October 4, 2010
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The Tipping Point
This is another good one. A keeper. Good read. Makes you feel like you are “in” and going to find out some sort of secret that just might change your life. Just might.
“The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
Three things that create the tipping point to making something BIG happen (like epidemics):
1. Law of the few
2. Stickiness factor
3. Power of context
80/20 principle: In any situation, roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants. For example: 80 % of crime is done by 20 % of the population. 80 % of beer is drunk by 20% of the drinkers. He relates it to a couple of very charismatic people who had HIV that then infected many others. HIV actually hit earlier in the 50s, but the virus was able to be overcome by the victims. (That would be “law of the few) The reason why it stuck in the 80s is because the virus itself changed into something people could not shake off. (That would be the stickiness factor). He brought up the study of the woman who was killed with 38 people watching, and no one called the police. It turns out, everyone thought someone else would. She would have had more chance of survival is she had been attacked on a lonely street with just one witness. (That would be the power of context).
A. Law of the few: The “few” people you need are Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. (The messengers, the exceptional people who are capable of starting epidemics)
Connectors: “Six degrees of separation.” This guy mailed a bunch of random people a letter and asked them to send it to someone they knew who could get it closer to a specific person. It turned out that those random people were able to send it to someone, who sent it to someone else…normally in less than six steps. This is the theory that we are all connected to each other by just six degrees of separation. If you think about the people you know, and how you know them, you will probably find that there are a couple key people who connected you with most everyone else–these people are called connectors. They just have a way of meeting and knowing and remembering people. Making connections.
Mavens: “maven” comes from Yiddish, meaning one who accumulates knowledge. These are the people who know, and who help others come into the “know.”When one of these people suggests a restaurant, you go, because you know it is good. When you need to know what computer to buy, you ask them, because they know. Connectors connect people, Mavens connect information.
Salesmen: the persuader: energy, enthusiasm, charm, likability. And something more. Very positive. “We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. I feel happy, so i smile. 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. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in. This is how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. These people are called “senders.”
B. Stickiness factor: (There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irrestistible.)
This is about what makes it stick. And making the little changes needed to make it stick if it doesn’t at first. The products (they discuss many, from Sesame Street to Airwalk) that are willing to find the right messengers (the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen) and fiddle around with things until they work–get big results.
C. Power of Context:
New York City was able to lower crime rate by the “Broken Window” theory. The theory goes that if a window is broken and no one fixes it, no one cares and more windows will be broken. So they fixed the “broken windows” (mostly graffiti and regulation of Subway tokens) and crime went down DRAMATICALLY. Environment affects us more than we think. A child in a good home bad neighborhood is much more at risk than a child in a poor home good neighborhood. The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) says that we make mistakes of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. It isn’t that good people will always do good things and bad will always do bad. It is that it depends on what all is going on around the situation. At a seminary, they did a “Good Samaritan” test, where they put a beat up/sick person in the way of a seminary student. They interviewed all the students before, asking them why they were training for ministry and such, some they even had asked to do a speech about the “good Samaritan.” Then, with some they told them “Please hurry to make your speech, you are late” and some they told “They will be ready in a few minutes, but let’s get over there.” No matter what reason they were in seminary, no matter what the meeting was for…those who were told they were late–only 10% stopped to help the hurt/sick person. 90% kept rushing–even to stepping OVER the person. Of the ones told they had some time: 63% stopped to help them. Point? The context (Rush rush rush) affected the actions of the people.
John Wesley–why did Methodism spread so fast? He wasn’t just a connector, connected to many people–he was connected to many GROUPS, which made the difference. Those groups them could grow and become something on their own. In groups, there is the Rule of 150. It seems that after 150, you can’t really sustain the relationships. Many communes and businesses have found this to be true. Once they get to 150, they break off and start a new one. At work, after 150 each person doesn’t feel their own role: “This is what you get when you have small teams, where everyone knows everyone. Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss. People want to live up to what is expected of them.”
So it turns out that when we are with other people, it helps us remember things. “Relationship development is often understood as a process of mutual self-disclosure, 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 transitive memory. Transitive memory is part of what intimacy means.” So when you are with your family, something happens, you have that many more heads to remember it and fix it…”Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems…they were once able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding and could count on the access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and this too, is gone. The loss of transitive memory feels like losing a part of one’s own mind.” No wonder you feel like you are going crazy when a loved one dies.
Whenever you start an epidemic, you have the Innovators (adventurous ones “These are outcasts in some way. The at least feel that way, like they were different. People with more passion. Set apart from everyone else, who doesn’t look like their peers.”) who then are picked up by the Early Adopters (they tweak it to make it accessible, sticky–these are the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen “They make it palatable for mainstream people. They see what the really wired people are doing and tweak it” They translate it for the rest of us). Then you have the Early Majority and Late Majority of people who pick up on it (some quicker than others). Then lastly, you have the Laggards (traditional, who see no reason to change), and this is the bell curve of the tipping point.
So he relates it to smoking. Turns out, in interviews, those who started smoking almost always did because they viewed it as something “cool.” Not due to the cigarette, but the smoker. There is actually a “smoker personality.” “The quintessential hardcore smoker, according to Eysenck, is an extrovert, sociable, likes parties, has many friends, craves excitement, takes chances, impulsive, more aggressive, not reliable, a greater sex drive, and much higher on the “anti-social” index: more deliquent, ore rebellious, more drinkers, more truthful…” So most people don’t smoke because the act is cool, but those who do it are. They are the “Few” driving the tipping point for teen smoking. There is a lot more about that in the book, but it goes into then how we need to make cigarettes less “sticky” and how it seems there are some people who smoke, but don’t get addicted–called “chippers” They smoke no more than five a day, but at least four times a week. More like social drinkers.” For some, nicotine works as a drug to help stop depression. So when those people tried to quit, they got depressed. They are working on a depression drug to help with that, and found that many more smokers were able to quit with it (Zyban).
It turns out that the biggest predictor of how a kid will turn out it, that shapes their character and personality–is their peer group. The author’s suggestion wasn’t to stop kids from experimenting smoking (or other things), but rather to make sure that experimentation was safe and didn’t lead to addiction. The “few” will always be there, but help it not be sticky, help the context to not be favorable, and chances are, it won’t be a tipping point for them.
There was a lot more. I am doing the book justice. I am also late for class, so that is all you get.
