How do you create a trend, or a social movement, or a product that people can’t get enough of? What you are trying to ignite is a social epidemic, when an idea, message, or product spreads through the public masses like wildfire and creates a craze.
Take a cue from medical epidemics: When a virus spreads, it starts with one person — Patient Zero — who gets sick and infects a handful of others. Then each infected person passes the germs to more people, and with exponential speed and reach the virus spreads until it reaches epidemic proportions. Ideas, messages, behaviors, and products can spread through a population in a social epidemic in the same way that viruses spread.
Epidemics have a few common characteristics.
This book focuses on how to push ideas or products to a tipping point in order to create a social epidemic. There are three factors that can be adjusted to tip an idea to a social epidemic: the messenger, the message itself, or the context of the message. You can turn your ordinary idea into an epidemic by altering one or more of these aspects.
When you’re trying to spread a message, idea, or product to epidemic proportions, you need people to help preach your message and spread the word to the masses. The Law of the Few proposes that there are certain, special types of people who are much more effective at broadcasting your idea and getting people to listen and follow suit. These special people are exceptional either in their social connections, knowledge, or persuasiveness and fall into three personality types: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. (In the full summary, we’ll look at how these critical personality traits contributed to the success of Paul Revere’s midnight ride.)
Connectors are people who seem to know everyone. You can find Connectors in every walk of life; they are sociable, gregarious, and are naturally skilled at making — and keeping in contact with — friends and acquaintances.
Connectors tend to be connected to many communities — whether through interests and hobbies, jobs that cause them to work with people in other fields, or other experiences. Their strength is in occupying many different worlds, and bringing them together.
However, Connectors are not close with all their connections. In fact, Connectors’ power is in having lots of acquaintances, or “weak ties.” Your acquaintances typically have different social circles and communities — exposing them to different people and information — than you, whereas your friends’ knowledge and social ties tend to largely overlap with your own. Thus, your friends can help spread a message in the same communities you occupy, but weak ties can help spread that message beyond your reach because they belong to different worlds than you do.
For this reason, weak ties are more valuable than close friends in creating a wider reach for spreading epidemics, and Connectors are the hubs at the center of all those worlds.
While Connectors are people specialists who know many people and can spread information widely, Mavens are information specialists; they are endlessly curious and adept at gathering and retaining information on a wide variety of (sometimes obscure) topics.
A Maven’s influence is in the power of her recommendation. People know that Mavens are knowledgeable and trustworthy sources of information, so a Maven’s word carries a lot of weight. If a Maven suggests you check out a budding epidemic, you’re inclined to listen.
Mavens also love to share their knowledge with other people, and are socially motivated to help people with the information they’ve gathered: A Maven is the kind of person who not only clips coupons and knows when a store is having a sale, but also shares coupons with her friends.
Mavens’ genuine helpfulness inspires more trust and credibility — people know Mavens have no agenda or ulterior motive — so when they give recommendations people tend to take them more seriously. In a social epidemic, they serve as data banks — they carry the message, with authoritativeness.
Salesmen are the people who pitch the idea or message behind an epidemic and persuade people to jump on board. They do not merely store and share information; Salesmen want to convince you to follow their advice.
Salesmen have the right words plus an inherent energy, enthusiasm, charm, and likability that makes people want to listen to them. Plus, Salesmen instinctively know how to use nonverbal cues to reinforce their power of persuasion.
Nonverbal communication — including facial expressions, tone of voice, eye contact, and body language — have a powerful impact on us, even when they are so subtle that we don’t notice them. People naturally fall into a conversational rhythm when they talk, subconsciously matching speech cadence, tone, and volume. The better your conversational harmony with someone, the more connected you feel to them.
Salesmen are masters at not only matching conversational rhythms, but drawing people into their own rhythms and setting the tone for the interaction. This natural ability makes Salesmen particularly skillful at influencing people’s emotions and thus persuading them to join a movement.
As Gladwell illustrates with his varied examples, social epidemics take many forms — from fashion crazes to rumors to crime waves — and each calls for a unique combination and application of the three principles he discusses. Not every principle will be applicable to a given epidemic, and similarly, not every messenger will be effective. The key is to understand how these strategies can be employed so that you can determine what’s most effective in your situation.
(Shortform note: Overall, the book doesn’t offer much — if any — general tips for applying of these strategies, presumably because each situation is so unique. Instead, Gladwell focuses on driving home understanding of the principles based on research, his explanations, and case studies.)
The Law of the Few declares that the right messengers can tip and spread an epidemic. However, your messengers can only succeed when the message is one that will catch on — in other words, it must be “sticky,” meaning that it must be memorable enough to inspire action or change. If you don’t remember the message, what are the chances you will change your behavior or buy the product?
If an idea or product isn’t catching on, don’t assume that it’s inherently unsticky. Generally, it’s just the presentation of the message that must be tweaked to make it sticky.
This doesn’t mean you have to make the message loud or in-your-face to make it sticky; in fact, small, subtle changes are often the key to stickiness. In one example, a researcher distributed pamphlets trying to influence Yale students to get free tetanus shots at the campus health center. Details and photos emphasizing the danger of the disease had virtually no impact, but adding a campus map, circling the health center, and adding the hours the shots were available produced results. Adding information that was more practical and personal made the message sticky.
You have to know your audience to determine how to make information sticky for them; it may require tapping into their interests or subconscious motivation. The forces that inspire people to act are not always intuitive, so sometimes market or scientific research can be useful in developing sticky strategies.
In the full summary, we’ll take a look at how the creators of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues made small but critical changes to make their educational content stickier. They used research to develop strategies, including putting Muppets and human characters together in the same scenes — inspiring the creation of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch — and airing the same episode five days in a row before debuting the next one.
The third principle has to do with the conditions that lend themselves to an epidemic catching on. The Power of Context capitalizes on the fact that human behavior is greatly affected by the context of our environments, and that altering the physical environment or social context in which people receive your message can make them more receptive to it. Even subtle, seemingly insignificant changes in our environments can make us more likely to change our behavior. When done on a broad enough scale, this can ignite an epidemic.
One way of manipulating context is to alter the physical environment in some way. The New York City police used the Power of Context by implementing the Broken Windows Theory to reduce violent crime by cracking down on smaller infractions, including diligently cleaning graffiti on subway trains. The basis of this idea is that subtle environmental cues — like graffiti-covered subway trains — send a message that anything goes, and that mindset snowballs into more serious crimes.
(Shortform example: If you are in a public restroom that’s smelly, unkempt, and littered with crumpled seat covers and used paper towels, you’re less inclined to pick your paper towel up and put it back in the trash if it falls to the ground. On the other hand, if the restroom is spotlessly clean, you’ll probably feel more self-conscious about your paper towel litter, and you’re more likely to pick it up and put it back in the trash can.)
People are also influenced by social context. In fact, studies reveal that your character is not a fixed set of inherent traits, but a collection of habits and tendencies that are subject to change under different conditions and context. This makes context so powerful that certain situations can eclipse our natural dispositions.
On a small scale, you probably behave differently whether you’re with your family, your coworkers, or your old college friends. You’re also likely to act differently in public than you do in the privacy of your home. Is this effect powerful enough to determine whether you follow a fashion trend or join a social movement?
Small groups, in particular, have a strong power to amplify a message or idea and help create an epidemic for a few reasons.
