The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Malcolm Gladwell (New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown, and Company, 2000). 294 pages + index.

The world could use more thinkers like Malcolm Gladwell. Even in the case of The Tipping Point, where the theories and ideas strongly outweigh the quality of the argument, what Gladwell does in questioning “why?” and then looking for rather nontraditional answers is an underutilized exercise.

The premise of Gladwell’s first book is that there comes a point where some simple, seemingly insignificant influence or alteration pushes a product or idea over the edge. More importantly, there are three kinds of people required for this to happen: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

The most essential leap in understanding that one must make in order to accept the tipping point is that human behavior is actually epidemic in many ways (Gladwell uses syphilis as an example). Because of this condition, impact is often able to override logic in such a way that results in the trends of the modern world. Moreover, tipping points seem to be antithetical to typical human behavior, which is infinitely more gradualist, in the way they explode and evoke drastic, nearly instantaneous changes. This is where the work of the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen come in. Their presence allows for magnification of the influence of the few elements influencing the tip, the sustainability and resonance of the epidemic, and the development of the proper context in which to ensure generational success.

Gladwell’s theoretical construct is sound, but his approach to examples proving his theory turns out to be more erratic than one might expect. While the reasons that Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues stuck around are just as convincing as the reasons that New York City crime dropped drastically in the wake of Bernie Goetz, I remain wholly unconvinced that Peter Jennings’s personal preference for Ronald Reagan, manifested in a slight smile, influenced the vote of ABC’s viewers. This last is an example of the general problem with much of Gladwell’s approach. Because his evidence base is largely sociological scholarship (and he trained as a journalist) he wields sociological arguments as near-fact, never pausing to consider the problems they may present.

Sociology from the outset is difficult for a logical mind to accept, as human behavior is so reliant on an infinite and always changing number of variables. Gladwell even contradicts himself, writing, “The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment” (163). If this is true – and it is a point I find compelling – then there should be no place in human behavior where our world can be “tipped” by external influences; at least not in some of the ways that Gladwell is describing them. In fact, Gladwell likes to employ a tactic I have just now coined Improper Variable Weight. In the real world, where the human condition is so fluid, to ignore the need for constant context (a requirement Gladwell himself describes!) and fail to understand the spectrum of the systems of influence is self-defeating and disappointing.

Overall the book is fascinating, and Gladwell most definitely has opened my mind to ways of analyzing trends not only in human behavior but everywhere they are observable. I can also only assume that each person’s reaction to the book will be influenced in advance by your feelings about science, sociology, logic, and knowledge. And if there’s something for everyone, then the book is, by definition, a success.