances of being caught or identified if they operate on streets where potential victims are already intimidated by prevailing conditions. If the neighborhood cannot keep a bothersome panhandler from annoying passersby, the thief may reason, it’s even less likely to call the police to identify a potential mugger or to interfere if the mugging actually takes place.”

“In the mid-80s, Kelling was hired by the NY Transit Authority as a consultant, and he urged them to put the Broken Windows theory into practice. They obliged, bringing in a new subway director, David Gunn, to oversee a multi-billion-dollar rebuilding of the system. Many subway advocates, at the time, told Gunn not to worry about graffiti, to focus on the larger questions of crime and subway reliability, and it seemed like reasonable advice. Worrying about graffiti at a time when the entire system was close to collapse seems as pointless as scrubbing the decks of the Titanic as it headed toward the icebergs. But Gunn insisted. ‘The graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system, he says. ‘When you looked at the process of rebuilding the org and morale, you had to win the battle against graffiti. Without winning that battle, all the management reforms and physical changes just weren’t going to happen. We were about to put out new trains that were worth about ten million bucks apiece, and unless we did something to protect them, we knew just what would happen. They would last one day and then they would be vandalized.’

Gunn drew up a new management structure and a precise set of goals and timetables aimed at cleaning the system line by line, train by train. He started with the 7 train that connects Queens to midtown Manhattan, and began experimenting with new techniques to clean off the paint. On stainless-steel cars, solvents were used. On the painted cars, the graffiti was simply painted over. Gunn made it a rule that there should be no retreat, that once a car was ‘reclaimed’ it should never be allowed to be vandalized again. ‘We were religious about it,’ Gunn said. At the end of the 1 line in the Bronx, where the trains stop before turning around and going back to Manhattan, Gunn set up a cleaning station. If a car came in with graffiti, it had to be removed during the changeover, or the car was removed from service. ‘Dirty’ cars, which hadn’t yet been cleaned of graffiti, were never to be mixed with ‘clean’ cars. The idea was to send an unambiguous message to the vandals.

‘The kids would come the first night to the yard and paint the side of the train white. Then they’d come the next night, after it was dry, and draw the outline. Then they’d come the third night and color it in. We knew the kids would be working on one of the dirty trains, and we’d wait for them to finish their mural. Then we’d walk over with rollers and paint it over. It was a message to them. If you want to spend three nights of your time vandalizing a train, fine. But it’s never going to see the light of day.’

Gunn’s graffiti cleanup took from 1984 to 1990. At that point, the Transit Authority hired William Bratton to head the transit police, and the second stage of the reclamation of the subway system began. Bratton was, like Gunn, a disciple of Broken Windows. His first step as police chief was as seemingly quixotic as Gunn’s. With felonies on the subway system at an all-time high, Bratton decided to crack down on fare-beating because he believed that, like graffiti, fare-beating could be a signal, a small expression of disorder that invited much more serious crimes. An estimated 170k people a day were entering the system without paying a token. Some were kids, who simply jumped over the turnstiles. Others would force their way through. And once one or two or three people began cheating the system, other people — who might never otherwise have considered evading the law — would join in, reasoning that if some people weren’t going to pay, they shouldn’t either, and the problem would snowball. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that fare-beating was not easy to fight. Because there was only $1.25 at stake, the transit police didn’t feel it was worth their time to pursue it, when there were plenty of more serious crimes happening.

Bratton would roam the city on the subway at night, getting a sense of what the problems were and how best to fight them. First, he picked stations were fare-beating was the biggest problem, and put as many as 10 police officers in plainclothes at turnstiles. The team would nab fare-beaters one by one, handcuff them, and leave them standing, in a daisy chain, on the platform, until they had a ‘full catch.’ The idea was to signal, as publicly as possible, that the transit police were now serious about cracking down on fare-beaters. Previously, police officers had been wary of pursuing fare-beaters because the arrest, the trip to the station house, the filling out of necessary forms, and the waiting for those forms to be processed took an entire day — all for a crime that usually merited no more than a slap on the wrist. Bratton retrofitted a city bus and turned it into a rolling station house, with its own fax machines, phones, holding pen, and fingerprinting facilities. Soon the turnaround time on an arrest was down to an hour. Bratton also insisted that a check be run on all those arrested. Sure enough, one out of seven arrestees had an outstanding warrant, and one out of 20 was carrying a weapon of some sort. Bratton writes, ‘After a while the bad guys wised up and began to leave their weapons home and pay their fares.’ Under Bratton, the number of ejections from subway stations — for drunkenness, or improper behavior — tripled within his first few months in office. Arrests for misdemeanors, for the kind of minor offenses that had gone unnoticed in the past, went up fivefold between 1990 and 1994. Bratton turned the transit police into an org focused on the smallest infractions, on the details of life underground.

After the election of Guiliani in 1994, Bratton was appointed head of the NYPD, and he applied the same strategies to the city at large. He instructed his officers to crack down on quality-of-life crimes: on the ‘squeegee men’ who came up to drivers at NYC intersections and demanded money for washing car windows, for example, and on all the other above-ground equivalents of turnstile-jumping and graffiti. When crime began to fall in the city — as quickly and dramatically as it had in the subways — Bratton and Guiliani pointed to the same cause. Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.

Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They’re both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment.”

“Broken Windows and the Power Context say that 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’s alert to all kinds of cues, and who’s prompted to commit crimes based on his perception of the world around him. That’s an incredibly radical idea. There’s an even more radical dimension here. The Power of Context is an environmental argument. It says that behavior is a function of social context. But it’s a very strange kind of environmentalism. In the 60s, liberals made a similar kind of argument, but when they talked about the importance of environment they were talking about the important of fundamental social features: crime, they said, was the result of social injustice, of structural economic inequality, of unemployment, of racism, of decades of institutional and social neglect, so that if you wanted to stop crime you had to undertake some fairly heroic steps. But the Power of Context says that what really matters is little things.”

“In some unconscious way, Jennings was able to signal his affection for Republican candidates. A second study showed how people who were charismatic could — without saying anything and with the briefest of exposures — infect others with their emotions. The implications of these two studies go to the heart of the Law of the Few, because they suggest that what we think of as inner states — preferences and emotions — are actually powerfully and imperceptibly influenced by seemingly inconsequential personal influences, by a newscaster we watch for a few minutes a day or by someone we sit next to, in silence, in a two-minute experiment. The essence of the Power of Context is that the same thing is true for certain kinds of environments — that in ways that we don’t necessarily appreciate, our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances.”

“There are certain times and places and conditions where you can take normal people from good schools and happy families and good neighborhoods and powerfully affect their behavior merely by changing the immediate details of their situation.

Hartshorne took as their subjects about 11,000 schoolchildren aged 6–18, and over the course of several months gave them literally dozens of tests, all designed to measure honesty. They found that there isn’t one tight little circle of cheaters and one tight little circle of honest students. Some kids cheat at home but not at school; some kids cheat at school but not at home. Whether or not a child cheated on, say, the word completion test was not an iron-clad predictor of whether they would cheat on, say, the underlining As part of the speed test. If you gave the same group of kids the same test, under the same circumstances six months apart, they found, the same kinds would cheat in the same ways in both cases. But once you changed any of those variables — the material on the test, or the situation in which it was being administered — the kinds of cheating would change as well.

What they concluded then, is that something like honesty isn’t a fundamental trait. A trait like honesty is considerably influenced by the situation. ‘Most children,’ they wrote,

will deceive in certain situations and not in others. Lying, cheating, and stealing as measured by the test situations used in these studies are only very loosely related. Even cheating in the classroom is rather highly specific, for a child may cheat on an arithmetic test and not on a spelling test, etc. Whether a child will practice deceit in any given situation depends in part on their intelligence, age, home background, and the like and in part on the nature of the situation itself and his particular relation to it.