On a community level, people have a capacity to have some kind of social relationship with about 150 people. In a community of 150 or less, people know everyone well enough to keep each other accountable to get work done, to abide by social standards, and to follow other group policies and norms. Groups of this size are better able to reach consensus and act as one. Beyond that limit, smaller groups start to break off and organizational hierarchies (e.g. management structures in companies) may be needed to keep order.
Through case studies as well as research from marketing, economics, and social psychology, we’ll explore these principles in depth to understand the strategies that can help create — and halt — social epidemics. We’ll also discuss how technology and the Age of Information affects the spread of ideas and makes the Law of the Few even more critical.
You see the phenomenon every flu season: Someone in your office catches a bug, and within a week it seems half her department is infected. In two weeks, there are people showing those same flu symptoms in every department, and by the end of the month half the office has caught the bug.
Each person who catches the virus can infect a whole new set of people, and each of them does the same, in an ongoing ripple effect. The virus continues spreading this way, ultimately creating an epidemic. This is how epidemics grow through geometric progression: When a virus spreads, it doubles, and doubles again, and doubles again, and through that process it grows exponentially.
Ideas, messages, behaviors, and products can spread through a population in a social epidemic in the same way that viruses spread. Epidemics have a few common characteristics.
It can be hard to wrap our head around the notion that drastic change happens at one particular point because we tend to think that significant changes occur in a steady progression (e.g. a river doesn’t flood instantaneously when a storm hits; the water steadily rises over hours of heavy rain). But the tipping point is a critical moment when minor change makes all the difference (e.g. the moment the water crests the river bank).
Think of snow: The difference between 34 and 31 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t feel much colder than the difference between 37 and 34 degrees. But when that same three-degree drop happens at the tipping point — 32 degrees — rain becomes snow.
This book focuses on how to push ideas or products to a tipping point in order to create a social epidemic. In Chapters 1-5, we’ll discuss in detail the three factors that can tip epidemics and examples of each of these strategies in action. Then, in chapters 6 and 7, we’ll take a more in-depth look at how these principles play out in practice and examine how you can use your insight about what tips an epidemic to develop a strategy for stopping an epidemic.
(Shortform note: While the book outlines the principles of how to tip epidemics and illustrates them in numerous examples, it lacks in specific tips for applying these principles. It may be that each situation and would-be epidemic calls for such a unique combination and application of these strategies that there’s no way to give general advice, but Gladwell’s primary focus is on getting readers to understand the foundations of social epidemics, not advising how to put them to practice.)
There are three factors that can be adjusted to turn an idea into a social epidemic: the messenger, the message itself, or the context of the message.
Employing one, two, or all three of these principles can tip an epidemic. We’ll cover each at a high level, then explore each in greater detail in chapters 2-5.
When you’re trying to spread a message, idea, or product to epidemic proportions, you can’t do it all yourself; you need people to help preach your message and spread the word to the masses. But not just anyone will do. The Law of the Few proposes that there are certain, special types of people who are much more effective at broadcasting your idea and getting people to listen and follow suit in order to create an epidemic.
These special people fall into three personality types that make them exceptional either in their social connections, knowledge, or persuasiveness. We’ll discuss this in depth in Chapter 2.
Patient Zero of AIDS is an example of the power of key players in the spread of epidemics. This so-called Patient Zero was Gaetan Dugas, who falls into the category of being particularly well connected. Dugas was a French-Canadian flight attendant who reportedly had 2,500 sexual partners across North America. Dugas is linked to at least 40 of the first cases of AIDS in California and New York.
The Law of the Few is a more extreme version of the 80/20 Principle in economics, which dictates that in a given situation, about 20 percent of participants will be responsible for 80 percent of the “work.” For example, 20 percent of drivers cause 80 percent of all traffic accidents. And in many societies, 20 percent of criminals are responsible for 80 percent of crimes.
Epidemics tip not only because of the behavior of a handful of key players. A change in the contagiousness and strength of the virus, message, or idea itself can also cause it to tip.
In medical terms, this is when a virus evolves to become more contagious or more infectious. When that happens, people who are infected are less able to fight it off, or stay sick longer, creating more opportunity to infect more people.
In social epidemics, this is the factor that makes a message stick or make an impact. In a marketing context, stickiness makes an ad stand out from the white noise of all the media we encounter. (Shortform example: Think of advertisements from 20 or more years ago that still stand out in your head. Maybe it’s the Budweiser “Whassup?” commercial, or (stretching back almost 50 years) the “Mikey Likes It” Life cereal ads.)
To understand the importance of the Stickiness Factor, consider this: If you don’t remember the message, what are the chances you will change your behavior or buy the product? Making an idea sticky and impactful is often a matter of surprisingly small, subtle changes. We’ll explore this more in Chapter 3.
Human behavior is greatly affected by the context of our environments. The Power of Context capitalizes on this insight and suggests altering the context in which people receive your message or idea can make them more receptive to it. This is a little abstract, so let’s take a look at some examples.
On a small scale, you probably behave differently whether you’re with your family, your coworkers, or your old college friends. You’re also likely to act differently in public than you do in the privacy of your home. Is this effect powerful enough to determine whether you follow a fashion trend or join a social movement?
We often don’t realize how profoundly the environment alters how we act. Context changes subconsciously cue us to behave differently — sometimes drastically so — or force us into a new routine that has ripple effects on our actions.
Even subtle changes can have a significant effect on how we act. In 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was stabbed and killed on a NYC street, despite the fact that there were 38 people witnessinges to the attack. At the time, most reports of the incident blamed witnesses’ inaction on urban callousness. Psychologists later attributed this to the “bystander effect,” which says that when people are in a group, they are less likely to act because they either assume someone else will or assume the problem is less serious because other people are not acting. Genovese, then, would have had a better chance of getting help if she’d been attacked in a more discreet location with just one witness. However, most reports of the incident blamed witnesses’ inaction on urban callousness.
In the mid-1990s, a syphilis epidemic exploded in Baltimore. The disease had been present in the city previously, but the confluence of a few, relatively minor factors created a tipping point; all three rules of epidemics were at work.
A disproportionately large number of people who were likely to be exposed to the disease were concentrated in two housing projects that bordered the epicenter of the city’s syphilis problem. These two housing projects were demolished around the same time, displacing many infected people to other areas of the city. This spread the disease more widely to other communities, rather than keeping it relatively contained in one or two areas of the city.
Medical services in the city’s poorest areas took a budgetary hit, cutting the capacity to serve patients in STD clinics. As a result, patients with syphilis had to wait an additional few weeks before getting treatment, in the meantime infecting more people and effectively making the disease more contagious.
A rise in crack cocaine drew people to poor neighborhoods to buy drugs, increasing the risk of more people getting infected and bringing the disease back into their own neighborhoods. Crack use and addiction also tends to lead to risky sexual behavior, which exacerbates the spread of STDs.
You don’t necessarily need all three principles to tip an epidemic — you just need the right ones. The Law of the Few and the Power of Context were both pivotal in launching a sneaker brand called Hush Puppies from the brink of decline to epidemic popularity within the span of a few years.
In the early 1990s, Hush Puppies were selling only about 30,000 pairs a year. Around that time, teens in New York City’s SoHo and the East Village began wearing the sneaker specifically because they were not in style. Fashion Mavens likely contributed to the spread of Hush Puppies in these neighborhoods, noticing the ironically un-trendy trend and alerting friends.
