The Tipping Point Notes
Genre📚
Nonfiction: Social Psychology
Summary🗒
How do trends start? What causes some behaviors/products/ideas to stick, while others fall into obscurity? Who or what plays the biggest role in news spreading through word of mouth? In The Tipping Point, Gladwell explores the single moment and factors that contribute to the spread of ideas. He analyzes everything from teen smoking, crime, Hush Puppies sneakers, and even Sesame Street.
Who is this for?🤷♂️🤷♀️
Anyone who is interested in mass communication
Fans of other Gladwell books
People who are interested in marketing or advertising
Top 3 Quotes💬
“Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.”
“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”
“There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstance, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”
Notes📝
Ideas spread like epidemics🦠
After the last few years, I think we’re all a little too familiar with the spread of viral epidemics: Somewhere in some country, an individual becomes infected with a contagion and becomes the first host. This person will usually go on with his regular life ill, infecting all his close friends, family, and coworkers. These newly infected go on to transmit the infection to everyone in the immediate community, spilling the virus from their homes onto the streets and stores. That is until a connector, someone who is only temporarily in that community, gets on a plane/car/boat and escorts the virus to another population. From there it's a hockey stick curve: the cases rise exponentially, as a disease that began with fewer than one infected, is now inside the bodies of millions.
This may come as a surprise, but ideas spread similarly. They, like viral epidemics, usually begin with only one infectant. But if enough people become contaminated, they can exponentially take over the world.
Gladwell describes three laws that govern the spread of these epidemics: The Law of The Few, The Stickiness Factor, and The Law of Context.
1. The Law of The Few🧍♂️🧍♀️🧍
This law is grounded on the idea that only a few people play the important role of causing ideas to spread or tip. Gladwell outlines them as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.
Connectors🔗
In the 1960s psychologist Stanley Milgram ran a sociology experiment testing a simple idea: On average, how many people do you have to go through to know anyone in the world? He mailed 200 randomly selected people from Nebraska a package containing the address of a stockbroker from Boston. Each participant was to send the package to anyone they knew could get the package closer to the stockbroker. The results were fascinating.
“Milgram found that most of the letters reached the stockbroker in 5 or 6 steps. This experiment is where we get the concept of six degrees of separation.”
And remember this was before the internet in the 60s.
But what is perhaps more interesting in this theory, is the actual pattern that most of the participants' letters followed. When you hear “six degrees of separation” you may simply assume that every degree is created equal; that the pattern of you knowing someone that knows someone that knows someone that knows someone, probably looks like a line. But what Gladwell signifies, is that the shape of our relationships is more like a web. Many of us exist in our tiny groups of friends and acquaintances occupying similar physical spaces, but there are a few special people who link the small groups we live in.
“When Milgram analyzed his experiment…he found that many of the chains from Omah to Sharon followed the same asymmetrical pattern. Twenty-four letters reached the stockbroker at his home in Sharon, and of those sixteen were given to him by the same person…In all, half of the responses given to the stockbroker were delivered by the same three people.”
These last three people who gave the stockbroker his letters play an important role in the tipping point of ideas, serving as a link between different worlds. They are Connectors, people who just “know” everyone.
So who are Connectors?
Try and think of a list of your twenty closest friends. Now I want you to think about who was ultimately responsible for you meeting each one of them. I'll try. I met my best friend Alex in the seventh grade because he sat next to me in math class. So in that case, I'm responsible for Alex. Easy. I then met my friend Santi in the Cross Country team during middle school. After meeting Santi, I met his friend Augusto. Augusto led me into a friend group, but among those people was one of my closest friends, Emiliano. Through Emiliano, I eventually met Brady, our track teammate. My friend Brady presented to me his friend Danny from calculus. Danny invited on a trip to Austin where I met his brother Diego. And then Diego took me out to eat with his roommate Sebastian, who studies at UT. Santi is responsible for Augusto, Emiliano, Brady, Danny, Diego, and Sebastian.
The main idea is that when you put your friend “groups” under a microscope, they look more like a pyramid. It's seemingly the 1-3 key people we meet in our lives who are responsible for an overwhelming majority of our friendships. When I met Santi I wasn’t so much becoming friends with him as much as I was joining some sort of club. My friends are his friends.
“Sprinkled among every walk of life, in other words, are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack at making friends and acquaintances. They are Connectors.”
Everyone knows someone like this. Connectors make themselves obvious to spot because they love meeting others. They're the type of people who are fascinated by everyone; the kind of person who would talk to you when you sit next to them on the bus before it leaves, and by the time you're leaving the stop, they have you laughing. By the time you arrive, they have your phone number and all your socials.
“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, [Connectors] like them all.”
