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

Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics. 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.

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

“It’s a captive audience,” Sadler says. “These women may be at a salon for anywhere from two hours to eight 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 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. It’s a trusting relationship. You literally and figuratively let your hair down in a salon.”

—to follow Harris’s logic—that does not mean that parents who smoke around their children set an example that their kids follow. It simply means that smokers’ children have inherited genes from their parents that predispose them toward nicotine addiction. In

Smoking is no different. Whether a teenager picks up the habit depends on whether he or she has contact with one of those Salesmen who give teenagers “permission” to engage in deviant acts.

Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.

Mark Alpert, the University of Texas professor whom I described as the Ur Maven, is the kind of person who would come over to your house and show you how to install or fix or manipulate a very complicated piece of software. Tom Gau, the quintessential Salesman, takes the very arcane field of tax law and retirement planning and repackages it in terms that make emotional sense to his clients. Lois Weisberg, the Connector, belongs to many different worlds—politics, drama, environmentalism, music, law, medicine, and on and on—and one of the key things she does is to play the intermediary between different social worlds.

just as Rebecca Wells’s task would have been much harder if her readers came to her readings not in groups of six and seven but by themselves. And had Gore tried to put everyone in one big room, it wouldn’t have worked either.

“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.”

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.”

We have seen, in this book, how a number of relatively minor changes in our external environment can have a dramatic effect on how we behave and who we are. Clean up graffiti and all of a sudden people who would otherwise commit crimes suddenly don’t. Tell a seminarian that he has to hurry and all of a sudden he starts to ignore bystanders in obvious distress. The Rule of 150 suggests that the size of a group is another one of those subtle 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 be easily infected with the community ethos below the level of 150, somehow, suddenly—with just the smallest change in the size of the community—become divided and alienated. Once that line, that Tipping Point, is crossed, they begin to behave very differently.