Two fashion designers then noticed the budding trend among those New York City teens, and were inspired to use Hush Puppies to complement their couture. The well-known designers acted as Connectors, broadcasting images of the shoes to a massive audience and tipping the epidemic. What’s more, the fact that they noticed the trend in SoHo and the East Village — two neighborhoods known as centers of cutting-edge, fashion-forward, and experimental styles — illustrates the Power of Context; the effect likely would have been different if the story started with a bunch of Kansas City teenagers wearing the sneaker.
Soon celebrities were wearing the sneaker and Hush Puppies became a mainstream trend. Celebrities and other fashion influencers were Salesmen to the public masses who, just a few years earlier, probably wouldn’t have considered buying un-stylish Hush Puppies. WIth this potent mix of Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen, the company sold 430,000 pairs in 1995. Sales quadrupled in 1996, and increased again the following year.
The Law of the Few is about the people who spread messages, ideas, or viruses and cause epidemics to tip. These are specific types of people who have the contacts, knowledge, and social skills to effectively spread an idea far and wide.
Connectors are people who seem to know everyone. You can find Connectors in every walk of life. Connectors are sociable, gregarious, and are naturally skilled at making — and keeping in contact with — friends and acquaintances.
In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the “small-world experiment” to research how closely people are connected. He sent letters to 160 people in Nebraska, giving them the name and address of a stockbroker in Boston and instructing them to write their name on the letter and then send it to a friend or acquaintance who might get the letter one step closer to that stockbroker. Each person who received the chain letter would do the same, until a friend or acquaintance of the stockbroker finally received it and would send it directly to him.
At the end of the experiment, Milgram found that most of the letters reached the stockbroker in five or six steps, creating the concept that people all over the world are all connected by six degrees of separation.
Even further, Milgram discovered that half of the letters were ultimately delivered to the stockbroker by three people. Although everyone is linked by just six degrees of separation, a small group of people are connected to a disproportionately large number of people. Those few, well-connected people are the Connectors.
(Shortform note: The notion that a handful of powerful people can spread a message further and more effectively than the rest of the population is called the Influentials theory, and has been a staple in marketing for 50 years. However, several more recent experiments by network-theory scientist Duncan Watts determine that these rare trendsetters — or hubs, in his experiment — are no more influential in spreading an idea than the rest of the population. Watts recreated Milgram’s small-world experiment with email and found that only 5 percent of messages passed through Connectors. Additionally, Watts has found that the public’s mood and susceptibility to influence at a given time is a far greater determinant of whether an epidemic tips than the strength of the influencer spreading the idea.)
Connectors tend to be connected to many communities — whether through interests and hobbies, jobs that cause them to work with people in other fields, or other experiences. Their strength is in occupying many different worlds, and bringing them together.
(Shortform example: A Connector may be a journalist who interviews many different people for her work, who also plays on a recreational volleyball team, and is a regular at the local rock climbing gym, as well as a familiar face at her church, and also active and well-known in a specific online forum. She knows many people in these communities on a first-name basis and would be able to connect them if, for example, someone on her volleyball team were looking for a lawyer, and she happened to know a great one who attended her church.)
A party game called “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” attempts to link Hollywood actors through their movie roles the way Milgram’s small-world experiment linked people through letters. You start with a random actor, then name another actor from one of her movies, then name an actor who has been in a movie with that second actor, and continue until you get to someone who’s shared the screen with Bacon — trying to make the connection in six steps or less. For instance, you can get from Mary Pickford to Bacon in three steps because she was in Screen Snapshots with Clark Gable, who played in Combat America with Tony Romano, who was in Starting Over with Bacon.
The game works because Bacon had roles in so many movies. However, when a computer scientist calculated the connectedness of about a quarter million actors who have appeared on TV and in movies, he found that the most well-connected actor was actually Rod Steiger. You could connect any actor with Steiger in less than three steps because not only because he had roles in a lot of movies, but also because the movies were so wide ranging — from dramas to Westerns, and Oscar winners to flops. Within Hollywood, Steiger occupied many worlds, and in those many diverse circles he accumulated a huge number of connections.
Connectors are not close with all their connections. In fact, Connectors’ power is in having lots of acquaintances, or “weak ties.” Acquaintances create a wider reach because they typically occupy different social circles and communities, exposing them to different people and information than you encounter.
Weak ties can help spread a message beyond your reach because they belong to different worlds than you do. On the other hand, your friends’ knowledge and social ties tend to largely overlap with your own. Your friends can help spread a message in the same communities you occupy, which doesn’t do much to expand your reach in spreading a message.
A study by a group of psychologists found that although we tend to develop relationships with people who are similar to us (e.g. age and race), proximity plays a bigger role than similarity in choosing friends. This means that if someone lives down the street from you, you’re more likely to develop a friendship with her than with someone who you have more in common with but who lives an hour away. You’re also likely to be exposed to a lot of the same news, people, and information.
While Connectors are people specialists, Mavens are information specialists. They are the kinds of people who are endlessly curious and adept at gathering and retaining information on a wide variety of (sometimes obscure) topics.
In a marketing and retail context, these people are called “Market Mavens” or “price vigilantes.” They watch price fluctuations, know when stores are having sales, collect coupons, and know the days when the coupons are worth double.
Mavens not only collect information, but they also enthusiastically share their knowledge with other people. They are socially motivated to help people with the information they’ve gathered; a Maven may give you some of her coupons, and remind you when a sale is coming up. Mavens have no ulterior motive for sharing information; they just want to help. Their genuine helpfulness inspires more trust and credibility, so when they give recommendations people tend to take them more seriously.
Whereas a Connector’s influence lies in knowing many people and spreading information widely, a Maven’s influence is in the power of her recommendation. People know that Mavens are knowledgeable and trustworthy sources of information, so a Maven’s word carries a lot of weight. If a Maven suggests you check out a budding epidemic, you’re inclined to listen.
Mavens are both teachers and students: They love to learn new information as much as they love to share it. In this way, Mavens mine their social contacts for tips and recommendations, while also doling out their own advice. In a social epidemic, Mavens serve as data banks — they carry the message, with authoritativeness.
Salesmen are the people who pitch the idea or message behind an epidemic and persuade people to jump on board. They do not merely store and share information; Salesmen want to convince you to follow their advice. Behavioral psychologist Donald Moine has widely studied persuasion, and says that a great salesman is armed with more and better responses to potential clients’ objections.
Salesmen have all the right words as well as a distinct energy, enthusiasm, charm, and likability that makes people want to listen to them. But there’s something more: Salesmen instinctively know how to use nonverbal cues to reinforce their power of persuasion.
Nonverbal communication includes hand gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, eye contact, posture, cadence of speech, and body language. Nonverbal cues have a powerful impact on us, even when they are so subtle that we don’t notice them.
An experiment performed during the 1984 presidential campaign between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale revealed how news anchors’ slight facial expressions could bias viewers’ opinions and votes. Researchers gathered recordings of three news anchors’ faces while they reported on each of the two candidates. Then they played the clips for people on mute, and asked participants to use a 21-point scale to rate how positive or negative the anchors’ facial expressions looked.
The first two anchors — Dan Rather on CBS and Tom Brokaw on NBC — scored right in the middle, meaning they had a neutral expression when talking about either candidate. The third anchor, Peter Jennings on ABC, scored about two points higher than neutral when reporting on Mondale and six points above neutral when talking about Reagan.
After the election, the researchers found that ABC viewers around the country voted in higher numbers for Reagan than CBS and NBC viewers. When asked about their preference, these pro-Reagan ABC viewers had no conscious recognition of Jennings’s subtle biased facial expressions; instead, viewers insisted they preferred Reagan’s policies. Researchers also found that ABC’s story selection was more hostile toward Reagan, meaning the nonverbal cues from Jennings’s facial expressions actually overpowered more explicit editorial bias.