This seems wildly counterintuitive. If I asked you to describe the personality of your best friends, you could do so easily, and you wouldn’t say things like ‘My friend Howard is incredibly generous, but only when I ask him for things, not when his family asks him for things,’ or ‘My friend Alice is wonderfully honest when it comes to her personal life, but at work she can be very slippery.’ All of us, when it comes to personality, we naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or isn’t a certain way. But what the researchers are saying is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we’re deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior.”

“The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process info. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), a fancy of way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, we invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and the context. We will always reach for a ‘dispositional’ explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation. In one experiment, for instance, a group of people are told to watch two sets of similarly talented basketball players, the first of whom are shooting baskets in a well-lit gym and the second of whom are shooting in badly-lit gym (and obviously missing a lot of shots). Then they’re asked to judge how good the players are. The players in the well-lit gym were considered superior. In another example, a group of people are brought in for an experiment and told they’re going to play a quiz game. They’re paired off and draw lots. One person gets a card that says they’re going to be a Contestant. The other is told they’re going to be the Questioner. The Questioner is then asked to draw up a list of ten ‘challenging but not impossible’ questions based on areas of particular interest or expertise, as someone who’s into Ukrainian folk music might come up with a series of questions based on that. The questions are then posed to the Contestant, and after the quiz is over, both parties are asked to estimate the level of general knowledge of the other. Invariably, the Contestants rate the Questioners as being a lot smarter than they themselves are.

You can do these kinds of experiments a thousand different ways and the answer almost always comes out the same way. This happens even when you give people a clear and immediate environmental explanation of the behavior they’re being asked to evaluate: that the gym, in the first case, has few lights on; that the Contestant is being asked to answer the most impossibly biased and rigged set of questions. In the end, this doesn’t make much difference. There’s something in all of us that makes us instinctively want to explain the world around us in terms of people’s essential attributes: he’s a better basketball player; that person is smarter than I am.

We do this because we’re a lot more attuned to personal cues than contextual cues. The FAE also makes the world a much simpler and more understandable place. In recent years, for example, there’s been much interest in the idea that one of the most fundamental factors in explaining personality is birth order: older siblings are domineering and conservative, younger siblings more creative and rebellious. When psychologists actually try to verify this claim, however, their answers sound like the Hartshorne conclusions. We do reflect the influences of birth order, but as psychologist Judith Harris points out in The Nurture Assumption, only around our families. When they’re away from their families — in different contexts — older siblings are no more likely to be domineering and younger siblings no more likely to be rebellious than anyone else. The birth order myth is an example of the FAE in action. But you can see why we’re so drawn to it. It’s much easier to define people just in terms of their family personality. It’s a kind of shorthand. If we constantly had to qualify every assessment of those around us, how would we make sense of the world? How much harder would it be to make the thousands of decisions we’re required to make about whether we like someone or love someone or trust someone or want to give someone advice? Psychologist Walter Michael argues that the human mind has a kind of ‘reducing valve’ that ‘creates and maintains the perception of continuity even in the face of perpetual observed changes in actual behavior.’ He writes:

When we observe a woman who seems hostile and fiercely independent some of the time but passive, dependent, and feminine on other occasions, our reducing valve usually makes us choose between the two syndromes. We decide that one pattern is in the service of the other, or that both are in the service of a third motive. She must be a really castrating lady with a facade of passivity — or perhaps she’s a warm, passive-dependent woman with a surface dense of aggressiveness. But perhaps nature is bigger than our concepts and it’s possibly for the lady to be a hostile, fiercely independent, passive, dependent, feminine, aggressive, warm, castrating person all-in-one. Of course which of these she is at any particular moment wouldn’t be random or capricious — it would depend on who she’s with, when, how, and much, much more. But each of these aspects of her self may be a quite genuine and real aspect of her total being.

Character, then, isn’t what we think it is, or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, on certain times, on circumstances 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 environments. 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 I’m fun. But if I couldn’t have lots of dinner parties, if my friends instead tended to see me in lots of different situations over which I had little or no control — like, say, faced with four hostile youths in a filthy, broken-down subway — they probably wouldn’t think of me as fun anymore.”

“Darley and Batson concluded, ‘Indeed, on several occasions, a seminary student going to give his talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way.’ The only thing that really mattered was whether the student was in a rush. Of the group that was, 10% stopped to help. Of the group that knew they had a few minutes to spare, 63% stopped.

What this study is suggesting is that the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behavior. The words, ‘Oh, you’re late’ had the effect of making someone who was ordinarily compassionate into someone who was indifferent to suffering — of turning someone, in that particular moment, into a different person. Epidemics are, at their root, about this very process of transformation. When we’re trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic, convert them from hostility to acceptance. That can be done through the influence of special kinds of people, people of extraordinary personal connection. That’s the Law of the Few. It can be done by changing the content of communication, by making a message so memorable that it sticks in someone’s mind and compels them to action. That’s the Stickiness Factor. I think that both of these laws make intuitive sense. But we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature.

This doesn’t mean that our inner psychological states and personal histories aren’t important in explaining our behavior. An enormous percentage of those who engage in violent acts, for example, have some kind of psychiatric disorder or come from deeply disturbed backgrounds. But there’s a world of difference between being inclined toward violence and actually committing a violent act. A crime is a relatively rare and aberrant event. For a crime to be committed, something extra, something additional, has to happen to tip a troubled person.”

“Once you understand that context matters, however, that specific and relatively small elements in the environment can serve as Tipping Points, that defeatism is turned upside down. Environmental Tipping Points are things that we can change: we can fix broken windows and clean up graffiti and change the signals that invite crime in the first place. Crime can be more than understood. It can be prevented. There’s a broader dimension to this. Judith Harris has convincingly argued that peer influence and community influence are more important than family influence in determining how children turn out. Studies of juvenile delinquency and high school drop-out rates, for example, demonstrate that a child is better off in a good neighborhood and a troubled family than she is in a troubled neighborhood and a good family. We spend so much time celebrating the importance and power of family influence that it may seem, at first blush, that this can’t be true. But in reality it’s no more than an obvious and commonsensical extension of the Power of Context, because it says simply that children are powerfully shaped by their external environment, that the features of our immediate social and physical world — the streets we walk down, the people we encounter — play a huge role in shaping who we are and how we act. It isn’t just serious criminal behavior, in the end, that’s sensitive to environmental cues. It’s all behavior.”

The 150 Rule

“The lesson of Ya-Ya Sisterhood is that small, close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic potential of a message or idea. That conclusion, however, still leaves a number of critical questions unanswered. The word group, for instance, is a broad term. If we’re interested in starting an epidemic — in reaching a Tipping Point — what are the most effective kinds of groups? As it turns out, there is a simple rule of thumb that distinguishes a group with real social authority — the Rule of 150, a fascinating example of the strange and unexpected ways in which context affects the course of social epidemics.”

“Make a list of all the people you know whose death would leave you truly devastated. Chances are you’ll come up with around 12 names. That, at least, is the average answer that most people give to that question. Those names make up what psychologists call our empathy group. Why aren’t groups any larger? Partly it’s a question of time. If you look at the names on your sympathy list, they’re probably the people whom you devote the most attention to — either on the phone, in person, or thinking and worrying about. If your list was twice as long, if it had 30 names on it, and, as a result, you spent only half as much time with everyone on it, would you still be as close to everyone? Probably not. To be someone’s best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting. At a certain point, at somewhere between 10–15 people, we begin to overload, just as we begin to overload when we have to distinguish between too many tones.”

“What correlates with brain size? The answer, Dunbar argues, is group size. If you look at any species of primate the larger their neocortex is, the larger the average size of the groups they live with.

Dunbar’s argument is that brains evolve, they get bigger, in order to handle the complexities of larger social groups. If you belong to a group of five people, he points out, you have to keep track of ten separate relationships: your relationships with the four others in your circle and the six other two-way relationships between the others. That’s what it means to know everyone in the circle. You have to understand the personal dynamics of the group, juggle different personalities, keep people happy, manage the demands on your own time and attention, and so on. If you belong to a group of 20 people, however, there are now 190 two-way relationships to keep track of: 19 involving yourself and 171 involving the rest of the group. That’s a fivefold increase in the size of the group, but a twentyfold increase in the amount of info processing needed to ‘know’ the other members of the group. Even a relatively small increase in the size of a group, in other words, creates a significant additional social and intellectual burden.

Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we’re the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement. Dunbar has actually developed an equation, which works for most primates, in which he plugs in what he calls the neocortex ratio of a particular species — the size of the neocortex relative to brain size — and the equation spits out the expected maximum group size of the animal. If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 148 — roughly 150. ‘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 wouldn’t feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them at a bar.’

“Dunbar has combed through anthropological lit and found that the number 150 pops up again and again. For example, he looks at 21 different hunter-gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence and found that the average number of people in their villages was 148. The same pattern holds true for military orgs. ‘Over the years military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb which dictates that functional fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200,’ Dunbar writes, ‘This, I suspect, is not simply a matter of how the generals in the rear exercise control and coordination, because companies have remained obdurately stuck at this size despite all the advances in communications tech since WWI. Rather, it’s as though the planners have discovered, by trial and error over the centuries, that it’s hard to get more than this number of people sufficiently familiar with each other so that they can work together as a functional unit.’”

“Then there’s the example of the religious group known as the Hutterites, who for hundreds of years have lived in self-sufficient agricultural colonies in Europe and, since the early 20th century, in North America. The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it into two and start a new one. One of the leaders at a colony outside Spokane told me, ‘Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people. When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another.’ The Hutterites, obviously, didn’t get this idea from evolutionary psych. They’ve been following the 150 rule for centuries. But their rationale fits perfectly with Dunbar’s theories. At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens — something indefinable but very real — that somehow changes the nature of community overnight. ‘In smaller groups people are a lot closer. They’re knit together, which is very important if you want to be effective and successful at community life,’ he said, ‘If you get too large, you don’t have enough work in common. You don’t have enough things in common, and then you start to become strangers and that close-knit friendship starts to get lost. What happens when you get that big is that the group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan. You get 2–3 groups within the larger group. That’s something you really try to prevent, and when it happens it is a good time to branch out.’”

“The Rule of 150 suggests that the size of a group is another one of those sublte contextual factors that can make a big difference. In the case of the Hutterites, people who are willing to go along with the group, who can easily be infected with the community ethos below the level of 150, somehow, suddenly — with just the smallest change in the size of the community — became divided and alienated. Once that line, that Tipping Point, is crossed, they began to behave very differently.

If we want groups to serve as incubators for contagious messages, as they did in the case of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or the early Methodist church, we have to keep groups below the 150 Tipping Point. Above that point, there begin to be structural impediments to the ability of the group to agree and act with one voice. If we want to, say, develop schools in disadvantaged communities that can successfully counteract the poisonous atmosphere of their surrounding neighborhoods, this tells us that we’re probably better off building lots of little schools than one or two big ones. The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.

Perhaps the best example of an org that has successfully navigated this problem is Gore Associates, a tech firm in Delaware that makes fabric, Glide dental floss, and a variety of items for the auto and medical industries. At Gore there are no titles; everyone’s card reads “Associate,’ regardless of how much money they make or how much responsibility they have. People don’t have bosses, they have sponsors — mentors — who watch out for their interests. There are no org charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Salaries are determined collectively. HQ for the company is a low-slung, unpretentious brick building. The ‘exec’ offices are small, plainly furnished rooms. The corners of the buildings tend to be conference rooms or free space, so that no one can be said to have a more prestigious office.

Gore is, in short, a very unusual company with a clear philosophy. It’s a big established company trying to behave like a small start-up. By all accounts, that attempt has been wildly successful. Gore is often lists of best companies to work for. It has a rate of employee turnover that’s about a third of the industry average. It’s been profitable for 35 consecutive years and has growth rate and an innovative, high-profit product line. Gore has managed to create a small-company ethos so infectious and sticky that it’s survived their growth into a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees. And how did they do that? By (among other things) adhering to the Rule of 150.

The founder of the company seems to have stumbled upon the principle by trial and error. ‘We found again and again that things get clumsy at 150,’ he told an interviewer some years ago, so 150 employees per plant became the company goal. In the electronics division, that means that no plant was built larger than 50k square feet, since there was almost no way to put many more than 150 people in a building that size. Hen said, ‘Our long-term planning is that we put 150 parking spaces in the lot, and when people start parking in the grass, we know it’s time to build a new plant.’ That new plant doesn’t have to be far away. In Gore’s home state of Delaware, for instance, the company has 15 plants within a 12-mile radius in Delaware and Maryland. The buildings only have to be distinct enough to allow for an individual culture in each.

It’s not hard to see the connection between this kind of org structure and the unusual, free-form management style of Gore. The kind of bond that Dunbar describes in small groups is essentially a kind of peer pressure: it’s knowing people well enough that what they think of you maters. He said that in a group under 150, ‘orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts.’ Gore doesn’t need formal management structures in its small plants because in groups that small, informal personal relationships are more effective. ‘Peer pressure is much more powerful than the concept of a boss. People want to live up to what’s expected of them.’”

“‘The pressure I’m talking about is the kind you get when the salespeople are in the same world as the manufacturing people, and the salesperson who wants to get an order taken care of can go directly and talk to someone they know on the manufacturing team and say, I need that order.’”

“What Buckley is referring to here is the benefit of unity, of having everyone in a complex enterprise share a common relationship. There’s a useful psych concept that makes much clearer what he’s speaking about, ‘transactive memory.’ When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains. Most of us deliberately don’t memorize most of the phone numbers we need. But we do memorize where to find them — in a phone book or our Rolodex. Or we memorize the number 411 so we can call directory assistance. nor do most of us know, say, the capital of Paraguay. Why bother? It’s an awful lot easier to buy an atlas and store that kind of info there. Perhaps most important, we store info with other people. Couples do this automatically. A few years ago, a psychologist set up a memory test with 59 couples, all of whom had been dating for at least three months. Half of them were allowed to stay together, and half were split up, and given a new partner whom they didn’t know. Wegner then asked all the pairs to read 64 statements, each with an underlined word. Five minutes after looking at all the statements, the pairs were asked to write down as many as they could remember. Sure enough, the pairs who knew each other remembered substantially more than those who didn’t know each other. Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system — a transactive memory system — which is based on an understanding about who’s best suited to remember what kinds of things. ‘Relationship development is often understood as a process of mutual self-disclosure,’ he writes. ‘Although it’s probably more romantic to cast this process as one of interpersonal revelation and acceptance, it can also be appreciated as a necessary precursor to transactive memory.’ Transactive memory is part of what intimacy means. in fact, he argues, it’s the loss of this kind of joint memory that helps to make divorce so painful. ‘Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems,’ he writes. ‘They once were able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding…They once could count on access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and this, too, is gone…The loss of transactive memory feels like losing part of one’s own mind.’”

“Since mental energy is limited, we concentrate on what we do best. Women tend to be the ‘experts’ in childcare, because their initial greater involvement in raising a baby leads them to be relied on more than the man in storing childcare info, and then that initial expertise leads them to be relied on even more for childcare matters, until — often unintentionally — the woman shoulders the bulk of the intellectual responsibility for the child. ‘When each person has group-acknowledged responsibility for particular tasks and facts, greater efficiency is inevitable,’ Wegner says. ‘Each domain is handled by the fewest capable of doing so, and responsibility for the domains is continuous over time rather than intermittently assigned by circumstance.’

Gore has a highly effective institutional transactive memory. In order to be unified — in order to spread a company ideology to all of its employees — Gore had to break itself up into semi-autonomous small pieces. That’s the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first. The Ya-Ya Sisterhood epidemic wasn’t focused on one thing. It was thousands of different epidemics, all focused on the groups that had grown up around it.”

Translation

“How is it that all the weird, idiosyncratic things that really cool kids do end up in the mainstream?

