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- The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.
- We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time.
- And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?
- Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80% of the “work” will be done by 20% of the participants. In most societies, 20% of criminals commit 80% of crimes. 20% of motorists cause 80% of all accidents. 20% of beer drinkers drink 80% of all beer. When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.
- The problem is this: how are human beings connected? Do we all belong to separate worlds, operating simultaneously but autonomously, so that the links between any two people, anywhere in the world, are few and distant? Or are we all bound up together in a grand, interlocking web?
- We don't seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do.
- The answer is that in the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.
- Horchow collects people the same way others collect stamps. He remembers the boys he played with sixty years ago, the address of his best friend growing up, the name of the man his college girlfriend had a crush on when she spent her junior year overseas. These details are critical to Horchow. He 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. See here — Monday was Ginger Broom's birthday, and the Wittenbergs' first anniversary. And Alan Schwartz's birthday is Friday and our yard man's is Saturday.”
- Weisberg has a low, raspy voice, baked hard by half a century of nicotine, and she pauses between sentences to give herself the opportunity for a quick puff. Even when she's not smoking, she pauses anyway, as if to keep in practice for those moments when she is.
- Was he actually interesting? Who knows? The point is that Lois found him interesting, because, in some way, she finds everyone interesting. Weisberg, one of her friends told me, ”always says — 'Oh, I've met the most wonderful person. You are going to love her,' and she is as enthused about this person as she was about the first person she has met and you know what, she's usually right.“ Helen Doria, another of her friends, told me that ”Lois sees things in you that you don't even see in yourself," which is another way of saying the same thing, that by some marvelous quirk of nature, Lois and the other people like her have some instinct that helps them relate to the people they meet. When Weisberg looks out at the world or when Roger Horchow sits next to you on an airplane, they don't see the same world that the rest of us see. They see possibility, and while most of us are busily choosing whom we would like to know, and rejecting the people who don't look right or who live out near the airport, or whom we haven't seen in sixty-five years, Lois and Roger like them all.
- Gau talks quickly, but in fits and starts. He's always revving up and gearing down. Sometimes when he is making an aside be will rev up even further, as if to put in his own verbal parentheses. He asks lots of rhetorical questions.
- What was interesting about Gau is the extent to which he seemed to be persuasive in a way quite different from the content of his words. He seems to have some kind of indefinable trait, something powerful and contagious and irresistible that goes beyond what comes out of his mouth, that makes people who meet him want to agree with him. It's energy. It's enthusiasm. It's charm. It's likability. It's all those things and yet something more. At one point I asked him whether he was happy, and he fairly bounced off his chair.
- "Because you know what, the power of positive thinking will overcome so many things. There are so many people who are negative. Someone will say, you can't do that. - And I'll say, what do you mean I can't do that?"
- The subtle pro-Reagan bias in Jennings's face seems to have influenced the voting behavior of ABC viewers.
- 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. Somehow nodding, in the end, mattered as much as Peter Jennings's smiles did in the 1984 election.
- ...the constant punning and pop culture references like Monsterpiece Theater or the Samuel Beckett parody “Waiting for Elmo.” (The show's head writer, Lou Berger, says that the reason he applied for a job at Sesame Street was because of a Kermit sketch he saw while watching the show with his son in 1979. “It was one of those crazy fairy tales. They were looking for a princess in distress. Kermit ran out to this female Muppet princess and said” — and here Berger did a pitch-perfect Kermit — “'Excuse me, are you a female princess in distress?' And she said, 'What does this look like? A pant suit?' I remember thinking,'That's so great. I have to work there.'”)
- Many of the most famous Muppets were created for ad campaigns: Big Bird is really a variation of a seven-foot dragon created by Henson for La Choy commercials; Cookie Monster was a pitch-man for Frito-Lay; Grover was used in promotional films for IBM. (Henson"s Muppet commercials from the 50s and 60s are hysterically funny but have a dark and edgy quality that understandably was absent from his Sesame Street work.)
- What they found was that Emily's conversations with herself were more advanced than her conversations with her parents. In fact, they were significantly more advanced. (...) In general, her speech to herself is so much richer and more complex (than her speech to adults) that it has made all of us, as students of language development, begin to wonder whether the picture of language acquisition offered in the literature to date does not underrepresent the actual patterns of the linguistic knowledge of the young child. For once the lights are out and her parents leave the room, Emily reveals a stunning mastery of language forms we would never have suspected from her (everyday) speech. Feldman was referring to things like vocabulary and grammar and — most important — the structure of Emily's monologues. She was making up stories, narratives, that explained and organized the things that happened to her. Sometimes these stories were what linguists call temporal narratives. She would create a story to try to integrate events, actions, and feelings into one structure — a process that is a critical part of a child's mental development.