Connectors play the major role of spreading ideas in word of mouth epidemics. They are the “Paul Reveres”, “Dale Carnegies” and “Elon Musks” of the world, serving as the very few who are able to spread an “infection” to the most people. But more importantly, they also move around. Once they are infected, they contaminate a variety of people from the diverse friend groups they belong to. While I can name all the people in my friend group that Santi knows, there are just as many in other friend groups he’s close with that I don’t know. Connectors have a diverse variety of friends.
They are the glue that connect the string of worlds we belong to in this huge web that is human relationships.
Mavens📚
So if Connectors play the major role of spreading ideas in word of mouth epidemics, who is responsible for finding new ideas?
This is where Mavens come in.
They play the role of patient zero in a word of mouth epidemic; discovering new thoughts, and then infecting the few people in their immediate circle. Eventually, if through the chain of infections the message finds its way to a Connector, the outbreak becomes inescapable.
Mavens are all around us. They are people who are captivated by a particular thing and observe it in all its fine detail. When they notice something is new or off, a price change on their cereal brand or a slight drop in quality from the new iPhone, they tell all their friends about it. One of my close friends, Jacob, is a total car Maven. He’s fascinated by the market and informs everyone he knows about the newest developments. Anytime I need information about cars, I go to him. He’s not arrogant or pretentious about his knowledge, he just loves talking about cars and helping his friends. Look into your life, there are most likely a handful of people you know who behave like this. Perhaps even yourself.
“There is something about the personal, disinterested, expert opinion of a Maven that makes us all sit up and listen…why are the Ziggurat restaurant guides so popular? Perhaps it is because they are convenient guides to all the restaurants in a given town. But their real power derives from the fact that their reviews are the reports of volunteers. Of diners who want to share their opinions with others.“
Mavens are the little boy who told Paul Revere he overheard a conversation from the British soldiers about attacking Lexington. They’re the few people in an enormous city who search every street and alleyway to find the newest restaurants and then inform their friends of any new discoveries. The type of individuals who use the phone number on the back of an “ivory soap bottle” to ask about health effects.
They are consumed by something; and while the rest of us take our cars, coffee, computers, books, shoes, or soap for granted, rarely noticing new developments or setbacks, mavens see all of it.
“What sets mavens apart though, is not so much what they know, but how they pass it along…A connector may tell 10 friends where to stay in Los Angeles, and half of them may take his advice. A maven may tell 5 people about the hotel, but make the case so emphatically, that all of them would take his advice. These are different personalities at work acting for different reasons.”
Mavens have the knowledge and skills to start word of mouth epidemics.
Salesmen🤑
“In a social epidemic mavens are databanks, they provide the message. Connectors are social glue, they spread it. But there is also a select group of people, Salesmen, with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced with what we are hearing.”
This last group of people plays the role of getting others on board with an idea. They are incredibly persuasive. These “Salesmen'' have lots of charisma and are able to seduce us towards a spreading idea.
They are the few rebels who convinced the Lexington crowd to form a militia against the British. The Tucker Carlson or Jimmy Kimmel personalities on the news who sway viewers into one extreme or another. Or even some of your closest friends who nudge you towards a particular opinion or idea. The science behind their influence is fascinating.
So what actually makes someone a Salesman?
Gladwell cites this phenomenon called “interactional synchrony”, the idea that our conversations take place in three fields of communication:
The literal words said
The tone with which they are delivered
Perhaps the most groundbreaking, are the small micromovements we make when we talk
When two people talk, they create these tiny movements in their bodies matching the flow of the conversation. These are the gestures you make with your hands when you are explaining something or simply nodding along to someone else talking. The folding of your arms or crossing of the legs during conversation. It's a sort of dance we take part in; rhythmically matching each other’s micromovements in communication. Speakers “dance” to the rhythm of their own words, while the listeners “dance” along to the speaker's harmony with their own micromovements. Take notice of this next time you sit down to talk with someone, it's pretty funny how synchronized we all are. It's a part of our groupish biology.
The book conveys that those who are most leading in these microvements when they talk to someone have persuasion.
“Skilled Musicians know this, and good speakers…they know when the crowds are with them, literally in synchrony with them, in movements and nods and stillness in moments of attention.”
Essentially, persuasive people are those who can take the lead in this “dance”. They have the extraordinary ability to almost seduce listeners into their movements instantaneously; rhythmically grabbing our attention from the second we arrive at the conversation. Two people could say the exact same words with the exact same tone, but whoever is able to master the micromovements has persuasion.
Salesmen can also seduce us with emotions.
“Mimicry“ is also one of the means we infect each other with our emotions. In other words, if I smile and you see me and smile in response…It's not just you imitating or empathizing with me, it may also be a way I can pass on my happiness to you.”
