The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Gladwell explores the phenomenon of teen suicides in Micronesia and the prevalence of teen smoking as additional case studies to illustrate the ways that epidemics work. He argues that something as commonplace as teen smoking “follows the same kind of mysterious and complex social rules that govern teen suicide” (221-222) and that both issues can be understood as social epidemics.

David Philips of the University of California San Diego shows that high-profile suicide can be contagious in specific ways. A newsworthy suicide involving a single-passenger crash results in higher incidences of single-passenger vehicle suicides. In a sense, the original suicide grants permission for the subsequent ones and provides “a highly detailed set of instructions” (224) for other people who are in dire circumstances. Gladwell posits that suicide can be understood as “a private language between members of a common subculture” (225). He observes that in the context of the Micronesian teen suicide epidemic, ending one’s life is “an incredibly expressive form of communication, rich with meaning and nuance, and expressed by the most persuasive of permission-givers” (225). Thus, an influential suicide victim can be understood as the “Tipping Person, the Salesman […] whose experience ‘overwrote’ the experience of those who followed him” (227).

A similar logic exists in the case of teen smoking. Smoking has its “Tipping People” and a “shared language” (228), as in the above examples related to suicide. What he identifies as the smoker personality type—somebody who is more likely to be an extrovert, a partygoer, an impulsive risk-taker with a high sex drive—is the kind of person to whom a teen might be drawn. Thus, cool smokers themselves are the draw for young people to pick up smoking, rather than the allure of smoking itself. In this case, smoking becomes popular because of the contagiousness of the smoker, rather than due to the stickiness of smoking.

Strategies for reducing teen smoking could focus either on making smoking less contagious or on making it less sticky. Reducing contagiousness involves finding ways to prevent the cool Salesmen from smoking in the first place and convincing young people to take their “cues as to what is cool” (238) from other sources; both of these goals are hard to achieve. Controlling the behavior of young people or forcing them to listen to parents is notoriously difficult, in part because the influence of their peer groups is huge. Gladwell points to evidence showing a link between depression and the smoking habit and suggests that “if you can treat smokers for depression, you may be able to make their habit an awful lot easier to break” (246), perhaps through medication. Another strategy is to focus on teen smokers who are only light smokers, as it takes time to develop an addiction. Many people “simply never smoke enough to hit that addiction threshold” (249) to nicotine. Gladwell argues that teen experimentation with smoking isn’t the problem, so that “instead of fighting experimentation,” society should ensure that “experimentation doesn’t have serious consequences” (251).

Gladwell summarizes two key points related to understanding the spread of epidemics. The first lesson of researching Tipping Points is that “starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas” (255-256). For example, Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen should receive support and attention as they start word-of-mouth epidemics. Second, investigators must understand that “the world—much as we want it to—does not accord with our intuition” (258). Rather, people are influenced by factors that are not always taken into account, such as their immediate environments and small changes in context. The volatility of social changes mirrors the chaos and unpredictably of the individual.