The document provides a summary of key concepts from Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point". It discusses how small changes can have large effects through the principles of epidemics and tipping points. The three main rules that drive social epidemics are the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. Epidemics are driven by exceptional people known as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. Groups of around 150 people are most effective for reaching tipping points. Case studies on rumors, smoking, and suicide illustrate how epidemics spread and can be influenced. The conclusion emphasizes that social change is driven by a few key factors and intelligent action in the right places can tip the world

1. The Tipping Point
by Malcolm Gladwell
Destiny Reid, Morgan Misak, John Medina, Haley Lamm, and Aaron Covell

2. Introduction
• The incidental touch: (hushpuppies)
• The Critical Point (crime rates)
• Contagious Behavior
• Little changes have big effects
• Incremental changes

3. Beginning of Epidemics and The Tipping
Point
• Contagious Behavior; little things have big effects; change is not gradual but
one dramatic moment are principals of an epidemic
• Name given to one dramatic moment in an epidemic, when everything
changes at once is called the Tipping Point
• Sudden Change is at the center of the Tipping Point and is the hardest to
understand
• Geometric Progression

4. The Tipping Point
• Moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point
• Automatically assume that neighborhoods and social problems decline in a
steady progression
• Do not decline steadily at all, at the tipping point control can be lost and
everything can disintegrate
• Unexpected becomes expected

5. Two Main Questions
• Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others
don’t?
• What can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our
own?

6. Chapter 1: The Three Rules of Epidemics
• Only takes a small change to shatter an epidemics equilibrium
• More than one way to tip an epidemic
• When an epidemic’s equilibrium tips its because something has happened,
some change has occurred
• 80/20 Principle

7. Social Epidemics
• Driven by efforts of a handful of exceptional people
• Law of the Few
• Stickiness in tipping: Critical component in the tipping point
• Stickiness factor: specific ways of making a contagious message memorable
• Power of Context: human beings are more sensitive to our environment then
we may seem

8. People in Epidemics
• Strongly influenced by their situation, circumstances and conditions and
particulars of the environments in which they operate
• Even the smallest and subtlest and most unexpected factors can affect they
way we act
• When people are in a group, responsibility is diffused (assume someone else
will take responsibility)
• There really isn’t a problem if someone else isn’t assuming responsibility

9. Rules of the Tipping Point
• Law of the Few
• The Stickiness Factor
• The power of Context
• Provide us with direction for reaching the tipping point

10. Chapter 2: The Law of the Few
• People critical to social epidemics
• Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen
• Word of Mouth Epidemic
• Success of any kind is dependent on the involvement of people with a
particular set of social gifts
• Associate with people who occupy the same physical spaces we do

11. Connectors
• Know lots of people
• Introduce us to our social circles
• People who we rely on the most without noticing
• Special gift of bringing people together

12. Chapter 2 Continued: Intro to Mavens
• Maven is one who accumulates knowledge
• Information specialists
• Not many people compare prices; rely on Mavens
• Have info on a lot of different products, prices, and places
• Well over half of Americans know a Maven

13. Downfalls of Mavens
• Desire of service and influence can be taken too far
• Can become nosy
• Not a persuader, but educator and helper
• Have to remember that it’s “their life”

14. Mavens, Connectors & Salesmen
ConnectorsMavens Salesmen
• Data banks
• Provide the message
• “Social glue”
• Spread the message
• Skills to persuade us when we
are unconvinced of what we are
hearing
• Are as critical to the “tipping”
of word-of-mouth epidemics as
the other two

15. Subtleties of Persuasion
• Market research study by a company making high-tech headphones
• Wanted to “test how well headset worked while student was in motion”
• Dancing up and down, nod heads vigorously up and down, or side to side
• Listened to radio about tuition increase after song was played
• Question asked afterwards:
“What do you feel would be an appropriate dollar amount for undergraduate tuition
next year?”

16. Results
• Results correlated with the student’s head movement
• Reason 1: Subtle verbal message; harder to insulate themselves against
• Reason 2: Nonverbal cues more important than verbal cues
• Reason 3: Persuasion often works in ways that we do not appreciate

17. Interactional Synchrony
• Research has found that two people will gesture and talk in harmony
• When 2 people talk, volume and pitch come into balance
• Speech rate and latency equalizes
• Conversational patterns almost instantly reach a common ground

18. Persuasive Personality: Our “Super-Reflex”
• We are barely aware of it
• You can draw others into your own rhythms and dictate terms of interactions
• Students with high degree of synchrony with teachers more happy
• Imitate each other’s emotions to express support
• “Mimicry”: If I can make you smile, I can make you happy

