Gladwell's The Tipping Point: a review

What do syphilis in Baltimore, Sesame Street, Hush Puppies shoes, and crime reduction in New York City all have in common? They are all epidemics. They started with a small group of people, reached some ethereal level and exploded across a community, be it local, national, or worldwide. They are also prominently featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell examines epidemics to explore the reasons why these disparate things have been able to affect so many people. He seems personally most interested in those epidemics that can make a positive difference in people's lives, such as the learning epidemics caused by Sesame Street and Blues Clues. Regardless, he traces the elements involved in the spread of many different epidemics–be they fashion statements, non-crime waves or messages such as Paul Revere's famous cry of impending battle.

Central to the book is the idea of a tipping point: An idea, fashion statement or germ--a contagion--may exist at some basal level within a population, infecting roughly the same number of people that overcome it in any given time period. Some stimulus can cause an imbalance in this equilibrium, though, and the contagion will start to reach more new people than it leaves behind. This is the tipping point, and an epidemic follows. Without that push to disrupt the equilibrium, it may never reach that critical mass, that threshold it needs to cross in order to infect the whole population. Gladwell's analysis of epidemics centers around this idea: How can we identify strategies to "tip" phenomena into epidemics?

The idea of an equilibrium is central to the analyses that engineers (like me) perform. Every analysis begins with a system (such as a rope supporting some hanging weight) and a basis of evaluating that system (such as the system's momentum). Due to the conservation of momentum, which states that momentum cannot be created or destroyed, every bit of momentum that enters the system will either be accumulated, or it must leave the system in some way. Equilibrium occurs when the accumulation term is zero: then everything that enters the system also leaves the system. In the case of momentum, accumulation results in motion. The rope with the hanging weight is at rest, so it is not accumulating momentum, and it is in equilibrium. (Incidentally, this means that the sum of forces acting on it is zero, and the tension in the rope can be calculated.) The upshot of this is that equilibria can be described mathematically. As soon as Gladwell mentioned the word 'equilibrium', I began to formulate a mathematical model to track the spread of an epidemic throughout a population.

The model works roughly thus: The system is a population of individuals, and the quantity being tracked is the spread of a particular contagion. Each member of the population in question would have a state, either "infected" or "not infected." They would also contact "x" number of people in a given time step "t", and, if infected, have a "y"% chance of "infecting" each of the people they came into contact with. Each individual would remain infected for "z" time steps. Each of these variables would be different for each person in the population (except for the time step, which would necessarily be the same for all), and, when all members of the population were considered, the total spread of the contagion could be tracked. You could predict the percent of a population "infected" with some contagion after a time period by setting an initial condition (maybe only one individual is infected to start with) and extrapolating to the desired number of time steps. Just as Gladwell attempts to cut to the heart of the issue, this is the simplest model I could think of to describe the spread of a contagion.

Gladwell defines the transmission of epidemics by three laws. The first of these, "The Law of the Few," explores three special types of people that can help an idea become an epidemic: his “Connectors,” “Salespeople” and "Mavens." These are the people who can tip that contagion over the edge into boundless effect. In my model, these are people who have exceptional coefficients "x", "y", and "z". The first of these, the Connectors, spread contagions exceptionally well simply by the sheer magnitude of people they know. Their "x" is through the roof. If I am studying the spread of the newest pop hit, “Bulletproof” by La Roux, an average person would pass the song along to maybe two people per day. The Connectors would get ten people to listen to it: they know more people, they are in contact with them more, and their contact is meaningful. These people have huge social networks.

What if you don’t like pop? Especially dance pop from the UK, like "Bulletproof"? Gladwell’s Salespeople will convince you that you do. Their "y" is near 100%: they have the ability to transmit ideas to everyone they meet. Gladwell’s Mavens are an interesting case. These people are experts in a narrow field. As a result, they hold a lot of sway when giving advice about that field, and people they "infect" are likely to stick with whatever the Maven is spreading. Given the right contagion--something in their field--they have a high "y," and the "z" of those they infect is likely to rise. Mavens also practice selection among contagions--they will only select the best. The case of the Maven may not apply as well to the spread of a pop hit. Maybe a music reviewer would be a maven, and a favorable review would encourage others to listen.

In this way, these three types of people infect more than their fair share; they diffuse ideas farther than normal people. Whether from sheer numbers as with the Connectors, from careful selection as with the Mavens, or with efficacy of transmission as with the Salespeople, these special individuals have the ability to tip things into epidemics. Gladwell identified them through studying epidemics he was familiar with and by thinking about extraordinary people he knew. I could also have identified them by analysis of my model: They are the individuals with exceptional coefficients.