If you think about it, this is quite a radical idea. Most of us consider our face as a way of displaying what is going on inside. If we frown it means we are unhappy, and if we raise the corners of our mouths, it shows our contentment. But what emotional contagiousness suggests is that the reverse can also happen. That when we are in a room with someone excited, it can lift our spirits. Likewise, if we are exposed to irritated people they can put us in a bad mood. These are the mirror neurons acting on our brain, firing whenever we see emotion. We are susceptible to other people’s feelings.
“When 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.”
If I gave you great news but delivered it with the corners of my mouth folding down, it's hard to imagine you feeling great about whatever I tell you. This is where empathy comes from, and persuaders take advantage of this.
It's essentially those who are able to create micromovement harmony in their conversation, and easily convey their emotions who are the most persuasive. They are Salesmen, pushing the rest of us towards any particular idea spreading in a word of mouth epidemic.
2. The stickiness factor💡
“We tend to spend a lot of time figuring out how to make messages more contagious…But the hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn’t go in one ear and out the other.”
The second Law of Epidemics is related to how ideas are memorable. Any message can come from a maven and find its way to a connector spreading rapidly through a population. But, if the actual idea is not sticky (memorable) then this epidemic is no better than the common cold, infecting hundreds of people but only for a short time until it’s forgotten.
I could tell all my friends about the brand new Chinese restaurant that opened down the street, singing its praises to everyone. And even if this message found its way to Santi and spread through my school population. If the restaurant isn’t actually good or memorable, the message is dead in the water. It needs to be sticky and remain in people's minds.
Sesame Street is a good example of something that's inherently sticky. The show was initially targeted at kids, known for having low attention spans, and the premise was to “infect” them with literacy through television. But to do this it had to be very memorable.
“It is a mistake to think of Sesame Street as a project conceived in a flash of insight. What made the show unusual in fact, was the extent to which it was exactly the opposite of that…the final product was deliberately and painstakingly engineered.”
The creators of the show had psychologists analyzing kids as they watched different scenes to learn what was memorable; slowly learning things like music being an excellent tool for memory as it dealt with patterns, and also using participation was a huge way to make a message last longer in the child’s head. They eventually learned what scenes stuck and what didn’t; the television show went on to accomplish what was first seen as an impossible task of infecting children with education through telivision.
“[The creators] intuitively grasped what it took to get through to children. They were television’s answer to Beatrix Potter, or L. Frank Baum or Doctor Suess.”
Every type of movie/show/product has its own version of Sesame Street; a product or idea that is so memorable it breaks through to the mainstream.
My best examples are Christopher Nolan movies. They rarely need a trailer to sell out theaters every few years and it's evident why: The films are the closest thing to cinematic hypnotism. If I walk into a room and Interstellar or The Dark Knight is playing, I have almost no choice but to glue my eyes to the tv, staring in wonder; the score of Hans Zimmer playing, the drama and acting of Mcaughnahey or Bale, accompanied by an extremely compelling narrative. A meteorite could be hitting the ground a mile away outside my window, and all I could worry about was how Cooper was going to make it home or if Batman was going to climb out of the pit. Nolan movies are sticky. They are memorable, and that allows us to tell our friends about them. From there, it's all about the message getting to the few right people and the word of mouth epidemic comenses.
So what makes any particular movie/restaurant/product sticky?
The real answer is: no one really knows. That’s the question marketing firms and companies spend millions of dollars a year answering. Perhaps, stickiness comes from taking an idea and presenting it in a slightly different way: it comes from teaching kids the alphabet, but with puppet animals and music. Maybe, telling the story of Dunkirk, except with tension so high that none of the characters share a line of dialogue for the first hour. My favorite book, Sapiens, is a New York Times best seller; yet many historians often argue the novel offers “nothing new to the field”. I would say what makes Sapiens unique isn’t the content or ideas; it's the way Harari delivers the information with clear writing and captivating stories, rather than as one of the dry anthropology textbooks he pulled from.
“There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstance, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”
3. Law of context🏙
This final law exemplifies that the environment under which an epidemic spreads is also important. Gladwell explains behavior, like movies/restaurants/things, can also be virally transmitted; pointing out how human actions are most influenced by environment, not psychology.
The Little details matter🔍
“In Baltimore syphilis spreads much more in the summer than in the winter. Hush puppies took off because they were being worn by kids in the cutting edge precincts of the west village, an environment that helped others look at the shoes in a new light. It could even be argued that the success of paul revere’s ride, in some way, owed itself to the tract that it was made at night. At night people are home in bed, which makes it a whole lot easier to reach than if they were working in the fields.”
Gladwell’s main argument about context is this idea, the Broken Windows Theory, which describes how small details in our environment can cause large changes in our behavior. Conjured up by criminologists decades ago, the theory uses the radical example of crime; saying that if windows in a town are left broken/vandalism is rampant/jaywalking is allowed, then slowly the sense of lawlessness will spread to the greater community. Crime and violence will skyrocket like infections because of the lawless environment.