19. Chapter 3: The Stickiness Factor
Joan Cooney & sesame street
• Target was 3-5 year olds
• Agent of infection was television
• “Virus” she wanted to spread was literacy
• Hope was that the show could become educational Tipping Point

20. The Quality of Sickness
• If you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them
• Kids are distracted by toys, but still understand show
• Can gain no more from increased attention
• Kids watch when they understand and look away when they are confused

21. Chapter 4: The Power of Context (Part One)
The Stickiness Factor
• Sesame Street
• Blue’s Clues
• Mutual Exclusivity

22. The Power of Context
• Bernie Goetz
• Broken Windows Theory
• Zimbardo Prison Experiment

23. Chapter 5: The Power of Context (Part Two)
• Groups have a critical role in social epidemics
• They create peer pressure and social norms that influence the beginnings of epidemics
• The spread of any new and contagious ideology has a lot to do with the skillful use of
group power
• Small, close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic potential message or idea

24. Social Epidemic Examples
John Wesley – A Connector
• He would form the most enthusiastic followers
into religious societies
• Each member was required to attend weekly
meetings and adhere to the strict code of
conduct or else they were expelled from the
group
• He wasn’t one person with ties to many groups,
but was one person with ties to many groups

25. Social Epidemic Examples
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
by Rebecca Wells
• Book showed up on the first best seller
list in Northern California
• San Francisco is home to one of the
country’s strongest book-group cultures
• Inspired emotion, reflection, and
discussion for groups of women in
“book-groups”

26. What Are The Most Effective Groups In
Reaching A Tipping Point?
Is there a simple rule of thumb that distinguishes a group with real social
authority from a group with little power at all?

27. Human Limitations
• There seems to be some limitation built into us either by learning or by the design of our
nervous system
• Magical Number Seven- Bell wanted to have a number to be as long as possible so they
could have as large a capacity as possible, but not so that people couldn’t remember the
numbers

28. Key Definitions
• Channel Capacity: the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information
• Intellectual Capacity: our ability to process raw information
• Emotional Channel Capacity (Sympathy Group): the people we devote most of our
attention to, the people you know whose death would leave you truly devastated
• Social Channel Capacity: deals with complex thought and reasoning, related to the
neocortex
• Transactive Memory System: based on the understanding about who is best suited to
remember what kinds of things

29. Robin Dunbar
• The larger the neocortex of any species of primate, the larger the average size of the groups
they live with
• Brains get bigger in order to handle the complexities of larger social groups
• Groups have to understand personal dynamics of the group, juggle different personalities,
keep people happy, manage the demands on your own time and attention
• A small increase in the size of a group creates a significant additional social and intellectual
burden

30. Dunbar’s Number
• Neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens: 147.8 rounded up to 150
• Represents the max. number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social
relationship with
• “At this size, orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of
personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups, this becomes
impossible.”

31. The Rule of 150
• Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss
• It’s knowing people well enough that what they think of you matters
• Everyone shares a common relationship
• The paradox of the movement: In order to create one contagious movement,
you often have to create many small movements first

32. Chapter 6: Case Study: Rumors, Sneakers, and
the Power of Translation
Why did Airwalk tip?
• The Lambeis marketing strategy
• Diffusion model: detailed, academic way of looking at how a contagious idea
or product or innovation moves through a population

33. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen
• Take ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate
them into a language the rest of us can understand
• Innovators try something new
• Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen sees it and adopts
• Rumors are the most contagious of all social messages

34. Chapter 7: Case Study: Suicide, Smoking, and
the Search for the Unsticky Cigarette
• Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger
• Stickiness is primarily a property of the message
• It is important to keep these two concepts separate, because they follow very
different patterns and suggest very different strategies

35. Suicide Epidemic
• Sima, a 17 year old boy who lived on the South Pacific islands of Micronesia
• In the early 1960’s suicide on the islands of Micronesia was almost unknown
– in the 1980’s the islands had the highest rate of suicide in the world
• Micronesia 160 per 100,000 citizens
• United States 22 per 100,000 citizens

36. Suicide Continued
• He takes a rope and makes a noose, but does not suspend himself, as in a
typical Western hanging
• He ties the noose to a low branch, window, or doorknob and leans forward,
so that the weight of his body draws the noose tightly around his neck
• Slowly cutting off the flow of blood to the brain; Unconsciousness follows
• Death results from anoxia – the shortage of blood to the brain