This experiment raises three important points about nonverbal communication.
Everyone engages in nonverbal communication, and the nonverbal messages you send reveal whether you agree or disagree with someone, if you’re making an effort to connect with them, or if you are totally disinterested.
When people talk, research shows that they subconsciously synchronize their movements and gestures with each other almost immediately. They quickly match each other’s volume, pitch, and speaking rhythm. Salesmen are especially adept at drawing people into their own conversational rhythms, allowing them to set the tone for the interaction.
In addition to conversational harmonizing, people imitate each other’s emotional expressions. This is called motor mimicry: If someone frowns, you are likely to frown as an automatic response. What’s more, physical expressions influence your actual emotions, so through motor mimicry, you can have a strong influence on others’ emotions.
In this way, emotions are contagious. For example, if someone you’re talking to is happy about something, she’d smile as she talks to you. In automatic response, you smile back. Subconsciously, this smile brings you some happiness.
You feel more interested and enthralled with people with whom you have a high level of synchrony. Salesmen effortlessly pull you into harmony with them. Their uncanny ability to draw people into their conversational rhythms and emotional expressions make Salesmen particularly skillful at influencing people’s emotions. And that is a very powerful tool of persuasion.
In April of 1775, a silversmith named Paul Revere rode his horse through the towns surrounding Boston in the middle of the night, spreading the news that he expected the British to attack the next morning and mobilizing locals to act. He was so effective that the colonial militia beat the British that following morning, in a battle that sparked the American Revolution. Revere helped spread the news throughout the entire region in a matter of hours, making his midnight ride one of the most famous historical examples of a word-of-mouth epidemic.
That same night, a fellow Bostonian named William Dawes took a midnight ride in the opposite direction as Revere to help spread the message, but hardly anyone mobilized in the towns he rode through. What made Revere so much more successful than Dawes?
First, Revere was a Connector. He was not only social and gregarious, but also a fisherman, hunter, cardplayer, theater-goer, businessman, and a member of the Masonic Lodge and several social clubs and community organizations; he was part of many different social circles in the Boston area. When he made his midnight ride, Revere was so well-connected that he knew who to alert — the local militia leaders and key figures in the community — to make the biggest impact.
Dawes, by contrast, likely had an average social circle, and his connections were probably much weaker in the area outside of Boston, where he was trying to spread the news. When he knocked on doors that night, he didn’t know whether he was at the home of a local leader or a farmer who had little power to further spread the message.
Second, Revere was a Maven. He was involved in a community group that actively collected information on the activities of British troops. He had warned local militia before about British schemes he had learned of. People knew that Revere was a reputable source of information about the British troops, so when they heard his warning on the night of his midnight ride, it carried more weight.
Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are more than mere messengers, spreading ideas to a wide variety of people and convincing them to follow suit; they can also act as translators, making a radical new trend, product, or idea more palatable to the public masses. We will explore this further in Chapter 6.
(Shortform note: Gladwell doesn’t say that every epidemic necessarily needs all three personality types. Depending on the situation, some combination of these messengers work in conjunction with the other principles to tip an epidemic.)
To turn your product, message, or idea into an epidemic, you may need to enlist the help of skilled messengers (Connectors, Mavens, or Salesmen) to help you get the word out. Use this exercise to help you identify these people and determine how they can help tip your epidemic.
Describe a product or idea you are trying to tip into an epidemic. (This can be the product your company is selling, the culture change you’re trying to create at your workplace, even an effort at home to get everyone to wash dishes as soon as they’re dirtied.)
In this situation, who would be a Connector, a person (or group of people) who is well-known among the people you’re trying to influence?
Who is a relevant Maven, who has trusted expertise in this subject area? Who is someone that people go to for the best advice?
The Law of the Few declares that the right messengers can tip and spread an epidemic. However, your messengers can only succeed when the message is one that will catch on — in other words, it must be “sticky.” To be sticky, a message must be memorable enough to inspire action or change.
Stickiness is particularly difficult in the Information Age because modern media exposes consumers to so much information that it is harder for an individual message to stick. In the advertising industry, this conundrum is called the clutter problem.
An idea is not inherently sticky or un-sticky; to make an idea sticky, you have to tweak the way it is presented. A message doesn’t need to be loud or in your face to be sticky. In fact, small, subtle changes are often the key to stickiness.
In a 1960s experiment, social psychologist Howard Levanthal tried to influence a group of seniors at Yale to get tetanus shots. He distributed pamphlets with information about the dangers of tetanus, the importance of getting vaccinated, and details about the campus health center offering free tetanus shots to students. These pamphlets came in three versions:
Although most of the students probably already knew where to find the health center (remember, they were all seniors), 28 percent of students got vaccinated as a result of this third version, compared with just 3 percent from the first two versions. When the information had a practical and personal touch, it was more effective.
Two television shows that launched 30 years apart had the same mission: broadcast educational programming sticky enough to capture the attention of 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds and have the lessons stick with them to give them a leg up in school. Both shows used careful research to find strategies that made the content extra sticky for their young viewers — some strategies overlapped, while others were totally different.
In both cases, small, often unexpected changes made a significant impact on whether or not preschoolers retained the information.
When a television producer named Joan Ganz Cooney masterminded Sesame Street, she wanted to start an epidemic: She wanted to use television to infect preschool-aged children with literacy. Her literacy virus had to be sticky enough to overpower the effects of poverty and parental illiteracy to give a leg up to young children who would otherwise enter school at an academic disadvantage. So the show’s creators conducted studies to help them engineer stickiness.
To this day, many people believe that both children and adults alike watch TV almost addictively because the visual and aural stimulation transfixes them, regardless of whether we are understanding or absorbing the content. However, one finding revealed that kids watch what’s on TV when they understand the content, and look away when they become confused or disinterested. They don’t just stare hypnotized for hours on end.
This insight allowed researchers to test childrens’ understanding and interest by simply observing them as they watched episodes of Sesame Street, then adjusting the program to keep children’s interest.
Here’s one example:
Sesame Street’s creators built the show on the concept that if they could keep kids’ attention, they could educate them. As long as the show’s content was produced in a way that directed viewers’ attention to the educational aspects (e.g. the letters appearing on the screen, not just the bright, fluffy Muppet pointing to them), children retained the lessons.
Almost 30 years after Sesame Street first aired, the creators of Blue’s Clues wanted to make a children’s educational show even stickier than Sesame Street. The producers made a format that improved on two major stickiness limitations of Sesame Street.
First, Sesame Street includes jokes and wordplay aimed at adults, in the hopes that more children will watch the show if their parents or guardians are willing to watch with them. The problem is that these adult jokes go over kids’ heads and can become a distraction, reducing the stickiness of the overall message.
Second, with preschoolers’ short attention span in mind, the creators of Sesame Street formatted it as a magazine show, consisting of dozens of segments that are each under three minutes long. But later research revealed that narrative structures make information stickier for kids, because kids better engage with and remember information presented in a story.
Blue’s Clues also borrowed some of Sesame Street’s tried and true methods of stickiness. For one thing, information is stickier for children when they interact with it in some way, so both shows elicit responses from their young viewers. If you watch a child watching either Sesame Street or Blue’s Clues, you may notice them occasionally talking to the TV in response to a character’s question or prompting.