This is where Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople play their most important role. They are the ones who take ideas and info from a highly specialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand.”

“Sociologist Gordon Allport writes of a rumor involving a Chinese teacher who was traveling through Maine on vacation in summer 1945, shortly before Japan’s surrender to the Allies at the end of WWII. The teacher was carrying a guidebook, which said that a splendid view of the countryside could be seen from a certain local hilltop, and he stopped in a small town to ask directions. From that innocent request, a rumor quickly spread: a Japanese spy had gone up the hill to take pictures of the region. ‘The simple, unadorned facts that constitute the ‘kernel of truth’ in this rumor,’ Allport writes, ‘were from the outset distorted…in three directions.’ First of all the story was leveled. All kinds of details that are essential for understanding the true meaning of the incident were left out. There was no mention of ‘the courteous and timid approach of the visitor to the native of whom he inquired his way; the fact that the visitor’s precise nationality was unknown…the fact that the visitor had allowed himself to be readily identified by people along the way.’ Then the story was sharpened. The details that remained were made more specific. A man became a spy. Someone who looked Asian became Japanese. Sightseeing became espionage. The guidebook became a camera. Finally, a process of assimilation took place: the story was changed so it made more sense to those spreading the rumor. ‘A Chinese teacher on a holiday was a concept that couldn’t arise in the minds of most farmers, for they didn’t know that some American universities employ Chinese scholars on their staffs and that these scholars, like others, are entitled to summer holidays,’ Allport writes, ‘The novel situation was perforce assimilated in terms of the most available frames of reference.’ And what were those frames of reference? In 1945, in rural Maine, at a time when virtually every family had a relative involved in the war effort, the only way to make sense of a story like that was to fit it in the context of the war. Thus did Asian become Japanese, guidebook become camera, and sightseeing become espionage.”

“‘There was a marked tendency for any picture or story to gravitate in memory toward what was familiar to the subject in his own life, consonant with his own culture, and above all, to what had some special emotional significance for him,’ Allport writes. ‘In their effort after meaning, the subjects would condense or fill in so as to achieve a better ‘Gestalt,’ a better closure — a simpler, more significant configuration.’

This is what is meant by translation. What Mavens and Connectors and Salespeople do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning. If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then — whether it’s of shoes or behavior or software — they have to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople in this very way: they have to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.”

“To analyze how well the needle program was working, Johns Hopkins researchers began, in the mid-90s, to ride along with the vans in order to talk to the people handing in needles. What they found surprised them. They’d assumed that addicts brought in their own dirty needles for exchange, that IV drug users got new needles the way you buy milk: going to the store when it’s open and buying enough for a week. But what they found was that a handful of addicts were coming by each week with knapsacks bulging with 300–400 dirty needles at a time, obviously far more than they were using themselves. These men were then going back to the street and selling the clean needles for $1 each. The van, in other words, was a kind of syringe wholesaler. The real retailers were these handfuls of men — these super-exchangers — who were prowling around the streets and shooting galleries, picking up dirty needles, and then making a modest living on the clean needles they received in exchange. At first, some of the program’s coordinators had second thoughts. Did they really want taxpayer-funded needles financing the habits of addicts? But then they realized that they had stumbled inadvertently into a solution to the limitations of needle exchange programs. ‘It’s a much, much better system. A lot of people shoot on Friday and Saturday night, and they don’t necessarily think in a rational way that they need to have clean tools before they go out. The needle exchange program isn’t going to be available at that time — and certainly not in the shooting galleries. But these [super-exchangers] can be there at times when people are doing drugs and when they need clean syringes. They provide 24/7 service, and it doesn’t cost us anything.

One of the researchers interviewed the super-exchangers and concluded that they represent a very distinct and special group. ‘They are all very well-connected people,’ he says. ‘They know Baltimore inside and out. They know where to go to get any kind of drug or needle. They have street savvy. I would say they’re unusually socially connected. The underlying motive is financial, but there’s definitely an interest in helping people out.’

The super-exchangers are the Connectors of Baltimore’s drug world. What people at Johns Hopkins would like to do is use the super-exchangers to start a counter-drug epidemic. What if they took those same savvy, socially connected, altruistic people and gave them condoms to hand out, or educated them in the kinds of health info that addicts desperately need to know? Those super-exchangers sound as though they have the skills to bridge the chasm between the medical community and the majority of drug users, who are hopelessly isolated from the info and institutions that could save their lives.”

“In the early 60s, suicide on the islands of Micronesia was almost unknown. But for reasons no one quite understands, it then began to rise, steeply and dramatically, by leaps and bounds every year, until by the end of the 80s there were more suicides per capita than anywhere else in the world. For males 15–24, the U.S. suicide rate is 22 per 100k. In Micronesia the rate is 160 per 100k — more than seven times higher. At that level, suicide is almost commonplace, triggered by the smallest of incidents. Sima took his own life because his father yelled at him. In the midst of the Micronesian epidemic, that was hardly unusual. Teens committed suicide because they saw their girlfriends with another boy, or because their parents refused to give them a few extra dollars for beer. One 19-year-old hanged himself because his parents didn’t buy him a graduation gown. One 17-year-old hanged himself because he’d been rebuked by his older brother for making too much noise. What, in Western cultures, is something rare, random, and deeply pathological, has become in Micronesia a ritual of adolescence, with its own particular rules and symbols. Virtually all suicides on the islands, in fact, are identical variations on Sima’s story. The victim is almost always male. He’s in his late teens, unmarried, and living at home. The precipitating event is invariably domestic: a dispute with girlfriends or parents. In three-quarters of the cases, the victim had never tried — or even threatened — suicide before. The suicide notes tend to express not depression but a kind of wounded pride and self-pity, a protest against mistreatment. The act typically occurs on a weekend night, usually after a bout of drinking with friends. In all but a few cases, the victim observes the same procedure, as if there were a strict, unwritten protocol about the correct way to take one’s own life. He finds a remote spot or empty house. He takes a rope and makes a noose, but he doesn’t suspend himself, as in a typical Western hanging. He ties the noose to a low branch or a window or a doorknob and leans forward, so that the weight of his body draws the noose tightly around his neck, cutting off the flow of blood to the brain. Death results from anoxia — the shortage of blood to the brain.

In Micronesia, anthropologist Donald Rubinstein writes, these rituals have become embedded in the local culture.”

“As suicide grows more frequent in these communities, the idea itself acquires a certain familiarity if not fascination to young men, and the lethality of the act seems to be trivialized. Especially among some younger boys, the suicide acts appear to have acquired an experimental almost recreational element.

There’s something very chilling about this passage. Suicide isn’t supposed to be trivialized like this. But the truly chilling thing about it is how familiar it all seems. Here we have a contagious epidemic of self-destruction, engaged in by youth in the spirit of experimentation, imitation, and rebellion. Here we have a mindless action that somehow, among teens, has become an important form of self-expression. In a strange way, the Micronesian teen suicide epidemic sounds an awful lot like the epidemic of teen smoking in the West.”

“The more adults inveigh against smoking and lecture teens about its dangers, the more teens will want to try it. Sure enough, if you look at smoking trends over the past decade or so, that’s exactly what has happened. The anti-smoking movement has never been louder or more prominent. Yet all signs suggest that among the young the anti-smoking message is backfiring. Between 1993 and 1997, the number of college students who smoke jumped from 22% to 29%. Between 1991 and 1997, the number of high school students who smoke jumped 32%. Since 1988, in fact, the total number of teen smokers in the U.S. has risen an extraordinary 73%.”