37. Suicide Continued
• David Phillips, sociologist at the University of California at San Diego, has
conducted a number of studies on suicide
• Immediately after stories about suicides appeared, suicides in the area served
by the newspaper jumped: In national stories, the rate jumped as well
• Marilyn Monroe’s death was followed by a temporary 12 percent increase in
national suicide rate

38. Suicide Continued
• The kind of contagion Phillips is talking about isn’t something rational or
even necessarily conscious; it’s not a persuasive argument: It’s something
much more subtle than that
• Perceived as “permission” it gives other people – particularly those
vulnerable to suggestion because of immaturity or mental illness – to engage
in the deviant act as well
• This person is the Tipping Person, the Salesmen

39. Smoking Epidemic
• Does teen smoking follow this same logic?
• Teen smoking does not simply illustrate the Law of the Few, it is also a very
good illustration of the Stickiness Factor
• In this epidemic there are also Tipping People, Salesmen, permission-givers

40. Smoking Continued
• Can you remember your interaction with cigarettes?
• Gladwell conducted a questionnaire to several hundred people and
discovered the answers were strikingly similarly
• Smoking seemed to evoke a particular kind of childhood memory – vivid,
precise, emotionally charged

41. Smoking Continued
• Hans Eysenck, British psychologist, argues that smokers and non smokers
can be separated along very simple personality lines
• The quintessential hard-core smoker, according to Eysenck, is an extrovert
• If you bundle all of these extroverts’ traits together – defiance, sexual
precocity, honesty, impulsiveness, indifference to the opinion of others,
sensation seeking – you come up with an almost perfect definition of the
kind of person many adolescents are drawn too

42. Smoking Continued
• The significance of someone's environment and nature plays a major role in
whether this epidemic
• Saul Shiffman, University of Pittsburgh psychologist, describes people who
smoke no more than five cigarettes a day but smoke at least four days a week
as “chippers”
• Shiffman calls “chippers” the equivalent of social drinkers; they are people in
control of their habit

43. Smoking Continued
• To solve this epidemic you must ask two questions
• Should we try to make smoking less contagious, to stop the Salesmen who
spread the smoking virus?
• Or are we better off trying to make it less sticky, to look for ways to turn all
smokers into “chippers”?

44. The Unsticky Cigarette
• There already is a ban on advertisement, strict laws, and higher prices
• This however, isn’t working, instead its motivating adolescence who have
smoking personalities to continue/experiment with cigarettes
• Controlling the contagion isn’t working

45. The Unsticky Cigarette Continued
• “Chippers” who smoke up to five cigarettes a day consume between four to
six milligrams of nicotine, which is approximately the addiction threshold
• Benowitz and Jack Henningfield proposed a way to control the Stickiness of
cigarettes
• By lowering the level of nicotine – if someone smokes 30 cigarettes in a day
could only get five milligrams of nicotine within a 24-hour period – it would
reduce the the Stickiness of a Cigarette

46. The Unsticky Cigarette Continued
• This level of nicotine should be adequate to prevent or limit the
development of addiction in most young people
• At the same time it may provide enough nicotine for taste and sensory
stimulation
• Cigarette smoking would be less like the flu and more like the common cold;
easily caught but easily defeated

47. Chapter 8: Conclusion
• Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas
• The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it
involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time
and cost

48. Conclusion Continued
• To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human
communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules
• Social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature
of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable

49. Conclusion Continued
• “Tipping points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the
power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like
an immovable, implacable place. It’s not. With the slightest push – in just the
right place – it can be tipped.” –Malcolm Gladwell

50. Afterword
• “I wrote my book without any clear expectation of who would read it, or
what, if anything, it would be useful for.”
• One of the things that motivated Gladwell to write The Tipping Point was the
mystery of word of mouth – a phenomenon that everyone seemed to agree
was important but no one knew how to define

51. Afterword: Understanding the Age of Isolation
• School Shooting Epidemic – Columbine
• Epidemics in isolation follow a mysterious, internal script that makes sense
only in the closed world that teenagers inhabit

52. Afterword: Beware of the Rise of Immunity
• One thing Gladwell didn’t talk much on, but which he has been asked over
and over again, is the effect of the internet
• Kevin Kelly, guru of the New Economy
• “Fax Effect” or the law of plentitude
• The fact that everyone has a phone makes the phone network very powerful,
in theory

53. Afterword: Finding the Mavens
• Ivory Soap and Lexus – Maven Trap
• Distinguished not by worldly status and achievements, but by the particular
standing they have among their friends
• People look up to them not out of envy, but out of love, which is why these
kids of personalities have the power to break through the rising tide of
isolation and immunity