- If you watch Blue's Clues with a group of children, the success of this strategy is obvious. It's as if they're a group of diehard Yankees fans at a baseball game.
- Some of the kids toward the end of the day Wednesday were saying, not Wanda the Witch again. When Wanda the Witch came back Friday, they jumped and clapped. Kids reach a saturation point. But then nostalgia sets in.
- Levanthal found that the hard sell — that trying to scare students into getting tetanus shots — didn't work, and what really worked was giving them a map they didn't need directing them to a clinic that they already knew existed. Blue's Clues got rid of the cleverness and originality that made Sesame Street the most beloved television program of its generation, created a plodding, literal show, and repeated each episode five times in a row.
- This is an epidemic theory of crime. It says that crime is contagious — just as a fashion trend is contagious — that it can start with a broken window and spread to an entire community. The Tipping Point in this epidemic, though, isn't a particular kind of person — a Connector like Lois Weisberg or a Maven like Mark Alpert. It's something physical like graffiti The impetus to engage in a certain kind of behavior is not coming from a certain kind of person but from a feature of the environment.
- Lillian Rubin, Goetz's biographer, writes that his choice to live on Fourteenth Street could hardly have been an accident. “For Bernie,” she writes, "there seems to be something seductive about the setting. Precisely because of its deficits and discomforts, it provided him with a comprehensible target for the rage that lives inside him. By focusing it on the external world, he need not deal with his internal one. He rails about the dirt, the noise, the drunks, the crime, the pushers, the junkies. And all with good reason.“ Goetz's bullets, Rubin concludes, were ”aimed at targets that existed as much in his past as in the present."
- All of those theories are essentially ways of saying that the criminal is a personality type — a personality type distinguished by an insensitivity to the norms of normal society. People with stunted psychological development don't understand how to conduct healthy relationships.
- People who aren't taught right from wrong are oblivious to what is and what is not appropriate behavior. People who grow up poor, fatherless, and buffeted by racism don't have the same commitment to social norms as those from healthy middle-class homes. Bernie Goetz and those four thugs on the subway were, in this sense, prisoners of their own, dysfunctional, world.
- They 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 is alert to all kinds of cues, and who is prompted to commit crimes based on his perception of the world around him. That is an incredibly radical — and in some sense unbelievable — idea. There is 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 is a very strange kind of environmentalism.
- The Power of Context says that the showdown on the subway between Bernie Goetz and those four youths had very little to do, in the end, with the tangled psychological pathology of Goetz, and very little as well to do with the background and poverty of the four youths who accosted him, and everything to do with the message sent by the graffiti on the walls and the disorder at the turnstiles. The Power of Context says you don't have to solve the big problems to solve crime. You can prevent crimes just by scrubbing off graffiti and arresting fare-beaters: crime epidemics have Tipping Points every bit as simple and straightforward as syphilis in Baltimore or a fashion trend like Hush Puppies.
- The 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 those 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.
- The purpose of the experiment was to try to find out why prisons are such nasty places. Was it because prisons are full of nasty people, or was it because prisons are such nasty environments that they make people nasty? In the answer to that question is obviously the answer to the question posed by Bernie Goetz and the subway cleanup, which is how much influence docs immediate environment have on the way people behave? What Zimbardo found out shocked him. The guards, some of whom had previously identified themselves as pacifists, fell quickly into the role of hard-bitten disciplinarians.
- “I realize now,” one prisoner said after the experiment was over, “that no matter how together I thought I was inside my head, my prisoner behavior was often less under my control than I realized.” Another said: "I began to feel that I was losing my identity, that the person I call —, the person who volunteered to get me into this prison (because it was a prison to me, it still is a prison to me, I don't regard it as an experiment or a simulation...) was distant from me, was remote, until finally I wasn't that person. I was 416. I was really my number and 416 was really going to have to decide what to do."
- But the consistency isn't nearly as high as you might expect. 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 he or she would cheat on, say, the underlining A's part of the speed test. If you gave the same group of kids the same test, under the same circumstances six months apart, Hartshorne and May found, the same kids 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 administered — the kinds of cheating would change as well. - What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn't a fundamental trait, or what they called a “unified” trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation.
- The psychologist Walter Mischel 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.”
- 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, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.
- What this study is suggesting, in other words, 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.
- Weird as it sounds, if you add up the meaning of the Stanford prison experiment and the New York subway experiment, they suggest that it is possible to be a better person on a clean street or in a clean subway than in one littered with trash and graffiti.