When evaluating any system that is described by a model, it is helpful to explore the ramifications that changing each variable of the model has. This is accomplished by holding all the variables except one constant and then manipulating that one. Alternatively, one variable can be held constant and the others changed to identify the restrictions imposed by that variable on the system. In this way, the effects of each variable, that is, each critical component of the system, can be identified. Just by looking at my simple model, I disagree that the three types of people who are Gladwell's Few would be the only ones who would have the power to transform a contagion into an epidemic–There are other ways to manipulate the "x," "y" and "z" values to produce extraordinary individuals. What about someone with a high "z" who harbors a contagion for a long time–a 'Convert?' These people would be able to upset the equilibrium by transmitting the contagion for a long time–they will be singing “Bulletproof” for weeks rather than just the day or two after they hear it, and they will be able to tip this phenomenon just like the Few can. Although Gladwell did not uncover any such others through his exploration of epidemics, a simple analysis of the model shows that more types of individuals with the power to tip things could exist. If we are interested in the identification of individuals to help us tip our own epidemics, shouldn't we spread the net as far as possible?

What about the media? It turns out that people do not only communicate on a one-to-one basis. The media are an alternate route to the Few for tipping epidemics. Sort of like super-Connectors, the media have a huge audience to whom they can spread information. Indeed, as Gladwell addresses his second criteria, “The Stickiness Factor,” he talks about children's television as a vehicle for learning epidemics, a case in which messages are disseminated entirely by the media, not by the Few. Even if the media are considered within Gladwell's framework as individual Connectors (or as one big mega-Connector), they throw the whole system out of whack due to the huge audience they command, orders of magnitude higher than anything that could be achieved by one of the Few. Why should we even bother looking for these Few if the conglomerate media is the ultimate Connector, and can tip our ideas into epidemics?

The internet is a medium that blurs the distinction between the Few and the general population. Through the proliferation of email, blogs, forums and social networking sites, we are able to communicate with each other much more rapidly and voluminously than nine years ago when Gladwell wrote his book. For my model, this means that everybody's "x" is elevated: we are all pseudo-Connectors. Connectors are no longer critical links in the chain that connects the population. I can message hundreds of people with the click of a mouse on Facebook, and link them to “Bulletproof” on Youtube. This glut of information necessarily devalues it: We as listeners cannot pay attention to it all. Mavens are drowned out by thousands of their peers reviewing the same items on Amazon; however, maybe this connectedness would allow an ultimate Maven to exist. The internet would empower the Maven to reach a huge audience. Maybe the Few can draw on the internet just as others do. Regardless, new forms of communication have changed the roles of the Few.

One very important distinction heretofore not considered is that different individuals will have different reactions to different contagions. A Maven is a perfect example: they will only have 'tipping power' for things they are experts at. From the perspective of my model, this means that considering different contagions requires the calculation of new coefficients for each individual. This presents a huge task, and there may be no way to correctly identify what the coefficients are; indeed this goes beyond tracking the spread of an epidemic, and instead delves into the realm of innovation, discovering new contagions. My model is not a useful tool for finding which things will spread, but rather how they will spread. The contagion up until this point has been an abstraction. To more fully explore the spread of epidemics, Gladwell turns his attention to the message that is being spread.

Gladwell's second law is the "Stickiness Factor," with which he explores the reason that some things are contagions--why do they 'stick' to us? He here focuses not on the population through which the epidemic spreads, or the Few who tip it; he looks at the contents of the contagion. The Few can’t do anything with an impotent virus or a worthless idea. It must be "sticky" enough to be absorbed before it can be passed on.

As his primary examples for this law, Gladwell highlights the television programs Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. He shows them as examples of intentionally engineering the 'stickiness' of a message, in this case increasing the stickiness of learning for children. The creators of Sesame Street studied children and what was sticky with them. They then tailored their show to meet those criteria. The sticky factor came not just from the information, but also the way it was presented, catering to children’s short attention spans. Blue’s Clues took the information and success of Sesame Street to another level by further developing the stickiness of the information, repeating it five times every week. This is a very interesting concept, that presentation can change the stickiness of a message without altering the content.

This stickiness factor is not taken into account in my simple model. It is assumed that the contagion will be sticky, that it can be transmitted, and that it will spread. This is the case for most of the things we typically consider contagions, i.e. diseases. With the example of education, Gladwell shows how non-inherently transmissible things can also become contagions. This has huge implications: We can engineer virtually anything to become an epidemic if we can figure out how to make it sticky. We can spread information, ideas and positive change just like H1N1 has spread across the world, if we only figure out how to make our information stickier.

