Dr. John Young                                                                                                                3/11/07

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

Tipping Points

In December, I gave a sermon on Malcolm Gladwell’s second book, Blink on first impressions and unconsciousness-rapid cognition. Today, I would like to talk with you about Malcolm Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point. Malcolm Gladwell was born in 1963; so, he is 43 years old. He was born in the United Kingdom, but he grew up in Elmira, Ontario, Canada. His English father is a Civil Engineering Professor at the University of Waterloo, and his mother is a Jamaican-born psychotherapist. Gladwell received his university training in history at the University of Toronto, and graduated in 1984. From 1987 until 1996, he was a science writer and later the New York bureau chief, for the Washington Post. The Tipping Point was published in 2000. It was number #1 on the New York Times BSL, and is still a best seller. The Tipping Point has had incredible influence on current thinking, including, advertising campaigns, and academic research, corporate decisions and government policies throughout the world. He turned ‘tipping point’ from a colloquialism into a much discussed set of concepts, a working part of our language. His second book Blink: the Power of Thinking without Thinking was published in 2005, and it became #1 on the NYTimes BSL, and it is still a best seller. In 2005, Time Magazine named Malcolm Gladwell one of its 100 most influential people.

            Gladwell explains that his Tipping Point book is the biography of an idea. That the “best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, crime waves, unknown books into bestsellers, word-of-mouth phenomena, and the mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to understand of them as epidemics. Ideas, products, message and behaviors spread like viruses do.” [7] What are primary characteristics of an epidemic: 1. a large number of people get infected in a short period of time; an epidemic is contagious, 2. little changes have big effects, and 3. those affected are changed in a hurry. Yawning is contagious, as is suburban flight. Research has demonstrated that when the percentage of professional people in a neighborhood drops below 5%, then school drop-out rates more double. [13]

Tipping points are these moments of critical mass, these transforming thresholds, these boiling points in social epidemics that take on epidemic proportions and characteristics. His book concentrates on three central facts that cause social epidemics: 1. certain people are much more important in transmitting the infectious agents, 2. certain messages or forms of communication are much more important than others because they are sticky; they stick and cause the social epidemic to happen and take over into popularity, and 3. the particular environment is important, the context counts. [18] So, Gladwell is arguing that certain people are important in causing social epidemics. They are important because their messages stick while others do not, and certain contexts make all the difference.

He calls his important people in social epidemics, the law of the few, and he names three types of people that are important: connectors, mavens, and salespeople. We all have heard of Paul Revere and his famous ride from Boston that is credited with beginning the American Revolutionary War. But did you know that another prominent Bostonian, William Dawes, rode out a different direction, also trying to spread the news that ‘the British were coming,’ and almost no one paid any attention. Paul Revere was a classic connector. He knew lots of people, and he understood who he needed to tell to be most effective in spreading the news. Dawes news did not stick; Revere’s started a revolution.

Remember Stanley Milgram’s famous research in the 1960s that popularized the term 6 degrees of separation? He asked 160 people in Omaha, Nebraska, to get a letter to a particular stockbroker in Sharon,Massachusetts, by handing the letter to someone they knew who was closer to Sharon, Massachusetts than they were. It took most people 6 steps to get the letter to the stockbroker in Sharon, Massachusetts. But perhaps the most interesting thing about the research was what was not initially emphasized. It turned out that these 160 unrelated people in Omaha, ended up using at some point on the way to the stockbroker in Sharon, Massachusetts, 3 of the same people. A particular clothing merchant in Omaha received almost half of the letters. He was a connector.

When you give people a list of 250 surnames, the average college student knew people with 21 of the names, Princeton Professors, an average of 39. But the range for both groups was tremendous, from 2 to 90 among the students, and 4 to over 100 among the professors. A connector collects people the way some one else collects stamps. Gladwell met the father of a friend who was a super-connector. He kept records; he sent birthday cards. But they were not his friends; they were his acquaintances. He had long lists of weak ties. For instance, the best connected actor was Rod Steiger, because he had a long, varied career, did all different kinds of movies and remembered everybody. The best connectors, not only know lots of people, but they have a nose for knowing the important people, particularly for making connections with the other connectors. Most of us rely on the connectors in our lives to keep us connected with the other people.

