By Malcolm Gladwell
How small changes trigger social epidemics
Subject
Themes
Social change does not unfold gradually. It erupts. Ideas, behaviours, and products spread through populations in the same way that viruses sweep through communities, and they do so according to three deceptively simple principles: the influence of a remarkable few, the stickiness of the message itself, and the power of the surrounding context.
Social change does not unfold gradually. It erupts. Ideas, behaviours, and products spread through populations in the same way that viruses sweep through communities, and they do so according to three deceptively simple principles: the influence of a remarkable few, the stickiness of the message…
When The Tipping Point appeared in 2000, it entered a publishing landscape hungry for accessible explanations of complex social phenomena. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw the emergence of what might be called the popular social science genre, in which journalists and academics translated research…
Most people assume that social change requires mass participation, that movements succeed because millions of individuals simultaneously decide to act differently. The reality is far more concentrated. A disproportionate share of influence flows through a tiny number of exceptional people whose…
Not every message that reaches the right audience produces action. Information can be perfectly distributed through ideal channels by the most connected and persuasive individuals, yet still fail to change behaviour if it lacks what might be called stickiness: the quality that makes a message…
The most unsettling insight to emerge from the study of social epidemics is that human behaviour is far less stable and far more context-dependent than most people believe. The conventional view holds that character is the primary driver of action: honest people behave honestly, compassionate people…
Social epidemics do not spread uniformly through populations. They move through groups, and the size and structure of those groups determine whether an idea gains momentum or fizzles out. One of the most striking findings to emerge from anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and organisational…
Between the creative fringe where new ideas are born and the mainstream where they achieve mass adoption lies a dangerous gap that most innovations never cross. Business consultant Geoffrey Moore called this "the chasm," and its existence explains why so many promising trends, products, and social…
In the mid-1990s, Baltimore experienced a syphilis epidemic so sudden that the number of children born with the disease increased by 500 percent in a single year. Three experts offered three separate explanations, each pointing to a different mechanism of change. The Centers for Disease Control…
On the night of 18 April 1775, Paul Revere rode thirteen miles from Boston to Lexington, knocking on doors and spreading the alarm that British troops were marching. By dawn, local militias had mobilised across the countryside. That same night, a tanner named William Dawes carried the identical…
In the late 1960s, television producer Joan Ganz Cooney set out to create a literacy epidemic among preschoolers. Her weapon was a one-hour daily television show aimed at three-, four-, and five-year-olds, and her goal was to give disadvantaged children enough of a head start that they would arrive…
On 22 December 1984, Bernhard Goetz boarded a New York City subway car and sat down next to four young black men. When Troy Canty and Barry Allen approached him asking for five dollars, and James Ramseur gestured toward a bulge in his pocket, Goetz pulled out a chrome-plated Smith and Wesson .38 and…
Rebecca Wells published Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood in 1996 to modest sales of 15,000 hardcover copies. When she gave a reading in Greenwich, Connecticut, seven people showed up. A year later, the paperback appeared, and something strange began to happen. Groups of six or seven women…
Airwalk began as a $13 million skateboarding shoe company based outside San Diego, rooted in Southern California beach and skate culture. Its canvas shoes in wild colours had a devoted following among hardcore skateboarders, but the company wanted to grow. In the early 1990s, the owners hired a…
On the South Pacific islands of Micronesia, a seventeen-year-old named Sima got into an argument with his father over a failed errand. His father, furious, waved a machete and told him to leave. Sima walked to the empty family house, borrowed a pen from his younger brother along the way, and hanged…
Georgia Sadler, a nurse in San Diego, wanted to raise awareness of diabetes and breast cancer in the black community. She began by holding seminars in churches after Sunday services. The results were discouraging. Out of congregations of two hundred, only about twenty people would stay, and those…
By Malcolm Gladwell
Subject
Themes
Social change does not unfold gradually. It erupts. Ideas, behaviours, and products spread through populations in the same way that viruses sweep through communities, and they do so according to three deceptively simple principles: the influence of a remarkable few, the stickiness of the message itself, and the power of the surrounding context.