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mtvessel15 Jul 2006
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell - Abacus, 2000
* * *
Even David Attenborough was using it recently in relation to global warming. The term “Tipping Point” has expanded from its original context in sociology to become a modern cliché describing the moment at which an idea, fashion or technology starts to disseminate exponentially through society. The spread of its use is a self-referential example of the very phenomenon that it describes, and the fact that Malcolm Gladwell managed to engineer it through the writing of this book suggests that his analysis of the factors that can cause a tipping point to occur is largely correct. For me, however, it has a few holes.
The first problem is to identify the thing that is doing the spreading. Gladwell never does this properly - his examples include syphilis in Baltimore, Paul Revere’s news that “the British are coming”, the appeal of Sesame Street, the rise of Hush Puppies as a fashion icon, crime in New York, teenage smoking and suicide trends in Micronesia. The only thing that these have in common is their potential to spread in an epidemic fashion and a word is needed to describe phenomena which have this property. “Meme” seems an obvious candidate, but bizarrely neither it nor its creator, Richard Dawkins, are even mentioned by Gladwell, apparently because he doesn’t like the lack of precision in its definition (“a unit of cultural inheritance”, which I agree is annoyingly opaque). Fair enough, but his failure to come up with a precisely defined alternative weakens his own analysis.
Gladwell defines three “laws” or rules that govern the creation of tipping points - the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor and the Power of Context (why three? Gladwell doesn’t say, but I rather suspect that it has more to do with the use of the rhetorical “rule of three” to increase the stickiness of his laws than anything else). It is not clear whether all three factors are required for every tipping point, but since most of his examples illustrate just one of the rules, presumably not.
The Law of the Few refers to the idea that new trends are started by a relatively small group of opinion formers, which Gladwell categorises into Connectors (people with lots of social contacts), Mavens (information gatherers and sharers) and Salesmen (persuaders). He provides some interesting examples of each type, but doesn’t provide any statistical evidence for their influence in the creation of tipping points. The only example he does give - Paul Revere - is dodgy because of the amount of mythologisation of his story. His explanation for Revere’s success in rousing the folk around Boston (compared to William Dawes, who actually finished the ride) may be true but can’t be proved one way or the other. This feels like the classic journalistic fallacy of creating a story by inductively extrapolating a general trend from a few isolated cases (Gladwell is, by the way, a journalist).
The Stickiness Factor is where things start to get more interesting. Gladwell uses the example of Sesame Street and the way in which its messages about literacy were crafted to make them stick in children’s’ minds (its creators invented a “distraction test” which involved showing a series of still images at the same time as the show and watching which one kids paid attention to, which gave them a quantitative measure of which scripts worked and which didn’t). It would have been nice to have to have more of this - the psychological literature must be bulging with experiments, if only because so many journalists and advertisers would want to know what makes a message sticky.
Then we come to the Power of Context. The point here is that people’s actions are much more sensitive to their surroundings and circumstances than is sometimes thought to be the case. Gladwell illustrates this strikingly with an experiment in which seminarians were asked to prepare a short talk on a biblical subject and then walk over to another building to deliver it. En route they encountered a man slumped in an alley, evidently ill. The question was, which students stopped and helped? The rather surprising answer is that it wasn’t the students who joined the seminary out of a desire to help people rather than for personal spiritual fulfillment, nor the ones who had been asked to prepare their talk on the Good Samaritan and might therefore have recognised the parallel. It was the students who were told that they had plenty of time to get to the other building rather than being told that they were late. Behaviour, in other words, was dictated more by immediate context rather than personality traits or adopted philosophical models.
This gives rise to the hopeful suggestion that a relatively small (and cheap) change in social environment might be sufficient to cause significant changes in behaviour. The classic cited example is the cut in crime in New York in the 1990s which was reputedly caused by a zero tolerance policy towards graffiti and other minor misdemeanours. But how do we know that this was the important factor? Where are the controls that could eliminate other possible influences? Science is littered with examples where the “obvious” cause of an effect turns out to be the wrong one. And that’s the problem with the law of context. It’s too vague. Pretty much anything can become part of a person’s “context”, and can therefore be cited as the cause of a particular behaviour or trend that we are trying to explain. It’s great for just-so stories, but not for social engineering.
The intellectual weakness can be seen in Gladwell’s examination of teenage smoking. Firstly he contradicts himself by concluding that far from being context-driven, the tendency to become addicted to tobacco is a personality trait which is associated with emotional problems. The tipping point that makes someone becomes addicted to cigarettes is a combination of depression and the permission-giving example of an admired peer (which I suppose can be seen as “context” or “salesman”, depending on which law you are trying to illustrate). Gladwell’s solution? Since there’s nothing you can do about the peer effect, treat the depression. Hmm. Somehow I don’t think that putting a quarter of the nation’s youth into therapy is a practical solution to the problem of teenage smoking.
Now don’t get me wrong - this is a book with some very interesting facts and ideas which deserve further study and thought, and it is perhaps unfair to criticise a journalist for not having the intellectual rigour of an academic. But it has been presented as a major contribution to modern thought and I don't think that it is. The proof of the pudding, after all, is in the eating. If the three laws actually worked, there should have been an epidemic of original solutions to pressing social problems. Sadly, judging by the present state of political discourse, that's one tipping point that it didn't manage to create.