“The central observation of those who study suicide is that, in some places and under some circumstances, the act of one person taking their own life can be contagious. Suicides lead to suicides. Sociologist David Phillips has conducted a number of studies on suicide. He began by making a list of all the stories about suicide that ran on the front page of the country’s most prominent newspapers in the 20-year stretch between the end of the 40s and the end of the 60s. Then he matched them up with suicide stats from the same period. Sure enough, immediately after stories about suicides appeared, suicides in the area served by the newspapers jumped. In the case of national stories, the rate jumped nationally. (Marilyn Monroe’s death was followed by a temporary 12% increase in the national suicide rate.) Then Phillips repeated his experiment with traffic accidents and found that on the day after highly publicized suicide, the number of traffic accident fatalities was, on average, 6% higher than expected. Two days after a suicide story, traffic deaths rose 4%. Three days after, they rose 3%, and four days after, they rose 8%. (After ten days, the traffic fatality rate was back to normal). Phillips concluded that one of the ways in which people commit suicide is by deliberately crashing their cars, and that these people were just as susceptible to the contagious effects of a highly publicized suicide as were people killing themselves by more conventional means.

The kind of contagion Phillips is talking about isn’t something rational or even necessarily conscious. It’s not like a persuasive argument. It’s something more subtle than that. ‘I’m getting permission to act from someone else,’ he says.”

“The fascinating thing about this permission-giving is how extraordinarily specific it is. In his study of motor fatalities, Phillips found a clear pattern. Stories about suicides resulted in an increase in single-car crashes where the victim was the driver. Stories about suicide-murders resulted in an increase in multiple-car crashes in which the victims included both drivers and passengers. Stories about young people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving young people. Stories about older people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving older people. These patterns have been demonstrated on many occasions. News coverage of a number of suicides by self-immolation in England in the late 70s, for example, prompted 82 suicides by self-immolation over the next year. The ‘permission’ given by an initial act of suicide, in other words, isn’t a general invitation to the vulnerable. It’s really a highly detailed set of instructions, specific to certain people in certain situations who choose to die in certain ways. It’s not a gesture. It’s speech. In another study, researchers in England in the 60s analyzed 135 people who’d been admitted to a psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide. They found that the group was strongly linked socially — that many of them belonged to the same social circles. This, they concluded, was not coincidence. It testified to the very essence of what suicide is, a private language between members of a common subculture. The author’s conclusion is worth quoting in full:

Many patients who attempt suicide are drawn from a section of the community in which self-aggression is generally recognized as a means of conveying a certain kind of info. Among this group the act is viewed as comprehensible and consistent with the rest of the cultural pattern…If this is true, it follows that the individual who in particular situations, usually of distress, wishes to convey info about his difficulties to others, doesn’t have to invent a communication medium de novo…The individual within the ‘attempted suicide subculture’ can perform an act which carries a preformed meaning: all he’s required to do is invoke it. The process is essentially similar to that whereby a person uses a word in spoken language.

This is what’s going on in Micronesia, only at a much more profound level. If suicide in the West is a kind of crude language, in Micronesia it has become an incredibly expressive form of communication, rich with meaning and nuance, and expressed by the most persuasive of permission-givers. Rubinstein writes of the strange pattern of suicides on the Micronesian island of Ebeye, a community of about 6,000. Between 1955 and 1965, there wasn’t a single case of suicide on the island. In May 1966, an 18-year-old boy hanged himself in jail after being arrested for stealing a bicycle, but his case seemed to have little impact. Then, in November 1966, came the death of R, the charismatic scion of one of the island’s wealthiest families. R had been seeing two women and had fathered a one-month-old child with each of them. Unable to make up his mind between them, he hanged himself in romantic despair. At his funeral, his two lovers, learning of the existence of the other for the first time, fainted on his grave.

Three days after R’s death, there was another suicide, a 22-year-old male suffering from marital difficulties, bringing the suicide toll to two over a week in a community that hadn’t seen 1 suicide in 12 years. The island’s medic wrote: ‘After R died, many boys dreamed about him and said that he was calling them to kill themselves.’ 25 more suicides followed over the next 12 years, mostly in clusters of 3–4 over the course of a few weeks. Over and over again, the themes outlined by R resurfaced. Here’s the suicide note of M, a high school student who had two girlfriends — a complication defined, in the youth subculture of Ebeye, as grounds for taking one’s life. ‘Best wishes to M and C [the two girlfriends]. It’s been nice to be with both of you.’ That’s all he had to say, because the context for his act had already been created by R. In the Ebeye epidemic, R was the Tipping Person, the Salesman, the one whose experience ‘overwrote’ the experience of those who followed him. The power of his personality and the circumstances of his death combined to make the force of his example endure years beyond his death.”

“The shared language of smoking is as rich and expressive as the shared language of suicide. In this epidemic, as well, there are also Tipping Points, Salesmen, permission-givers. Time and time again, the respondents to my survey described the particular individual who initiated them into smoking in precisely the same way.

There’s actually considerable support for this idea that there is a common personality to hard-core smokers. Hans Eysenck has argued that serious smokers can be separated from nonsmokers among very simple personality lines. The quintessential hard-core smoker, according to him, is an extrovert, the kind of person who

is sociable, likes parties, has many friends, needs to have people to talk to…He craves excitement, takes chances, acts on the spur of the moment and is generally an impulsive individual…He prefers to keep moving and doing things, tends to be aggressive and loses his temper quickly; his feelings aren’t kept under tight control and he’s not always a reliable person.

In countless studies since Eysenck’s groundbreaking work, this picture of the smoking ‘type’ has been filled out. Heavy smokers have been shown to have a much greater sex drive than nonsmokers. They’re more sexually precocious; they have a greater ‘need’ for sex, and greater attraction to the opposite sex. At age 19, for example, 15% of nonsmoking white women attending college have had sex. The same number for white female college students who smoke is 55%. The stats for men are about the same. They rank much higher on ‘anti-social’ indexes: they tend to have greater levels of misconduct, and be more rebellious and defiant. They make snap judgments. They take more risks. The average smoking household spends 73% more on coffee and 2–3 times as much on beer as the average nonsmoking household. Interestingly, smokers also seem to be more honest about themselves than nonsmokers. As David Krogh describes it in his treatise Smoking: The Artificial Passion, psychologists have what they call ‘lie’ tests in which they insert inarguable statements — ‘I do not always tell the truth’ or ‘I’m sometimes cold to my spouse’ — and if test-takers consistently deny these statements, it’s taken as evidence that they’re generally not truthful. Smokers are much more truthful on their tests. ‘One theory,’ Krogh writes, ‘has it that their lack of deference and their surfeit of defiance combine to make them relatively indifferent to what people think of them.’”

“The significance of the smoking personality, I think, cannot be overstated. If you bundle all of these extroverts’ traits together — defiance, sexual precocity, honesty, impulsiveness, indifference to the opinion of others, sensation seeking — you come up with an almost perfect definition of the kind of person many adolescents are drawn to. They weren’t cool because they smoked. They smoked because they were cool. The very same character traits of rebelliousness and impulsivity and risk-taking and indifference to the opinion of others and precocity that made them so compelling to their adolescent peers also make it almost inevitable that they would also be drawn to the ultimate expression of adolescent rebellion, risk-taking, impulsivity, indifference to others, and precocity: the cigarette. This may seem like a simple point. But it’s absolutely essential in understanding why the war on smoking has stumbled so badly. Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teens that smoking isn’t cool. But that’s not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. Smoking epidemics begin in precisely the same way that the Micronesian suicide epidemic began or word-of-mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic began, because of the extraordinary influence of some rule-breaking teens. In this epidemic, as in all others, a very small group — a select few — are responsible for driving the epidemic forward.”

“Of the people who experimented with cigarettes a few times and then never smoked again, only about a quarter got any sort of pleasant ‘high’ from their first cigarette. Of the ex-smokers — people who smoked for a while but later managed to quit — about a third got a pleasurable buzz. Of people who were light smokers, about half remembered their first cigarette well. Of the heavy smokers, though, 78% remembered getting a good buzz from their first few puffs ever. The questions of how sticky smoking ends up being to any single person, in other words, depends a great deal on their own particular initial reaction to nicotine.