Secondly, Sesame Street effectively uses repetition to help lessons sink in to children’s minds so that they gain a deeper understanding with each repetition. Blue’s Clues did a different take on this principle and aired each episode for five days in a row, Monday through Friday, before airing a new one the following week. Over the course of the week, children became more advanced at following along with the clues and solving the puzzles as the lessons took a stronger hold (read: became stickier) in their minds.
Whereas the first two principles of epidemics address the people who help spread the message far and wide (The Law of the Few) and how effectively an idea or message can take hold (The Stickiness Factor), the third principle has to do with the conditions that lend themselves to an epidemic catching on. According to the Power of Context, people are so sensitive to conditions and changes in our environment that context can determine whether or not an epidemic tips.
In the case of Paul Revere, the fact that he made his ride in the middle of the night was pivotal in helping the word-of-mouth epidemic catch on. First, it was easier to reach people knowing they were all at home in bed — rather than scattered around at work or running errands. Second, people understood that if Revere’s message was urgent enough that he had to wake them in the middle of the night, it must be important.
Subtle, seemingly insignificant changes in our immediate environments can make us more likely to change our behavior; when done on a broad enough scale, this can ignite an epidemic. These changes may be in our physical environment or social context (think of the murder of Kitty Genovese where bystanders stood watching, from Chapter 1).
During the 1980s, New York City had some of the highest crime rates in its history. Suddenly, in the 1990s, crime rates plummeted faster and more dramatically than any other city during that same period.
This drop appeared to be an anti-crime epidemic in how quickly and widely it took hold, but it didn’t really follow the first two principles of epidemics — The Law of the Few and The Stickiness Factor.
NYC’s anti-crime epidemic relied strongly on the third principle, The Power of Context. The change in context had to do with a policing approach called the Broken Windows Theory, which says that smaller signs of disorder — like broken windows left in disrepair on a building — send the message that anything goes. This subtle message leads to greater crime and public disorder. In other words, the environment is spreading a message that changes people’s behavior and leads to an epidemic.
Initially, NYC police’s Broken Windows approach led them to tackle graffiti in the subway systems. They made enormous efforts to keep trains clean of graffiti in order to send the message that someone was paying attention and even small infractions would not be overlooked.
Then, transit police cracked down on fare-beating, when people would hop subway turnstiles or find other ways to get onto the trains without paying the fares. Again, if one person skipped paying the fare, it signaled to other passengers that they shouldn’t have to either. That mentality easily snowballs into defiance against other, more serious rules as well.
The transit police had to take a gamble on putting so much effort and resources on fare-beating — which, in isolation, is a small offense — at a time when more serious crimes on the subway were at an all-time high. It can be challenging to put the Power of Context to practice because making small contextual changes to create a big impact feels counterintuitive. But if you make the right changes, you’ll see the results.
After seeing results from their strategy in the subway system, NYPD implemented the Broken Windows approach across the city. Officers targeted minor crimes including public drunkenness, public urination, throwing empty bottles on the street, and minor property damage. Ultimately, violent crimes dropped in the subway system and across the city, and NYPD administrators believed the Broken Windows approach deserves the credit.
The mayor and police chief reasoned that enforcing minor infractions sent the message that no criminal activity — even seemingly insignificant offenses — would be tolerated. That message spread and altered would-be criminals’ behavior, reversing the crime epidemic, or alternatively creating an anti-crime epidemic. This exemplifies the Power of Context, illustrating how small environmental changes can tip an epidemic.
(Shortform note: Since Tipping Point was published, alternative hypotheses for the reduction in crime have been proposed.
There isn’t consensus yet on a definitive answer, but the Broken Windows idea still illustrates the role of context on behavior.)
We tend to think of ourselves as products of nature and nurture, meaning the greatest influences on who we are and how we behave are our genetics and our upbringings. However, context is so powerful that certain situations can eclipse our natural dispositions.
The Fundamental Attribution Error is a psychological term for humans’ tendency to overestimate the importance of fundamental personality traits in explaining people’s behaviors, and underestimate the role of context. In other words, when we see someone behave a certain way, we’re more likely to assume it’s a fundamental personality trait, rather than the influence of temporary context.
For example, two comparably skilled basketball players are shooting baskets, but one is in a well-lit gym and one is in a dimly lit gym. The player in the well-lit gym obviously makes more baskets. But when spectators are asked to judge which of the two is more skilled, they choose the player in the well-lit gym, disregarding the conditions (better lighting) that greatly contributed to his success.
We make this error because human brains evolved in a way that makes us very good at processing certain kinds of information — and bad at processing others. The Fundamental Attribution Error makes the world simpler and easier to understand than considering all the variables of context, but it creates a blind spot in our understanding of all kinds of actions and events, from cheating to committing crime.
Although it’s humbling to admit that we are so inept at judging the causes of most situations, the Power of Context is actually promising: Problematic behavior is not the inevitable actions of inherently bad people, but instead is the result of context and circumstances that can be changed and adjusted for a better outcome. Your character is not a fixed set of inherent traits — as the Fundamental Attribution Error would have us believe — but a collection of habits and tendencies that are subject to change under different conditions and context; many of us appear to have consistent character traits only because we are good at controlling our environments.
One example of the power of social context is a 1920s study to measure the honesty among children. Students were given various tests in different situations that made it harder or easier to either cheat or inflate their scores.
There were some unsurprising findings: older children cheat more than younger children, students from stable homes cheat a little less than those from unstable homes, and girls cheat about as much as boys.
However, there were some surprising inconsistencies.
This revealed that a trait like honesty is not fundamental, but rather largely influenced by context.
Another example of social context impacting our behavior is the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which participants were randomly assigned the roles of either prisoners or prison guards.
The participants assumed their roles to such an extreme that they acted cruelly and completely out of character; the prison guards abused the prisoners, waking them up in the middle of the night to do push-ups and random tasks, spraying them with fire extinguishers, making them march handcuffed and with paper bags over their heads, and even throwing one prisoner into solitary confinement. The behavior was so alarming that the two-week experiment was ultimately called off after six days.
After the experiment, participants recognized that they had acted dramatically differently than they ever would have believed possible. The context of the experiment, with their temporary roles as prisoners or guards, was enough to overpower their natural disposition and totally alter their behavior. The fact that voluntary participants in an experiment could be so overtaken by their context suggests that it is entirely possible to create (much less drastic) behavioral changes in a targeted audience in order to tip an epidemic.
To create an epidemic, you have to be deliberate about how you present your idea and how people receive it. Use this exercise to help identify how you can make your idea sticky and create a context that makes people more open to it.
Think of a product or idea you are trying to tip into an epidemic. Who is your targeted audience, or whose ideas and behaviors are you trying to influence?
Think about how you have presented your idea so far and how effective your message has been. How might you be able to present your idea differently to make it more memorable and impactful?
What is the context in which your audience is operating, and how is that influencing their current behavior? Consider the environmental and social context.
What could you change about the environmental or social context of the situation to make people more likely to adopt the idea or behavior you’re trying to spread?
The principle of the Power of Context applies to not only our physical environment and the circumstances of a situation, but also who’s around us. Specifically, people behave differently when they’re in a group than when they’re alone. When we’re alone we’re more likely to act independently, but around other people our behavior is affected by peer pressure, social norms, and other influences; those influences can be enough to tip an epidemic.
Small groups, in particular, have a strong power to amplify a message or idea and help create an epidemic for a few reasons.
