Mental Epidemics: A Review of 'The Tipping Point' by Malcolm Gladwell

Published in the New Scientist: 6 May 2000 issue 2237

Getting your idea across is simpler than you think-whether it's a fashion statement, a social reform or, maybe, a scientific paper. Paul Marsden finds a manual for changing minds entertaining but faintly sinister

WANT to change the world? Find out how in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. He has "the rules" for engineering social epidemics. You'll see how to turn an idea, product or practice into a virulent mind virus that will sweep through society to become the latest craze, fad or fashion.

A social epidemic begins when a successful idea passes a threshold that epidemiologists call the tipping point, at which the growth in its sales or spread ceases to be linear and becomes exponential. Tamagotchis, those demanding little virtual pets, certainly reached the critical mass needed to tip and go epidemic, so, arguably, did the vociferous wave of anti-crime sentiment that recently swept across New York. The crime rate plummeted as a result.

Suicide notoriously tipped in Micronesia during the 1970s. The epidemic among young men transformed one of the lowest rates of suicide into the world's highest. And we have all had firsthand experience of news stories, unknown bands and ignored clothes designers tipping from the depths of obscurity to become The Next Big Thing. But how do seemingly unexceptional ideas push past the tipping point and go epidemic?

The answer, according to Gladwell, is simple. Translating the mathematical squiggle-babble of sociological epidemic models into clear, well-written English, and using entertaining examples from his experience as a journalist for The New Yorker, Gladwell outlines a three-point plan for engineering your own social epidemic in The Tipping Point.

• First, do not waste time marketing your idea to the masses: focus your energies on the trendsetters, the socially promiscuous and those with the power to influence. Place your idea or product with these people and, by the force of word of mouth added to an innate human tendency to keep up with the Joneses, your epidemic will snowball through society.
• Tweaking your idea or product to make it more infectious or "sticky" (Gladwell's preference) is the second step. This does not mean major surgery to transform a mediocre idea into a brilliant idea-a cosmetic makeover will work wonders, so just "tweak and test" with a view to involving your target audience, telling a story, somehow making it relevant to them.
• Finally, get the context right. The human mind is wired to be receptive to ideas only in certain situations, so make sure your idea fits the context in which it will be adopted, and make sure it fits the context of a mind still primarily adapted to a distant hunter-gatherer past.

There you have it, the three rules for a social epidemic: "The Law of the Few", "The Stickiness Factor" and "The Power of Context".

Now, the reason we all suspect that it cannot be this simple, Gladwell argues, is because we are prisoners of a linear mindset. We expect output to be linearly proportional to input. For example, imagine a sheet of paper folded in half, and then in half again, and so on for 50 folds. How tall do you think the folded stack would be? The thickness of a telephone directory perhaps, or the height of a refrigerator? No, says Gladwell, the folded stack would reach from the Earth to the Sun. It is this counter-intuitive power of geometric progression that allows little things to make big differences-small, well-directed changes can push your idea past the tipping point to create a full-scale epidemic.

Whether or not The Tipping Point does deliver a workable recipe for engineering a social epidemic, only time will tell. But while there is nothing particularly new in the ideas proposed, Gladwell's engaging style brings to life aspects of social contagion research by weaving together some of its more colourful case studies and insights with his own anecdotes. As such, it is an excellent source of brain candy.

For example, he describes how cosmetic changes to the context of high crime in New York, such as removing subway graffiti, precipitated massive drops in law-breaking, then explains why Big Bird and the muppets are so "sticky", but not so sticky as an even more repetitive TV programme for children (Teletubbies?).

Your ideas don't even have to be new: sometimes concentrating on the context is enough. Exploiting existing social networks has made all the difference to the success of health education campaigns, needle exchange schemes, book sales, shoes sales and various other phenomena that all went epidemic.

He even finds an elegant way to include the darling experiment of evolutionary psychology, the Wason test-which asks you how many cards you need to turn over to prove a simple rule-to show how hopelessly inept we are at solving problems unless they are put in the context of social situations. The Tipping Point contains enough to entertain your mind and the minds with whom you share your dinner for several weeks.

The only element notable by its absence is any reference to "memetics". The emerging research project, and spawn of Richard Dawkins's brain, investigates the spread, structure and selection of memes -which can loosely be defined as infectious units of culture.

If there is a real problem with The Tipping Point, it is Gladwell's failure to address the political and ethical implications of this new variant of social engineering. He discusses a process whereby ideas do not survive or perish based on rational evaluation of their usefulness-rather, they prosper by preying on the weaknesses of minds with a herd instinct, more adapted to the savannah than to supermarkets.

The final chapter, which outlines Gladwell's own master plan to engineer a massive reduction in cigarette smoking, quite frankly scared me with its Brave New Worldesque cocktail of drug therapy and informational warfare. This is the social Darwinism of ideas-ideational eugenics. And if it works, it will provide the doctors of spin and hype with a very dangerous new toy.

But The Tipping Point is not just for those with grand designs for the planet who have had an ethical bypass operation. I suspect the book will have a healthy innoculatory effect on everybody else, vaccinating us against the memetically modified agents of future social epidemics. By showing the strings by which we are so often moved, Gladwell takes us a step towards our own liberation.

Dr Paul Marsden is a research psychologist at the London School of Economics

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