The book uses the NYPD in the 80s as its key example: During the peak of a crime epidemic in the 80s, Police chief William Bratton focused on solving the little problems in New York to fix the big ones.
“Under [the police chief] Brattan…Arrests for misdemeanors, for the kind of minor offense 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.”
Rather than putting resources into preventing murder and violence, they began to focus squarely on vandalism, fair beating, public urination, and jaywalking. Miraculously, it worked.
“When crime began to fall in the city as quickly and dramatically as it had in the subways, Bratton and Julianne pointed to the same cause: minor seemingly insignificant quality of life crimes are tipping points for violent crimes.”
It sounds fanatical that something like violence can be attributed to these smaller crime waves, but the high murder rates appeared to be caused by this very thing. Once that was cleared up, the violent crime epidemic in New York seemingly stopped.
And if something like crime can follow the laws of infection, then there is almost no limit to a behavior that can also spread like the flu. With small or big changes in a situation, behavioral epidemics can be so impactful that they can also alter us on a deeper level.
In the section about Salesmen, I established that emotions and ideas can be transmitted through people. Now if we think of an environment as a place where we are essentially surrounded by “Salesmen'', people nudging us to act or think a certain way, then it's quite easy to see how certain contexts can have a strong influence on our behavior.
Have you ever heard of the home field advantage in sports? This phenomenon is a perfect example.
I blatantly saw this today as my soccer team, Liverpool, literally transformed into a whole new side playing on home ground; moving with more intensity and pressure than any other team in the Premier League. After some recent lackluster performances, the reds seemingly became infected by the crowd of Anfield using it as energy and momentum to fight. If you looked closely you could maybe even see steam blowing from the field; It was that kind of performance.
At A&M we call the student body at football games the 12th man. In the NBA playoffs, statistically, the team playing at home wins almost 70% of the time. Even cup finals for most sports are held in a neutral ground, so one team doesn’t hold an advantage.
My point is environment matters; Like crime, the situation of the stadium you play in can change you, it; making the best team in the league lose to the worst or vice versa.
“It isn’t just serious criminal behavior in the end, that is sensitive to environmental cues; It is all behavior.”
Fundamental attribution error🏃♂️
So if you think about it, this idea of behavioral epidemics actually raises a lot of questions about what character is.
I think most of us see personality or behavior as something innate; my friend Ali is a fast runner, my roommate Brady is smart, or my sister Maria is a leader. We think in absolute terms. But what The Law of Context and Broken Windows theory suggest is that our behavior and beliefs about the world are very much reliant on our immediate environment. That there are certain environments where any of us could be great runners and weak ones, deceitful and lawful, or intelligent and ignorant.
“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.”
It is the difference of the stadium that had Liverpool win today. Sometimes it is the difference of being in a quiet room versus a noisy room which lets test takers excel. And even vandalism or jaywalking can be the difference between a crime plagued city and an ordinary one. These seemingly small changes in context can serve as the tipping points to our behavior and character and beliefs about the world.
“When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we are trying to change our audience in some small, yet critical respect. We’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic…that can be done through the influence of certain types of people. People with 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 it sticks in someone’s mind and compels them to action. That is the stickiness factor…but we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics.”
Closing Notes🗒
Wow this book is crazy good. It's a true “peak behind the curtain” on human communication and influence.
In a way, I can sort of apply this to how human culture has progressed over centuries. On top of smaller epidemics, grander ideas such as agriculture, religion, genocide, exploration, colonization and digitalization came about from mavens. They spread through connectors and were sticky enough to take over entire cultures and subcultures of humans. But, there was also a third factor, the context of the environment, which catapulted these trends.
The European nations’ colonization of the Americas was an epidemic which spread like wildfire from state to state. But, if specific details in the context of their world like naval technology and gunpowder had not advanced tenfold in the centuries beforehand, it's hard to say if this turning point in history would have ever happened. Or if perhaps a few key Mavens such as Jobs, Gates, or Bezos were missing in the last few decades, it's tough to see where technology would be today. You could even argue education could have the most persuasive teachers in the best environment, but without the advancement in research of the last century on how to make learning sticky and memorable; it's difficult to guess where modern day literacy and bilingualism would be.
Every factor along these epidemics (The Law of The Few, The Stickiness Factor, The Law of Context) contributed an equal and largely substantial part in tipping each of them.
I don’t know if these are just thoughts, but I feel this book can be applied to anything. It's stunning, and I think I'll do a ranking for all of Gladwell’s novels now that I've finished his collection. But hey, if you made it all the way down here I really appreciate you reading this mini constitution I wrote up. I know it's a lot.