The Epidemic Success of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
The success of the bestselling book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (later turned into a Hollywood movie with a celebrity cast) is largely because it became an epidemic among small groups — specifically, book clubs. One piece of evidence for this is that the book first tipped in Northern California, where there is a strong book club culture.
The book’s compelling characters and emotionally engaging storyline make it ideal for book club discussions, and the act of sharing and discussing the story among friends increased Ya-Ya Sisterhood’s stickiness by creating a whole experience around the book. What’s more, the book’s focus on mother-daughter relationships and female friendships resonated with many female readers, resulting in book club discussions that were more personal and amplified readers’ connection with the book.
Being a book club pick meant the Ya-Ya Sisterhood sales grew more quickly — with book club groups of five or more — than it could have through individual sales. The epidemic then spread further when the (primarily) women in these book clubs recommended Ya-Ya Sisterhood to other friends, family members, and, of course, book clubs.
Every species has a limited capacity for how much information individuals can store, including how many close relationships they can maintain.
Channel capacity is a term in cognitive psychology that says humans have limited space in our brains for certain kinds of information: by and large, we can only remember six or seven things — whether objects, numbers, categories, or sounds — before we get overwhelmed and start to lose track. Similarly, social channel capacity states that we have a limited emotional capacity. We can only maintain deep relationships with a limited number of people before we hit our limit.
The concept was developed as anthropologist Robin Dunbar noted the difference in brain size of various primates (including humans). Specifically, compared to other mammals, primates have an exceptionally large neocortex. The neocortex is the part of the brain responsible for complex thought and reasoning.
Primates with a larger neocortex live in larger groups, with humans having the largest of all in both categories (neocortex and community size). Dunbar argued that a large neocortex is necessary to handle the complexities of larger groups; the more people (or primates) in a group, the more relationships and dynamics you have to keep track of.
The power of peer influence is strongest in groups that are small enough where each member has some kind of acquaintanceship or relationship with the rest of the group. This group dynamic makes small groups ideal for influencing behavior to tip an epidemic.
Case Study: Establishing the Methodist Church Through Small Groups
The founder of the Methodist church, John Wesley, created an epidemic by mobilizing many small groups throughout England and North America, expanding the religion from 20,000 to 90,000 followers within six years.
Wesley traveled around England and North America preaching open-air sermons to thousands of people. In each place, he would stay long enough to form religious societies from his most zealous followers. Converts had to attend weekly meetings and follow a strict code of conduct, or else face expulsion from the group. This way, each group self-regulated and maintained the principles of the faith.
In his travels, Wesley regularly visited these societies to reinforce the structure and ensure the standards of the religion remained strong. But overall, the groups he’d created became communities that largely kept themselves in line.
On a community level, people have a capacity to have some kind of social relationship with about 150 people. In different cultures and organizations — from tribes to military divisions — people have organically realized that social structure functions best at or under 150 people. This is called the Rule of 150.
In a community of 150 or less, people know everyone well enough to keep each other accountable to get work done, to abide by social standards, and to follow other group policies and norms. Groups of this size are better able to reach consensus and act as one. Beyond that limit, smaller groups start to break off and organizational hierarchies (e.g. management structures in companies) may be needed to keep order.
Groups also use a joint memory system called transactive memory to act more efficiently and cohesively. People are not limited to the facts and information we can memorize; we remember the sources of useful information — like phone books and maps and recipe books — to give us access to much more than our memory can hold. When we rely on the people we have close relationships with to hold information for us, this is called transactive memory.
Couples and families do this often. If you’re talking about a movie you saw and can’t remember an actor’s name, you may turn to your spouse to help you fill in the missing information because she tends to be better at remembering those kinds of details. Or if you just came home with a new tech device and don’t know how to program it, you know your teenage daughter is the best person in your family to ask for help.
In this way, groups develop a joint memory system in which each person organically becomes the resident expert on one topic or another, based on who is best suited to remember that kind of information. Transactive memory makes groups more efficient because each person does not need to know a little bit of everything. Instead, she just needs to know who has the expertise she needs. For this to work, the group must be small enough that the members know each other well enough to know who knows what, and to trust each other to be proficient and reliable within their individual areas of expertise.
Case Study: Gore Associates Succeeds By Following the Rule of 150
One example of the application of the Rule of 150 in a business setting is Gore Associates, a multimillion-dollar company that produces Gore-Tex fabric as well as high-tech products. Gore has followed the Rule of 150 throughout its growth as a steadily and increasingly profitable, innovative company with low turnover.
The company’s founder continually creates new divisions of the company to keep each one at or under 150 employees, essentially creating communities. Production plants are built to hold up to 150 people, and when one plant gets close to capacity, another one is built nearby. Although all the plants are part of the same company, each one has its own culture and community. Through transactive memory, each person in a plant or division knows which coworker has the expertise to help with any question that comes up.
Keeping plants and divisions of 150 or fewer employees creates peer pressure, social norms, and other group influences that help maintain the company’s standards. It’s harder for employees to slack off, for example, if they know everyone in the building — and everyone knows them, and knows who’s responsible if there’s a delay in one part of the production process. Gore does not have formal management structures in its plants because communities of this size self-regulate.
Now that we’ve examined the three principles of pushing potential epidemics to their tipping points, in this chapter we’ll take a further look at how these principles play out in practice. Each epidemic is different and requires a unique approach to get the masses to adopt that particular product or idea, so we’ll discuss how you can use the Law of the Few to adjust your messaging and make your idea appeal to trendsetters and regular Joes alike.
The diffusion model is a term in sociology for the way a contagious idea or product spreads among people who adopt it at different phases.
Case Study: Iowa Farmers Try a New Corn Seed
The diffusion model is well illustrated in a study of how Iowa farmers adopted a hybrid corn seed in the 1930s. Although this new seed was superior to what farmers were using, it took more than a decade after the seed was introduced before nearly all of the farmers had made the switch.
In the first five years, only a handful of the 259 farmers studied had adopted the new seed. These were the Innovators.
In the sixth year, 16 made the change, then 21 in the following year. These were the Early Adopters, who had seen the Innovators’ success and followed suit.
In the following three years, 36, 61, 46 farmers jumped on board, respectively. These were the Early and Late Majority, who had waited for eight to 10 years after the seed’s introduction before trying it.
In the following years, 36, 14, and finally 3 farmers adopted the new seed. These were the Laggards, who — despite seeing the new seed’s undeniable success in other farmers’ fields — were in no rush to change, even for the better.
If you graphed the number of farmers adopting the new seed each year, you would see a model epidemic curve that starts gradually, tips with the Early Adopters, climbs dramatically with the Early and Late Majority, and tapers off with the Laggards.
Different factors come into play each time an idea or product advances to the next group of adopters, because each group’s attitude and reasoning for adoption is different. Both Innovators and Early Adopters have a revolutionary mindset and are inherently open to innovations that will give them an edge, despite considerable risk.
However, before an idea or product moves from the Early Adopters to the Early Majority, a gap must be bridged; the fundamental difference in the visionary attitude of Early Adopters versus the caution of the Early Majority creates a chasm where would-be epidemics can fall off. This is where the Law of the Few becomes critical: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen can act as translators to make the seemingly revolutionary actions of the Innovators and Early Adopters attractive to the more mainstream and traditional majorities.
In general, most people naturally resist change and innovation in favor of what’s familiar, comfortable, and working well enough. A much smaller population (the Innovators and Early Adopters) give an idea or product its kickstart, but the masses ultimately must get on board for an epidemic to take hold. This is where translation is necessary to make new ideas or products more palatable and bridge the gap between the risk-takers and the rest of us.
Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen each use their strengths differently to translate messages in a way that they take on a deeper meaning to the people receiving the message (thus making it stickier).
Case Study: How Airwalk Got Preppy Kids to Wear Skater Shoes
A San Diego-based shoe company named Airwalk began producing shoes in the mid-1980s aimed at hard-core skateboaders, but achieved epidemic popularity in the 1990s through an advertising campaign that translated skater fashion trends to mainstream buyers.
Airwalk’s advertising agency, Lambesis, hired a Maven named DeeDee Gordon to spot social epidemics that were about to tip — from kung-fu movies to interest in Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Gordon contracted a team of Innovators across the country, and regularly checked in with them to find out what music, fashion, television shows, and topics they were interested in. By noting their varied interests over time, then seeing what the mainstream caught onto several months later, she was able to track and forecast trends and ideas that would soon advance from the Innovators and Early Adopters to the Majority.
Lambesis put a twist on those themes and, just as the trends were hitting mainstream popularity, incorporated them into the shoe ads in a way that appealed to young buyers (e.g. a kung-fu parody where the Airwalk-wearing main character uses his skateboard to fight off the ninja villains). Gordon used her Mavenly knowledge of trends to tap into the public’s interests and translate a niche shoe designed for skateboarders to mainstream popularity.
Lambesis’s ad campaigns not only rode the wave of these trends, but themselves helped tip these trends into epidemics by translating less accessible ideas into more digestible forms. For example, they took many young adults’ growing interest in the Dalai Lama and the occupation of Tibet and created an ad showing a Tibetan monk cheating on a test by looking at notes he’d scrawled on the sides of his Airwalk shoes. The ads tweaked somewhat obscure trends and translated them into a context that was more familiar to the mainstream.
Case Study: Distributing Clean Syringes to Drug Users
Translation can also take the form of an action to spread a product or service, rather than a form of communication to spread a message or idea. For example, the City of Baltimore distributed clean syringes to inner-city neighborhoods in an effort to combat AIDS, which was spreading through the reuse of dirty needles among drug users. But their effort was limited by a few factors.
A van distributed clean needles in specific locations on certain days of the week. But if drug addicts did not meet this schedule, they missed the opportunity.
- Heroin addicts tend to go through a lot of needles, so they were likely to run out of their supply of clean syringes if they only restocked from the van once a week.
Researchers who were assessing the program’s success assumed that drug users who were using the program would take a grocery-shopping approach and visit the van during its scheduled stops to stock up on enough needles for the week. Instead they discovered something surprising: A small group of drug users were each grabbing hundreds of clean needles from the van every week, then selling them to addicts in the streets.
City officials initially had misgivings about this unintended effect, which gave these so-called super-exchangers a way to fund their own drug addictions. However, they soon realized the super-exchangers were acting as translators: They could provide clean needles to addicts around the clock and in any location, responding to the need better than the city could on its limited route and schedule. The super-exchangers were Connectors, who knew a lot of people in the drug community, and translators, who bridged the divide between the city’s efforts and the drug users’ behavior.
Translation necessarily involves some tweaking or distorting of the original message to make it digestible to the people receiving the message. One form of this is rumors, which are the most contagious social messages and excellent examples of word-of-mouth epidemics.
Stories and messages undergo a distinct, three-step process when they become rumors. This process of simplifying and distorting happens in the retelling of a story among many people (like in the children’s game, Telephone), as well as in our own recollection of a memory.
Case Study: The Rumor That Turned a Chinese Scholar Into a Japanese Spy
You can see each step of the rumor process in the evolution of a story about a Chinese teacher taking a vacation in Maine in 1945, just before Japan surrendered to the Allies in World War II. The teacher’s guidebook recommended a viewpoint at the top of a nearby hill, so he stopped in a small town to ask someone for directions to the hilltop. This ignited a rumor among the locals that a Japanese spy was going to the top of the hill to take photos of the region.
Rumor spreaders leveled the original story by dropping the details about the teacher’s courteous, earnest approach, and the fact that his nationality was actually unknown.
The story was sharpened with the assumptions that the man was Japanese, that he was a spy, that his sightseeing was instead an act of espionage, and that he had a camera in his hand instead of a guidebook.
Finally, the story was assimilated to make more sense to the locals: In the context of wartime hostility, it seemed more logical that an Asian man would be an enemy committing espionage than a vacationing scholar interested in sightseeing.
(Shortform note: The book doesn’t offer any information on the Chinese teacher’s fate or the consequences of the rumor.)
The kind of contagiousness that tips social epidemics is often not based on rational or conscious decisions; in fact, we’ve discussed how subtle, even subconscious cues (like nonverbal signs and environmental factors) can completely alter how we react to a situation. Sometimes, this effect spurs epidemics of people knowingly harming themselves in some way.
You can use the three rules of epidemics to ignite a social epidemic. But you can also use the same insight to extinguish an epidemic. Here, we’ll use the same principles to combat the teen smoking epidemic by disrupting the messengers, the stickiness, or the context.
(Shortform note: This book was published in 2000, shortly after teen smoking rates in the late-1990s reached the highest levels since the late-1970s. From 2000 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Youth Tobacco Survey revealed a 73 percent decline in high school smoking.)
No one born in the past several decades is ignorant of the dangers of smoking. Yet the number of teen smokers in this country rose 73 percent from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, despite fervent efforts and ad campaigns by the anti-smoking movement. The information was widely broadcast (in one study, a group of smokers actually overestimated the risks of smoking), but the approach was missing the mark.
The Law of the Few undoubtedly played a part in tipping the teen smoking epidemic. Teen smoking is a prime example of how Salesmen can make a behavior contagious by playing the role (sometimes inadvertently) of permission-givers for something as harmful as smoking. In spite of anti-smoking messaging insisting that the habit is unattractive and uncool, many people have deep-seated associations of cigarettes with sophistication. Often, people think of a smoker from their childhood who exuded a sort of carefree coolness. Knowingly or not, those smokers become permission-givers.
The archetype of smokers as cool rebels is actually no coincidence, as research shows that there are common personality traits among smokers that include extroversion, sociability, sexual precocity, impulsivity, risk-taking, defiance, and indifference to the opinions of others. Many of these are the kinds of traits that make a person seem impossibly cool, especially to teenagers.
Smokers aren’t cool because they smoke, but rather smoke because they are cool; the traits that make these teens prone to smoking happen to be the same traits that make them seem cool to peers. But no matter the reasoning, the association — and its power to influence others to smoke — remains the same. People’s memories of sophisticated family members, older friends, or celebrities (permission-givers) smoking make them want to emulate their cool by taking up the habit as well, overpowering health information and logical self-preservation.
Example: Permission-Givers and Suicide
Permission-givers played a role in a teen suicide epidemic in the small island nation of Micronesia. The epidemic seemed to have tipped with the well-publicized suicide of a teenage boy named R., who was a member of one of the island’s wealthiest families. Stuck in a love triangle with two women — one of whom he had a child with — he ultimately hung himself.
R. became the permission giver to other adolescent boys who committed suicide, almost always by hanging, as a result of similar romantic and family strife (most of which was fairly trivial and typical of the teen experience). The concept of using suicide as an expression of wounded pride and sadness (in much milder forms than the despair we typically associate with suicide) became epidemic; in the early 1960s there were virtually no suicides in Micronesia, but by the late 1980s the country had more suicides per capita than anywhere in the world.