- Anyone who has ever been to the movies knows that the size of the crowd in the theater has a big effect on how good the movie seems: comedies are never funnier and thrillers never more thrilling than in a packed movie house. Psychologists tell us much the same thing: that when people are asked to consider evidence or make decisions in a group, they come to very different conclusions than when they are asked the same questions by themselves.
- Is there a simple rule of thumb that distinguishes a group with real social social authority from a group with little power at all? As it turns out, there is. It's called the Rule of 150, and it is a fascinating example of the strange and unexpected ways in which context affects the course of social epidemics.
- This natural limit shows up again and again in simple tests. If I make you drink twenty glasses of iced tea, each with a different amount of sugar in it, and ask you 10 sort them into categories according to sweetness, you'll only be able to divide them into six or seven different categories before you begin to make mistakes. Or if I flash dots on a screen in front of you very quickly and ask you to count how many you see, you'd get the number right up to about seven dots, and then you'd need to guess. “There seems to be some limitation built into us either by learning or by the design of our nervous systems, a limit that keeps our channel capacities in this general range,” the psychologist George Miller concluded in his famous essay “The Magical Number Seven.” This is the reason that telephone numbers have seven digits. “Bell wanted a number to be as long as possible so they could have as large a capacity as possible, but not so long that people couldn't remember it,” says Jonathan Cohen, a memory researcher at Princeton University.
- 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.
- Gore is, in short, a very unusual company with a clear and well-articulated philosophy. It is a big established company attempting to behave like a small entrepreneurial start-up. By all accounts, that attempt has been wildly successful. Whenever business experts make lists of the best American companies to work for, or whenever consultants give speeches on the best-managed American companies, Gore is on the list. It has a rate of employee turnover that is about a third the industry average. It has been profitable for thirty-five consecutive years and has growth rates and an innovative, high-profit product line that is the envy of the industry. Gore has managed to create a small-company ethos so infectious and sticky that it has 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.
- Perhaps most important, though, we store information with other people. Couples do this automatically. A few years ago, for example, Wegner set up a memory test with 59 couples, all of whom had been dating for at least three months. Half of the couples 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, like “Midori is a Japanese melon liqueur.” 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 items 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 is best suited to remember what kinds of things. “Relationship development is often understood as a process of mutual self-disclosure,” he writes. “Although it is 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, Wegner argues, it is 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 a part of one's own mind.”
- In a family, this process of memory sharing is even more pronounced. Most of us remember, at one time, only a fraction of the day-to-day details and histories of our family life. But we know, implicitly, where to go to find the answers to our questions — whether it is up to our spouse to remember where we put our keys or our thirteen-year-old to find out how to work the computer or our mother to find out details of our childhood. Perhaps more important, when new information arises, we know who should have responsibility for storing it. This is how, in a family, expertise emerges. The thirteen-year-old is the family expert on the computer not just because he has the greatest aptitude for electronic equipment or because he uses computers the most, but also because when new information about the family computer arises, he is the one assigned, automatically, to remember it. Expertise leads to more expertise. Why bother remembering how to install software if your son, close at hand, can do it for you? Since mental energy is limited, we concentrate on what we do best.
- Airwalking is the name given to the skateboarding move in which the skater takes off from a ramp, slips his board out from under his feet, and then takes one or two long, exaggerated strides in the air before landing. It is a classic stunt, a staple of traditional skateboarding, which is why when two entrepreneurs decided in the mid-1980s to start manufacturing athletic shoes aimed at hard-core skateboarders, they called the company Airwalk. Airwalk was based outside San Diego and rooted in the teenage beach-and-skate culture of the region.
- The short answer is that Lambesis came up with an inspired advertising campaign. At the start, working with only a small budget, the creative director of Lambesis, Chad Farmer, came up with a series of dramatic images — single photographs showing the Airwalk user relating to his shoes in some weird way. In one, a young man is wearing an Airwalk shoe on his head, with the laces hanging down like braids, as his laces are being cut by a barber. In another, a leather-clad girl is holding up a shiny vinyl Airwalk shoe like a mirror and using it to apply lipstick. The ads were put on billboards and in “wild postings” on construction-site walls and in alternative magazines. As Airwalk grew, Lambesis went into television. In one of the early Airwalk commercials, the camera pans across a bedroom floor littered with discarded clothing. It then settles under the bed, as the air is filled with grunting and puffing and noise of the bedsprings going up and down. Finally the camera comes out from under the bed and we see a young, slightly dazed-looking youth, holding an Airwalk shoe in his hand, jumping up and down on his bed as he tries unsuccessfully to kill a spider on the ceiling. The ads were entirely visual, designed to appeal to youth all over the world. They were rich in detail and visually arresting.