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell - Abacus, 2000
* * *
Even David Attenborough was using it recently in relation to global warming. The term “Tipping Point” has expanded from its original context in sociology to become a modern cliché describing the moment at which an idea, fashion or technology starts to disseminate exponentially through society. The spread of its use is a self-referential example of the very phenomenon that it describes, and the fact that Malcolm Gladwell managed to engineer it through the writing of this book suggests that his analysis of the factors that can cause a tipping point to occur is largely correct. For me, however, it has a few holes.
The first problem is to identify the thing that is doing the spreading. Gladwell never does this properly - his examples include syphilis in Baltimore, Paul Revere’s news that “the British are coming”, the appeal of Sesame Street, the rise of Hush Puppies as a fashion icon, crime in New York, teenage smoking and suicide trends in Micronesia. The only thing that these have in common is their potential to spread in an epidemic fashion and a word is needed to describe phenomena which have this property. “Meme” seems an obvious candidate, but bizarrely neither it nor its creator, Richard Dawkins, are even mentioned by Gladwell, apparently because he doesn’t like the lack of precision in its definition (“a unit of cultural inheritance”, which I agree is annoyingly opaque). Fair enough, but his failure to come up with a precisely defined alternative weakens his own analysis.
Gladwell defines three “laws” or rules that govern the creation of tipping points - the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor and the Power of Context (why three? Gladwell doesn’t say, but I rather suspect that it has more to do with the use of the rhetorical “rule of three” to increase the stickiness of his laws than anything else). It is not clear whether all three factors are required for every tipping point, but since most of his examples illustrate just one of the rules, presumably not.
The Law of the Few refers to the idea that new trends are started by a relatively small group of opinion formers, which Gladwell categorises into Connectors (people with lots of social contacts), Mavens (information gatherers and sharers) and Salesmen (persuaders). He provides some interesting examples of each type, but doesn’t provide any statistical evidence for their influence in the creation of tipping points. The only example he does give - Paul Revere - is dodgy because of the amount of mythologisation of his story. His explanation for Revere’s success in rousing the folk around Boston (compared to William Dawes, who actually finished the ride) may be true but can’t be proved one way or the other. This feels like the classic journalistic fallacy of creating a story by inductively extrapolating a general trend from a few isolated cases (Gladwell is, by the way, a journalist).
The Stickiness Factor is where things start to get more interesting. Gladwell uses the example of Sesame Street and the way in which its messages about literacy were crafted to make them stick in children’s’ minds (its creators invented a “distraction test” which involved showing a series of still images at the same time as the show and watching which one kids paid attention to, which gave them a quantitative measure of which scripts worked and which didn’t). It would have been nice to have to have more of this - the psychological literature must be bulging with experiments, if only because so many journalists and advertisers would want to know what makes a message sticky.
Then we come to the Power of Context. The point here is that people’s actions are much more sensitive to their surroundings and circumstances than is sometimes thought to be the case. Gladwell illustrates this strikingly with an experiment in which seminarians were asked to prepare a short talk on a biblical subject and then walk over to another building to deliver it. En route they encountered a man slumped in an alley, evidently ill. The question was, which students stopped and helped? The rather surprising answer is that it wasn’t the students who joined the seminary out of a desire to help people rather than for personal spiritual fulfillment, nor the ones who had been asked to prepare their talk on the Good Samaritan and might therefore have recognised the parallel. It was the students who were told that they had plenty of time to get to the other building rather than being told that they were late. Behaviour, in other words, was dictated more by immediate context rather than personality traits or adopted philosophical models.
This gives rise to the hopeful suggestion that a relatively small (and cheap) change in social environment might be sufficient to cause significant changes in behaviour. The classic cited example is the cut in crime in New York in the 1990s which was reputedly caused by a zero tolerance policy towards graffiti and other minor misdemeanours. But how do we know that this was the important factor? Where are the controls that could eliminate other possible influences? Science is littered with examples where the “obvious” cause of an effect turns out to be the wrong one. And that’s the problem with the law of context. It’s too vague. Pretty much anything can become part of a person’s “context”, and can therefore be cited as the cause of a particular behaviour or trend that we are trying to explain. It’s great for just-so stories, but not for social engineering.
The intellectual weakness can be seen in Gladwell’s examination of teenage smoking. Firstly he contradicts himself by concluding that far from being context-driven, the tendency to become addicted to tobacco is a personality trait which is associated with emotional problems. The tipping point that makes someone becomes addicted to cigarettes is a combination of depression and the permission-giving example of an admired peer (which I suppose can be seen as “context” or “salesman”, depending on which law you are trying to illustrate). Gladwell’s solution? Since there’s nothing you can do about the peer effect, treat the depression. Hmm. Somehow I don’t think that putting a quarter of the nation’s youth into therapy is a practical solution to the problem of teenage smoking.
Now don’t get me wrong - this is a book with some very interesting facts and ideas which deserve further study and thought, and it is perhaps unfair to criticise a journalist for not having the intellectual rigour of an academic. But it has been presented as a major contribution to modern thought and I don't think that it is. The proof of the pudding, after all, is in the eating. If the three laws actually worked, there should have been an epidemic of original solutions to pressing social problems. Sadly, judging by the present state of political discourse, that's one tipping point that it didn't manage to create.
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Date: 2006-07-19 08:41 pm (UTC)