Permission-givers may inspire people to try cigarettes, but the stickiness of the habit itself determines whether they will continue smoking long term. Smoking isn’t dangerous when you try it just once or twice; it becomes harmful the more you smoke and the longer you maintain the habit.
Nicotine is addictive only to some people, and among those people it is addictive to different degrees, likely based on their genetic tolerance for nicotine. Research shows that your experience with your first cigarette is the biggest single factor in whether or not you become a habitual smoker; people who are turned off immediately likely have little to no tolerance for the nicotine.
Among habitual smokers, there are two types: chippers and heavy smokers.
Since addiction happens over time, not instantaneously, this suggests that there is a threshold of nicotine intake, at which point a smoker becomes addicted.
To stop an epidemic like teen smoking, which has different elements that make it both contagious and sticky, you must decide which factor to tackle.
Combatting contagiousness entails somehow altering the influence of permission-givers. Many permission-givers are cool-seeming teens who are already smoking, setting an example and creating an allure for would-be smokers. Research suggests that peers have a greater impact on children’s and adolescents’ behavior than parents do; based on this, anti-smoking efforts would have to employ the help of the particularly rebellious teenagers who make smoking look so appealing to their peers. That avenue seems difficult, so Gladwell instead turns his attention to addressing stickiness.
To reduce cigarettes’ stickiness, you must change the factors that cause people to become habitual smokers. Gladwell explores two possible routes to take.
Tipping Points are all about small ways to make significant change. So-called Band-Aid solutions — despite the term’s negative connotations — can actually be the most effective strategies by taking focused, targeted action with the least amount of time, effort, and cost. Using a heavy amount of effort to tackle all aspects of a problem is not always possible or the best use of energy.
As we’ve discussed with the three rules of epidemics, you just need to pinpoint the right tweak (or tweaks) to tip an epidemic — whether it’s finding the right messenger, changing your presentation, or altering the context.
A nurse named Georgia Sadler launched a grassroots campaign to raise awareness about diabetes and breast cancer. She started by hosting seminars in black churches, but she found that the few people who attended already knew about the diseases, so she wasn’t reaching a new or large audience. However, when she moved the campaign from churches to beauty salons, she had epidemic success. Sadler changed the context by meeting people where they already were spending time (at the hair salon), instead of asking them to fit another commitment into their schedules.
Sadler capitalized on the existing relationships between hair stylists and their regular clients. The stylists were Connectors, so she trained them on information about the diseases that they could share with their clients. She also had a folklorist train the stylists in strategies to deliver the information in a compelling way, with conversation starters and other tidbits that made the information fit a typical salon conversation.
Sadler followed up by assessing how well her campaign was changing women’s attitudes and motivating them to get mammograms and diabetes tests, and she found that it was successful. (Shortform note: The book doesn’t offer any way of quantifying that success.)
We have looked at several ways in which our intuitions — about how people think and why they behave the way they do — are often wrong; for one thing, we severely underestimate the influence of nonverbal and contextual cues. In order to successfully incite a social epidemic, you must consistently test and question your intuitions.
Tipping points can be so unpredictable and volatile because humans — whose behavior must change in order for an epidemic to tip — are themselves unpredictable and subject to a wide variety of influencing forces. The volatility of tipping points, while potentially puzzling, is hopeful; with the right strategic action, you can create massive change.
In the book’s afterword, Gladwell has the hindsight to see how the Information Age is leading us to rely more heavily on word of mouth and primitive forms of social connections. The surfeit of media and information we are exposed to is overwhelming and essentially leads us back to basics.
While technology allows for more connectivity in the virtual world, it can also lead us to be more socially isolated. You text with friends and family instead of calling or visiting, you order goods and services online instead of going out in public to shop in a store, and you can work from the privacy and comfort of your own home instead of commuting to an office.
Adolescents have grown up in this culture, and in recent years they have experienced more isolation than past generations of adolescents as a result of several factors.
The school shooting epidemic in the U.S. since Columbine resulted, at least in part, from adolescent isolation and the construction of exclusively teen-inhabited worlds. Nearly all school shooters have been teens or young adults, so the epidemic spread almost solely among adolescents. Many of the shooters had commonalities, such as being bullied and lonely. But generations of teens have been bullied and lonely before they began shooting up schools.
In this epidemic, Columbine changed something within adolescents’ isolated world to alter the thought processes and behavior of subsequent school shooters. Somewhat similarly to the Micronesia’s suicide epidemic, school shootings became a new reaction to an old stimulus (bullying and ostracization), and this response became ritualized and contagious. The epidemic was able to spread because it was safely within the insulated adolescent worlds.
In the Age of Information, we have access to people and information via so many different forums — traditional media like print, television, and radio as well as digital media, from messaging apps to emails to websites to social platforms. Epidemics rely on this kind of interconnectedness in networks to spread diseases, ideas, or products.
The importance of networks is explained in the law of plentitude, or the “fax effect,” which says that the first fax machine was essentially worthless because no one else had a fax machine to receive your fax. The second fax machine made the first more valuable, and every subsequent fax machine sold made each one increasingly valuable because they expanded the network of people with whom you could exchange faxes; each additional participant adds to the value of the network as a whole. In a network, plentitude creates power and value, which is contradictory to the rule of supply and demand that limited supply makes something more valuable; .
However, once that plentitude passes a certain threshold, a large network can also lead to the fall of an epidemic. In the case of a virus, you may catch a flu that’s going around and then you develop an immunity to it; the flu can spread like wildfire, but once enough people have immunity, it has reached its natural end. (Shortform example: In the case of a social epidemic, a particular fashion trend may start among SoHo trendsetters and then is translated and spread to a larger, mainstream audience. But by the time the look is being replicated at JC Penney, it has been played out and lost its appeal not only to the trendsetters but even to the fashion-aware mainstream. The epidemic is over.)
Technology is creating an ever-expanding network, and people’s increasing interconnectedness is leading us to become immune to all the information and communication we receive. At a certain point, all that information becomes white noise and it is difficult for any one thing to grab our attention. And if you’re trying to start an epidemic, how do you make your message stand out from all that commotion?
This makes the Law of the Few even more critical, because people’s response to information overload is to limit their focus to trusted sources, like Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen.
If you’re trying to tip a social epidemic, how do you find the messengers to help you do that? Connectors naturally know many people and are relatively easy to find because they are inclined to find you. But Mavens can be harder to locate, so when the opportunity arises, it can be helpful to set Maven traps.
It’s not always possible to manufacture a Maven trap, but sometimes the right conditions create the opportunity. The key is to understand the principles and importance of word of mouth — especially in this age of isolation and immunity — so that you can recognize and seize opportunities when they arise.
Shortly after Lexus launched its first line of luxury cars, the company found two small problems that required a recall. This was embarrassing for a company that was marketing luxury, high-quality, and reliability, so Lexus went the extra mile with the recall: The company called each affected car owner about the recall, and when the dealerships did the repairs they also washed the cars and filled the gas tanks. What’s more, if customers lived far from a dealership, the dealer sent a mechanic to the customer’s home to do the repairs.
Lexus took this extra effort because they realized that these customers were Car Mavens (Shortform note: Gladwell reasons Car Mavens are the only people who would take a chance on a brand-new luxury car model). The Maven trap was practically set already with the recall, and all Lexus had to do was capitalize on the opportunity to do right by these Mavens so that they would, in turn, spread the word about the company’s exceptional customer service. And they did, contributing Lexus’s reputation for excellent customer service.