- One of the researchers who rode with the needle vans was an epidemiologist by the name of Tom Junge. He would flag down the super-exchangers and interview them. His conclusion is that they represent a very distinct and special group. “They are all very well connected people,” Junge says. “They know Baltimore inside and out. They know where to go to get any kind of drug and any kind of needle. They have street savvy. I would say that they are unusually socially connected. They have a lot of contacts I would have to say the underlying motive is financial or economic. But there is definitely an interest in helping people out.”
- Gordon is a striking woman, with a languid wit, who lives in a right-angled, shag-rugged, white-stuccoed modernist masterpiece in the Hollywood Hills, midway between Madonna's old house and Aldous Huxley's old house. Her tastes are almost impossibly eclectic: depending on the day of the week, she might be obsessed with an obscure hip-hop band, or an old Peter Sellers movie, or a new Japanese electronic gadget, or a certain shade of white that she has suddenly, mysteriously, decided is very coot.
- To took through the inventory of Airwalk ads in that critical period, in fact, is to get a complete guide to the fads and infatuations and interests of the youth culture of the era: there are 30-second spoofs of kung fu movies, a TV spot on Beat poetry, an X-files-style commercial in which a young man driving into Roswell, New Mexico, has his Airwalks confiscated by aliens.
- Teenage smoking is one of the great, baffling phenomena of modern life. No one really knows how to fight it, or even, for that matter, what it is.
- 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 much more subtle than that. “When I'm waiting at a traffic light and the light is red, sometimes I wonder whether I should cross and jaywalk,” he says. "Then somebody else does it and so I do too. It's a kind of imitation. I'm getting permission to act from someone else who is engaging in a deviant act. Is that a conscious decision? I can't tell. Maybe afterwards I could brood on the difference. But at the time I don't know whether any of us knows how much of our decision is conscious and how much is unconscious.
- 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.
- "Smoking seemed to evoke a particular kind of childhood memory — vivid, precise, emotionally charged. One person remembers how she loved to open her grandmother's purse, where she would encounter “the soft smell of cheap Winstons and leather mixed with drug-store lipstick and cinnamon gum.” Another remembers “sitting in the back seat of a Chrysler sedan, smelling the wonderful mixture of sulfur and tobacco waft out the driver's window and into my nostrils.” Smoking, overwhelmingly, was associated with the same thing to nearly everyone: sophistication. This was true even of people who now hate smoking, who now think of it as a dirty and dangerous habit. The language of smoking, like the language of suicide, seems incredibly consistent. Here are two responses, both describing childhood memories: My mother smoked, and even though I hated it — hated the smell — she had these long tapered fingers and full, sort of crinkly lips, always with lipstick on, and when she smoked she looked so elegant and devil-may-care that there was no question that I'd smoke someday. She thought people who didn't smoke were kind of gutless."
- There is actually considerable support for this idea that there is a common personality to hard-core smokers.
- 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 is 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 teenagers that smoking isn't cool. But that's not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool.
- The questions of how sticky smoking ends up being to any single person, in other words, depends a great deal on his or her own particular initial reaction to nicotine.
- Of all the teenagers who experiment with cigarettes, only about a third ever go on to smoke regularly.
- Nicotine may be highly addictive, but it is 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.
- Teenage smoking is about being a teenager, about sharing in the emotional experience and expressive language and rituals of adolescence, which are as impenetrable and irrational to outsiders as the rituals of adolescent suicide in Micronesia. How, under the circumstances, can we expect any adult intervention to make an impact?
- Teens are always going to be fascinated by people like Maggie the au pair and Billy G. and Pam P., and they should be fascinated by people like that, if only to get past the adolescent fantasy that to be rebellious and truculent and irresponsible is a good way to spend your life. What we should be doing instead of fighting experimentation is making sure that experimentation doesn't have serious consequences.
- The stylist also enjoys a special relationship with her client. “Once you find someone who can manage your hair, you'll drive a hundred miles to see her. The stylist is your friend. She takes you through your high school graduation, your wedding, your first baby. It's a long-term relationship. Its a trusting relationship. You literally and figuratively let your hair down in a salon.”
- 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 are interested in starting a word-of-mouth epidemic, your resources ought to be solely concentrated on those three groups. No one else matters. Telling William Dawes that the British were coming did nothing for the colonists of New England. But telling Paul Revere ultimately meant the difference between defeat and victory. The creators of Blue's Clues developed a sophisticated, half-hour television show that children loved. But they realized that there was no way that children could remember and learn everything they needed to remember and learn from a single viewing. So they did what no one had ever done in television before. They ran the same show five times in a row. Sadler didn't try to reach every woman in San Diego all at once. She took what resources she had and put them all into one critical place — the beauty salon.
- 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.
- In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push — in just the right place — it can be tipped.
jul 8 2020 ∞
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jul 8 2020 +