My model is much too simplistic to describe a real-world epidemic, but so is Gladwell's commentary up to this point. He had been hinting at it, like when he described some indefinable quality that some Salespeople posses, but he truly explores the issue in the third section of the book, "The Power of Context." Here he states the very obvious point that circumstances matter. People and ideas do not exist in vacuums. There is more than just stickiness and personality type at play. We as humans have complex subconscious psychological processes that pick up on subtle environmental cues we may not even be aware of. If the song “Bulletproof” is used as a theoretical example in a class project, the context informs the reader that it is not meant as a serious suggestion. The would-be epidemic tipper needs to consider the context that the message will be transmitted in.

Within a population, up until this point, only the transmitters of epidemics (The Connectors, the Mavens, and the Salespeople) have been considered, but the recipient of the transmission is just as important. Communication is a complicated subject that demands a lot from both the sender and the receiver to be effective. The great managerial writer, Drucker, addressed this in a 1974 essay called "Functioning Communications." He delineates there the effort required by the communicator to reach the listener due to differences in mental processes. Communications can fall upon deaf ears when the communicator fails to take into account the listener's mindset. People hear what they want to hear. People's brains are hard-wired to process stimuli in certain fashions. Drucker writes how communication is almost a battle: As the communicator, you have to bring the listener around to your way of thinking. You have to bypass the natural route in the listener's mind and develop new pathways. Otherwise, they will hear what they want to hear, and not what you want them to hear.

Effective communication from the communicator's standpoint demands messages that speak to the audience. Effective communication from the listener's standpoint demands a receptive attitude and a commitment to the consideration of new ideas. This is a hard thing to accomplish when so much of the information processing that goes on in our brains occurs below our consciousness. It's almost like holding you breath: you can only do it for so long before your natural processes take over. For Gladwell, this is addressed as Context. Some messages can be groomed for mass audiences (like Sesame Street), but I think enough variation exists to provide significant barriers for the universal transmission of most messages.

Should my model include another variable, "w," for the receptiveness of an individual to the spreading contagion? This would make the model more robust by considering the receiver's situation. At the same time, it would add another level of difficulty to the actual application of the model to a given system. Defining each individual's "x" should be rather straightforward, and it should be proportional to the number of people they know. Defining each person's "z" depends on how long they are likely to hold on to the contagion in question. The "y" and "w" terms, though, are highly subjective and variable, and depend on the intricacies of interpersonal communication. Each individual's "y" and "w" would change not only with the contagion, but also with the other members of the population with whom the individual interacts. One individual (let's call him Dave) will have a different "y" depending on how effective his communication of the message to another member of the population. Dave's "w" will also change depending on how receptive he is to others' communications. Although the model may describe the spread of an epidemic sufficiently, setting it up, that is, defining the variables, is nearly impossible.

Gladwell devotes considerable space toward discussing nuanced studies of various epidemics, and how his three laws played into them. One example I found particularly interesting told of suicide in the nation of Micronesia: Unheard of before a teenager took his life in the 1960s over a minor disagreement with his parents, a suicide epidemic soon swept the nation. The power of context played a powerful role here: that first suicide gave permission for the rest. Stickiness was important too: suicide, unfortunately, is absolutely sticky, and there is no way to make it less sticky. Try it once, and you are dead. One thing this example lacked, though, was any tie-in to the Few. No Connectors advertised suicide to their many acquaintances, no Mavens told the best methods, and no Salesmen advocated their friends try it. As far as I can tell, the first suicide was reported in the newspapers, and the epidemic spread; the media again was the culprit for tipping this epidemic.

This is indicative of the book as a whole: Gladwell presents a wealth of provocative ideas, a wealth of interesting examples, and a wealth of succinct conclusions. His writing is expertly woven and watertight. His book is chock full of marvelous anecdotes; however, nowhere does he give an example that effectively demonstrates the importance of all of his three laws in causing epidemics to tip. This does not mean his ideas are worthless; rather, he has presented tools that can be used to create change in society, in our thinking patterns, and in the way we spread our messages. If we want to spread things that really matter, such as anti-crime waves and learning, we need to identify ways that will help these things, which are not inherently transmitted, to spread to epidemic proportions. Seen as a historical reckoning of the factors involved in the spread of epidemics, Gladwell's Tipping Point excels. He fails, however, as I did, to define a general model that we can use to predict the spread of epidemics.