This is a critical point, and one that’s often lost in the heated rhetoric of the war on smoking. The tobacco industry, for instance, has been pilloried for years for denying that nicotine is addictive. That position, of course, is ridiculous. But the opposite notion often put forth by anti-smoking advocates — that nicotine is a deadly taskmaster that enslaves all who come in contact with it — is equally ridiculous. Of all teens who experiment with cigarettes, only about a third ever go on to smoke regularly. Nicotine may be highly addictive, but it’s only addictive in some people, some of the time. More important, it turns out that even among those who smoke regularly, there are enormous differences in the stickiness of their habit. Smoking experts used to think that 90–95% of all those who smoked were regular smokers. But several years ago, the smoking questions on the government’s national health survey were made more specific, and researchers discovered, to their astonishment, that a fifth of all smokers don’t smoke every day. There are millions of Americans, in other words, who manage to smoke regularly and not be hooked — people for whom smoking is contagious but not sticky.”

“What distinguishes chippers from hard-core smokers? Probably genetic factors. Allan Collins recently took several groups of different strains of mice and injected each with steadily increasing amounts of nicotine. When nicotine reaches toxic levels in a mouse (it is, after all, a poison), it has a seizure — its trail goes rigid, it begins running wildly around its cage; its head starts to jerk and snap; and eventually it flips over on its back. Collins wanted to see whether different strains of mice could handle different amounts of nicotine. Sure enough, they could. The strain of mice most tolerant of nicotine could handle about 2–3x as much of the drug as the strain had had seizures at the lowest dose. ‘That’s about in the same range as alcohol,’ Collins says.”

“Collins thinks that there are genes in the brains of mice that govern how nicotine is processed — how quickly it causes toxicity, how much pleasure it gives, what kind of buzz it leaves — and that some strains of mice have genes that handle nicotine really well and extract the most pleasure from it and some have genes that treat nicotine like a poison.

Humans aren’t mice, and drinking nicotine from a bottle in a cage isn’t the same thing as lighting up a cigarette. But even if there’s only a modest correlation between what goes on in mice brains and ours, these findings do seem to square with Poermleau’s study. The people who didn’t get a buzz from their first cigarette and who found the whole experience so awful that they never smoked again are probably people whose bodies are acutely sensitive to nicotine, incapable of handling it in even the smallest doses. Chippers may be people who have the genes to derive pleasure from nicotine, but not the genes to handle it in large doses. Heavy smokers, meanwhile, may be people with the genes to do both. This is not to say that genes provide a total explanation for how much people smoke. Since nicotine is known to relieve boredom and stress, for example, people who are in boring or stressful situations are always going to smoke more than people who aren’t.”

“Does it make a lasting difference to the personality of your child if you’re an anxious and inexperienced parent, as opposed to being authoritative and competent? Are you more likely to create intellectually curious children by filling your home with books? Does it affect your child’s personality if you see them 2 hours a day, as opposed to 8 hours a day? In other words, does the specific social environment that we create in our homes make a real difference in the way our children end up as adults? In a series of large and well-designed studies of twins — particularly twins separated at birth and reared apart — geneticists have shown that most of the character traits that make us who we are — friendliness, extroversion, nervousness, openness, and so on — are about half determined by our genes and half determined by our environment, and the assumption has always been that this environment that makes such a big difference in our lives is the environment of the home. The problem is, however, that whenever psychologists have set out to look for this nurture effect, they can’t find it.

One of the largest and most rigorous studies of this kind, for example, is known as the Colorado Adoption Project. In the mid-70s, University of Colorado researchers led by Robert Plomin recruited 245 pregnant women from the Denver area who were about to give up their children for adoption. They then followed the children into their new homes, giving them a battery of personality and intelligence tests at regular intervals throughout their childhood and giving the same sets of tests to their adoptive parents. For the sake of comparison, the group also ran the same set of tests on a similar group of 245 parents and their biological children. For this comparison group, the results came out pretty much as one might expect. On things like measures of intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the biological children are fairly similar to their parents. For the adopted kids, however, the results are downright strange. Their scores have nothing whatsoever in common with their adoptive parents: these children are no more similar in their personality or intellectual skills to the people who raised them, fed them, clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them for 16 years than they are to any two adults taken at random off the street.”

“Why, Harris asks, do the children of recent immigrants almost never retain the accent of their parents? How is it the children of deaf parents manage to learn how to speak as well and as quickly as the children whose parents speak to them from the day they were born? The answer has always been that language is a skill acquired laterally — that what children pick up from other children is as, or more, important in the acquisition of language as what they pick up at home. What Harris argues is that this is also true more generally, that the environmental influence that helps children become who they are — that shapes their character and personality — is their peer group.

“In 1986, a study of psychiatric outpatients in Minnesota found that half of them smoked, a figure well above the national average. Two years later, psychologist Alex Glassman discovered that 60% of the heavy smokers he was studying as part of an entirely different research project had a history of major depression. He followed that up with a major study in 1990 of 3,200 randomly selected adults. Of those who had some time in their lives had been diagnosed with a major psychiatric disorder, 74% had smoked at some point, and 14% had quit smoking. Of those who’d never been diagnosed with a psychiatric problem, 53% had smoked at some point in their life and 31% had managed to quit smoking. As psychiatric problems increase, the correlation with smoking grows stronger. About 80% of alcoholics smoke. Close to 90% of schizophrenics smoke. In one particularly chilling study, British psychiatrists compared the smoking behavior of a group of 12- to 15-year-olds with emotional and behavioral problems vs. a group of children of the same age in mainstream schools. Half of the troubled kids were already smoking 21+ cigarettes a week, even at that young age, vs. 10% of the mainstream kids. As overall smoking rates decline, in other words, the habit is becoming more concentrated among the most troubled and marginal members of society.

There’s a number of theories as to why smoking matches up so strongly with emotional problems. The first is that the same kinds of things that would make someone susceptible to the contagious effects of smoking — low self-esteem, say, or an unhealthy and unhappy home life — are also the kinds of things that contribute to depression. More tantalizing, though, is some preliminary evidence that the two problems might have the same genetic root. For example, depression is believed to be the result, at least in part, of a problem in the production of certain key brain chemicals, in particular the neurotransmitters known as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. These are the chemicals that regulate mood, that contribute to feelings of confidence and mastery and pleasure. Drugs like Prozac work because they prompt the brain to produce more serotonin: they compensate, in other words, for the deficit of serotonin that some depressed people suffer from. Nicotine appears to do exactly the same thing with the other two key neurotransmitters — dopamine and neorepinephrine. Those smokers who are depressed, in short, are essentially using tobacco as a cheap way of treating their own depression, of boosting the level of brain chemicals they need to function normally. This effect is strong enough that when smokers with a history of psychiatric problems give up cigarettes, they run a sizable risk of relapsing into depression. Here’s stickiness with a vengeance: not only do some smokers find it hard to quit because they’re addicted to nicotine, but also because without nicotine they run the risk of a debilitating psychiatric illness.

This is a sobering fact. But it also suggests that tobacco may have a critical vulnerability: if you can treat smokers for depression, you may be able to make their habit an awful lot easier to break. Sure enough, this turns out to be the case. In the mid-80s, researchers were doing a big national trial of a new antidepressant called bupropion when, much to their surprise, they began getting reports about smoking from the field. ‘I started hearing patients say things like ‘I no longer have the desire to smoke,’ or ‘I’ve cut down on the number of cigarettes I’m smoking,’ or ‘Cigarettes don’t taste as good anymore,’ said the head of the division. You can imagine that someone in my position gets reports about everything, so I didn’t put much stock in them. But I kept getting them. It was very unusual.’ This was in 1986, before the depression-smoking link was well understood, so the company was initially puzzled. But what they soon realized was that bupropion was functioning as a kind of nicotine substitute. ‘The dopamine that nicotine releases goes to the prefrontal cortex, the pleasure center of the brain. It’s what people believe is responsible for the pleasure, the sense of well-being associated with smoking, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to quit. Nicotine also increase norepinephrine, and that’s the reason that when you try to quit smoking, you get agitation and irritability. Bupropion does two things. It increases your dopamine, so smokers don’t have the desire to smoke, then it replaces some of the norepinephrine, so they don’t have the agitation, the withdrawal symptoms.’