There are also people we depend upon to keep us connected with new information. These information specialists are Mavens. Mavens are not only obsessed with getting information, but they have a strong need to tell other people about it once they have discovered it. They not only need to know, they need to share; they like to tell everybody. A Maven’s motivation is to educate and help, not usually to persuade. In their particular contexts, Mavens are charismatic. They can infect other people with their emotions.

The Salespeople [Gladwell used Salesman] are good at persuading people to act and to buy or accept. Non-verbal cues are often more important than verbal cues. Nodding for instance is persuasive. If somebody nods, you tend to agree with her more. Mimicry is human nature, and we do not always realize even that we have been persuaded. During the campaign when President Reagan was first elected, they studied the three TV network anchor men; Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings. Jennings was verbally more objective than the others, but his gestures, tones, etc. were clearly pro-Republican, and the viewers that watched him regularly tended more strongly to vote Republican.

When Gladwell turns to explaining stickiness, he focused on two public television children’s programs: Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. Sesame Street was popularized significantly by getting parents to watch it, at least at first, along with their pre-school children. I did that with my children. The combination of live people with issues that parents are think are important and puppets and Big Bird which pre-school children think is interesting and relevant, got several generation’s attention. They used repetition of numbers and letters and ideas, and helped millions of children. Sesame Street was sticky. Blue’s Clues, which is past my parental viewing period, was much simpler, a dog, 3 clues, leading to a solution, and they repeated the same episode all week, but it also proved very sticky. Regular pre-school Blue’s Clues watchers were, after six months, twice as effective in problem-solving and flexible thinking as their control groups. Sesame Street had sold excellent public children’s TV, and Blue’s Clues could just proceed to do things that actually worked with pre-schoolers.  In the American market place, where people are exposed to more than 300 commercial messages a day, which 50% more than in 1970, we need to know how we can communicate something that is worth communicating.

Let’s move on to the power of context. When Princeton Seminarians heard a lecture on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and then were asked to walk across campus to give a talk, there was a person on their way posing as clearly needing and deserving emergency help. If the students had been told they were late as they left for their presentation, very few stopped to help the person in need even though they were seminarians and just heard about the Good Samaritan. If they were not told they were late, they were much more likely to stop and help. Context matters.

When they were having problems in the New York City sub-ways, and I remember those days from my 14 years in New Jersey, they found that by cleaning up the graffiti and catching the token dodgers, little actions, they could make a big difference, in crime, cleanliness, etc. It turns out that birth order of children makes a big difference within a family, but not much difference outside of the family. A Stanford University researcher set up a mock prison: the temporary guards became quickly sadistic, and the prisoners became quickly paranoiac and anti-social. When Rebecca Wells, author of the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, she had 7 people at her first reading near her hometown. Then groups of women started coming together and bringing others, after year and a half, she had sold 2.5 million copies, and she had 800 people at her readings. Groups play a big role in social epidemics.

Certain things have been discovered: small, close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic potential of a method or idea. Most of us can only handle so much information at once: 7 choices are often plenty, 7 numbers to remember are just about capacity; that’s why phones are usually 7. It turns out once a group has more than 150, whether it is a congregation, social group, or corporation, the dynamics change. 150 exploits the bonds of memory and peer pressure, beyond that you need to begin to develop more formal measures to help the system work. The corporation that makes Gore-tex and Glide dental floss and other more industrial applications, just breaks their factories etc. apart once they reach 150, even just across a big parking lot.

Starting social epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas. If you want to change African-Americans’ awareness of AIDS, the place to do it was beauty shops: women talking freely, captive audience, enough time to process, a relationship of trust. It also requires different ways of communicating. You concentrate on the connectors, the mavens, and the salespeople. People like to think that they are autonomous and inner-directed, as if we act in ways that are permanently set by our genes and temperament, but most of us are quite suggestible. Social change is often volatile and seemingly inexplicable. So, let’s find the tipping points. Band-Aid solutions are pretty good solutions: solve a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.  [256] Our world is getting so complicated that we become increasingly immune: to advertising, to surveys and tele-marketing, and now to e-mail. In a complicated age, we are turning back to word-of-mouth: to our connectors, mavens, and salespeople.