THE TIPPING POINT: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, March, 2000 by Timothy Noah

To demonstrate the historical impact connectors can have, Gladwell cites Paul Revere. It's well known that Revere's midnight ride in 1775 alerted the people of Boston and its environs to the imminent British attack, and helped the colonial militia defeat the British at Concord. Less well known is that a tanner named William Dawes simultaneously tried to spread the word through an alternate route, but that the towns he rode through failed to rally in any significant numbers against the British. The reason, Gladwell theorizes, is that Dawes didn't know the right people to contact--that is to say, he didn't know the key people who would activate participation the next day by lots of other people. Dawes, according to Gladwell, was just an ordinary guy, whereas Revere, an intensely social person, was "the Lois Weisberg of his day." (As this example shows, Gladwell has a gift for making his points with great economy and humor.)

Simply communicating information, however, doesn't necessarily create an epidemic. Another crucially important factor, according to Gladwell, is "stickiness." By this Gladwell means that the information has to be compelling. Inherent worth helps, of course; in the example of Revere's ride, there was obviously great interest in the impending invasion. But gimmicks can work too. Gladwell tells the story of a hugely "sticky" direct marketing campaign launched in the 1970s for the Columbia Record Club by a man named Lester Wunderman. Wunderman took out TV ads in the wee hours of the morning directing viewers to look up print ads for the club in certain publications. If a viewer found a little gold box on the coupon in the ad, he got a free record. Even though the TV ads reached a small audience, and even though the gold box gambit was, as Gladwell puts it, "a really cheesy idea," and even though (as Gladwell is too polite to point out) the Columbia Record Club is probably a pain in the ass to belong to, the campaign got lots of people to examine print ads for the club, which in turn got huge numbers of people to sign up. It was, in a word, "sticky."

The final component of Gladwell's scheme is context. One of Gladwell's more intriguing examples of context is the story of Kitty Genovese, a young woman in Queens who was stabbed to death in 1964. The story is a famous example of urban horror because it later came out that 38 neighbors watched the stabbing from their windows, but none called the police. As articulated, at the time by Abe Rosenthal (then the Times city editor) and others, the presumed lesson was that big-city life makes people monstrously insensitive. But Gladwell cites a study by two New York City psychologists to argue that, in fact, the problem was that the eyewitnesses were too acutely sensitive to what was going on. Each eyewitness was aware not only that Genovese was being stabbed, but that many others were watching the horrific scene; each assumed one of the other eyewitnesses would alert the authorities. "The lesson is not that no one called despite the fact that 38 heard her scream," Gladwell sums up pithily. "It's that no one called because 38 people heard her scream. Ironically, had she been attacked on a lonely street with just one witness, she might have lived."