The drug — now marketed as Zyban — has been tested in heavily addicted smokers (more than 15 cigarettes/day) and found remarkable results. In the study, 23% of smokers given a course of anti-smoking counseling and a placebo quit after four weeks. Of those given counseling and the nicotine patch, 36% had quit after four weeks. The same figure for Zyban, though, was 49%, and of those heavily addicted smokers given both Zyban and the patch, 58% had quit after a month. Interestingly, Zoloft and Prozac — the serotonin drugs — don’t seem to help smokers to quit. It’s not enough to lift mood, in other words; you have to lift mood in precisely the same way that nicotine does, and only Zyban does that.”

“There’s a second potential Tipping Point on the stickiness question that becomes apparent if you go back and look again at what happens to teens when they start smoking. In the beginning, when teens first experiment with cigarettes, they’re all chippers. They smoke only occasionally. Most of those teens soon quit and never smoke again. A few continue to chip for many years afterward, without becoming addicted. About a third end up as regular smokers. What’s interesting about this period, however, is that it takes about three years for the teens in that last group to go from casual to regular smoking — roughly from 15–18 years of age — and then for the next 5–7 years there’s a gradual escalation of their habit. ‘It takes until their twenties to get to that level of a pack a day,’ an addiction expert says.

Nicotine addiction, then, is far from an instant development. It takes time for most people to get hooked on cigarettes, and just because teens are smoking at 15 doesn’t mean they’ll inevitably become addicted. You’ve got about three years to stop them. The second, even more intriguing implication of this, is that nicotine addiction isn’t a linear phenomenon. It’s not that if you need 1 cigarette a day, you’re a little bit addicted, and if you need 2 a day you’re a little bit more addicted, and if you need 10 you’re ten times as addicted as when you needed one cigarette. It suggests, instead, that there’s an addiction Tipping Point, a threshold — that if you smoke below a certain number of cigarettes you aren’t addicted at all, but once you go above that magic number you suddenly are. This is another, more complete way of making sense of chippers: they’re people who simply never smoke enough to hit that addiction threshold.

What’s the addiction threshold? No one believes it’s exactly the same for all people. But leading nicotine experts have made some educated guesses. Chippers, they point out, are people who are capable of smoking up to five cigarettes a day without getting addicted. That suggests that the amount of nicotine found in five cigarettes — 4–6mg of nicotine — is probably somewhere close to this addiction threshold. What Henningfield and Benowitz suggest, then, is that tobacco companies be required to lower the level of nicotine so that even the heaviest smokers — those smoking, say, 30 a day — couldn’t get anything more than 5mg of nictonine within a 24-hour period. That level ‘should be adequate to prevent or limit the development of addiction in most young people. At the same time it may provide enough nicotine for taste and sensory stimulation.’ Teens, in other words, would continue to experiment with cigarettes for all the reasons that they’ve ever experienced with them — because the habit is contagious, because cool kids are smoking, because they want to fit in. But, because of the reduction of nicotine levels below the addiction threshold, the habit would no longer be sticky. Cigarette smoking would be less like the flu and more like the common cold: easily caught but easily defeated.”

“In the 1996 Household Survey on Drug Abuse, 1% of those polled said they’d used heroin at least once. But only 18% of that 1% had used it in the past year, and only 9% had used it in the past month. That’s not the profile of a particularly sticky drug. The figures for cocaine are even more striking. Of those who have ever tried cocaine, less than 1% are regular users. What these figures tell us is that experimentation and actual hard-core use are two entirely separate things — that for a drug to be contagious doesn’t automatically mean that it’s also sticky. In fact, the sheer number of people who appear to have tried cocaine at least once should tell us that the urge among teens to try something dangerous is pretty nearly universal. This is what teens do. This is how they learn about the world, and most of the time — in 99% of the cases with cocaine — that experimentation doesn’t result in anything bad happening. We have to stop fighting this kind of experimentation.”

“What’s tragic about [the suicide epidemic] is that these little boys were experimenting. Experimenting is what little boys do. What is tragic is that they’ve chosen to experiment with something that you can’t experiment with. Unfortunately, there isn’t ever going to be a safer form of suicide, to help save the teens of Micronesia. But there can be a safer form of smoking, and by paying attention to the Tipping Points of the addiction process, we can make that safer, less sticky form of smoking possible.”

Conclusion

“Not long ago nurse Georgia Sadler began a campaign to increase knowledge and awareness of diabetes and breast cancer in SD’s black community. She wanted to create a grassroots movement toward prevention, and so she began setting up seminars in black churches. The results, however, were disappointing.

Her solution? Move the campaign from churches to beauty salons.

‘It’s a captive audience,’ Sadler says, ‘These women may be at a salon for anywhere from 2–8 hours, if they’re having their hair braided.’ The stylist also enjoys a special relationship with her client. ‘Once you find someone who can manage your hair, you’ll drive 100 miles to see her. The stylist is your friend. She takes you through your graduation, your wedding, your first baby. It’s a long-term relationship. It’s a trusting relationship. You literally and figuratively let your hair down in a salon.’ There’s something about the profession of stylist, as well, that seems to attract a certain kind of person — someone who communicates easily and well with others, someone with a wide variety of acquaintances.

She gathered together a group of stylists from the city for a series of training sessions. She brought in a folklorist to help coach the stylists in how to present their info about breast cancer in a compelling manner. ‘We wanted to rely on traditional methods of communication,’ Sadler says. ‘This isn’t a classroom setting. We wanted this to be something that women wanted to share. And how much easier is it to hang the hooks of knowledge on a story?’ Sadler kept a constant cycle of new info and gossipy tidbits and conversational starters about breast cancer flowing into the salons, so that each time a client came back, the stylist could seize on some new cue to start a convo. She wrote the material up in large print, and put it on laminated sheets that would survive the rough and tumble of a busy salon. She set up an evaluation program to find out what was working and to see how successful she was in changing attitudes and getting women to have mammograms and diabetes tests, and what she found out was that her program worked. It’s possible to do a lot with a little.”

“She changed the context of her message. She changed the messenger, and she changed the message itself. She focused her efforts.

This is the first lesson of the Tipping Point. Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas. The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are responsible for starting word-of-mouth epidemics, which means that if you’re interested in starting a word-of-mouth epidemic, your resources ought to be solely concentrated on those three groups.”

“The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost. We have, of course, an instinctive disdain for this kind of solution because there’s something in all of us that feels that true answers to problems have to be comprehensive, that there is virtue in the dogged and indiscriminate application of effort, that slow and steady should win the race. The problem, of course, is that the indiscriminate application of effort is something that’s not always possible. There are times when we need a convenient shortcut, a way to make a lot out of a little, and that’s what Tipping Points, in the end, are all about.”

“To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and coutnerintuitive rules.

What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. This, too, contradicts some of the most ingrained assumptions we hold about ourselves and each other. We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament.”

“To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That’s why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it’s in the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.

“The school massacre at Columbine happened on April 20, 1999. In the 22 months that followed, there were 19 separate incidents of school violence across the U.S. — ten of them foiled, fortunately, before anyone got hurt — each patterned, almost eerily on the Columbine shootings.”

“In the press, this wave of shootings and would-be shootings has sometimes been portrayed as part of a larger wave of violence. But that’s not true: in 1992–93, there were 54 violent deaths on public school campuses around the U.S. In 2000, there were 16. The Columbine wave happened in a period when violence among students was down, not up.”

“To have kids growing up in disaffection and loneliness is hardly a new development. Millions of kids who grow up just as emotionally impoverished as Andy Williams don’t walk into their school one morning and start shooting. The difference is Columbine. Andy Williams was infected by the example of Eric Harris and Dylan Kiebold, just as the suicides of Micronesia were infected by the example of that first dramatic love triangle. It’s a mistake to try to make sense of these kinds of actions by blaming influences of the outside world — in terms of broader trends of violence and social breakdown. These are epidemics in isolation: they follow a mysterious, internal script that makes sense only in the closed world that teens inhabit.

The best analogy to this kind of epidemic is the outbreak of food poisoning that swept through several public schools in Belgium in 1999. It started when 42 children in the town of Bornem became mysteriously ill after drinking Coca-Cola and had to be hospitalized. Two days later, 8 more schoolchildren fell sick in Brugge, followed by 13 in Harelbake the next day and 42 in Lochrisit three days after that — and on and on in a widening spiral that, in the end, sent more than 100 children to the hospital complaining of nausea, dizziness, and headaches, and forced Coca-Cola into the biggest product recall in its 113-year history. Upon investigation, an apparent culprit was found. In the Antwerp plant, contaminated carbon dioxide had been used to carbonate a batch of the soda’s famous syrup. But then the case got tricky: upon examination, the contaminants in the carbon dioxide were found to be sulfur compounds present at between 5–17 parts per billion. These sulfides can cause illness, however, only at levels about a thousand times greater than that. At 17 parts per billion, they simply impart a bad smell — like rotten eggs — which means that Belgium should have experienced nothing more than a minor epidemic of nose wrinkling. More puzzling is the fact that, in four of the five schools were the bad Coke allegedly caused illness, half the kids who got sick hadn’t actually drunk any Coke that day. Whatever went on in Belgium, in other words, probably wasn’t Coke poisoning. So what was it? It was a kind of mass hysteria, a phenomenon that’s not at all uncommon among schoolchildren. Psychiatrist Simon Wessely has been collecting reports of this kind of hysteria for about ten years and how has hundreds of examples, dating back as far as 1787, when millworkers in Lancashire suddenly took ill after they become persuaded that they were being poisoned by tainted cotton. According to Wessely, almost all cases fit a pattern. Someone sees a neighbor fall ill and becomes convinced that he’s being contaminated by some unseen evil — in the past it was demons and spirits; nowadays it tends to be toxins and gases — and his fear makes him anxious. His anxiety makes him dizzy and nauseated. He begins to hyperventilate. He collapses. Other people hear the same allegation, see the ‘victim’ faint, and they begin to get anxious themselves. They feel nauseated. They hyperventilate. They collapse, and before you know it everyone in the room is hyperventilating and collapsing. These symptoms, Wessely stresses, are perfectly genuine. It’s just that they’re manifestations of a threat that’s wholly imagined. ‘This kind of thing is extremely common,’ he says, ‘and it’s almost normal. It doesn’t meant that you’re mentally ill or crazy.’ What happened in Belgium was a fairly typical example of a more standard form of contagious anxiety, possibly heightened by the recent Belgian scare over dioxin-contaminated animal feed. The students’ alarm over the rotten-egg odor of their Cokes, for example, is straight out of the hysteria textbooks. ‘The vast majority of these events are triggered by some abnormal but benign smell,’ Wessely said. ‘Something strange, like a weird odor coming from the AC.’ The fact that the outbreaks occurred in schools is also typical of hysteria cases. ‘The classic ones always involve schoolchildren,’ Wessely continued. ‘There’s a famous British case involving hundreds of schoolgirls who collapsed during a 1980 Nottinghamshire jazz festival. They blamed it on a local farmer spraying pesticides.’ There’ve been more than 115 documented hysteria cases in schools over the past 300 years.

Is it a mistake to take the hysterical outbreaks like the Belgian scare too seriously? Not at all. It was, in part, a symptom of deeper underlying anxieties. What’s more, the children who felt sick weren’t faking their symptoms: they were sick. It’s just that it’s important to realize that sometimes epidemic behavior among children doesn’t have an identifiable and rational cause: the kids get sick because other kids got sick. The post-Columbine outbreak of school shootings is, in this sense, no different. It’s happening because Columbine happened, and because ritualized, dramatic, self-destructive behavior among teens — whether it involves suicide, smoking, taking a gun to school, or fainting after drinking a harmless can of Coke — has extraordinary contagious power.

My sense is that the way adolescent society has evolved in recent years has increased the potential for this kind of isolation. We’ve given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We’ve given them more time to spend among themselves — and less in the company of adults. We’ve given them email and beepers, and, most of all, cell phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day — dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults — with the voices of their peers. That is a world ruled by the logic of word of mouth, by the contagious messages that teens pass among themselves. Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teens. It won’t be the last.”

“Whenver I look at an unopened bar of Ivory soap, I flip it over and burst out laughing. In the midst of the product info, there’s a line that says, ‘Questions? Comments? Call 1–800–395–9960.’ Who on earth could ever have a question about soap? In fact, who on earth would ever have a question about soap so important that they felt compelled to call the company right away? The answer, of course, is that while most of us would never dial that number, a very small percentage of profoundly weird people may well feel compelled from time to time to call in with a question. These are people who feel passionate about soap. They’re the soap Mavens, and if you’re in the soap business you had better treat those soap Mavens well because they’re the ones whom all their friends turn to for advice about soap.

The Ivory soap 800 number is what I call a Maven trap — a way of efficiently figuring out who the Mavens are in a particular world — and how to set Maven traps is one of the central problems facing the modern marketplace.”

“Connectors, I think, are the sorts of people who don’t need to be found. They make it their business to find you. But Mavens are a little harder, which is why it’s so important, I think, to come up with strategies for finding them. Consider the experience of Lexus. In 1990, just after Lexus introduced its first line of cars in the U.S., the company realized that it had two minor problems with its LS400 line that required a recall. The situation was, by any measure, an awkward one. Lexus had decided, from the beginning, to build its reputation around quality workmanship and reliability. And now, within little more than a year of the brand’s launch, the company was being forced to admit problems with its flagship. So Lexus decided to make a special effort. Most recalls are handled by making a press announcement and mailing notification letters to owners. Lexus, instead, called each owner individually on the phone the day the recall was announced. When the owners picked up their cars at the dealership after the work was complete, each car had been washed and the tank filled with gas. If an owner lived 100+ miles from a dealership, the dealer sent a mechanic to their home. In one instance, a technician flew from LA to Anchorage to make the necessary repairs.

Was it necessary to go to such lengths? You could argue that Lexus overreacted. The problems with the car were relatively minor. And the number of cars involved in the recall — so soon after Lexus had entered the marketplace — was small. Lexus would seem to have had many opportunities to correct the damage. The key fact, though, was not the number of people affected by the recall but the kind of people affected by it. Who, after all, are the people willing to take a chance and buy a brand-new luxury model? Car Mavens. There may have been only a few thousand Lexus owners at that point, but they were car experts, people who take cars seriously, people who talk about cars, people whose friends ask them for advice about cars.”

“This is the perfect Maven trap — using the recognition that sometimes a specific time or place or situation happens to bring together a perfect Maven audience. Here’s another example: Bill Hartigan was working for ITT int he early 70s, right at the moment when the entire industry was first being allowed to market the then-unknown IRA. It was a market ITT ended up dominating. Why? Because they were the first to find a group of Mavens. Hartigan writes:

The concept of giving your money to an institution until you were at least 59.5 yeras old then seemed strange, and scary. But one interesting thing about those IRAs. Even until the mid-70s, ‘tax breaks’ were only for the wealthy. This was the exception. Knowing that was our key to success.

Target the wealthy? Nope. There are never many of them, they are too hard to see, and the benefits of IRAs probably would be of muted appeal. One potential target group stood out like a sore thumb, though. Teachers.

At the time (and to this day, unfortunately) this vital group of professionals was overworked and severely underpaid. No one ever sought the advice of a teacher when the topic was tax breaks and investing. But IRAs allowed teachers many similar benefits that heretofore had only been for the wealthy. It benefited them today and tomorrow.

They quickly caught on to the benefits of what IRAs had to offer them. Just as quickly, human nature took over. For the first time ever, they were able to talk to Johnny’s parents about how they handled their money.

Talk about grooming an entire market. Still the most brilliant marketing strategy that I’ve ever been involved with.”