The Tipping Point: Chapter One Summary & Analysis

In the city of Baltimore, there was a syphilis epidemic in the mid-90s. For decades, a couple people got syphilis every year—but something happened in the 90s that caused hundreds of people to get the disease. Many researchers blame the epidemic on the city’s crack cocaine problems—because of people’s drug addictions, they were more likely to go to impoverished parts of the city to buy drugs, during which time they might contract the disease in various ways. Another theory for the epidemic is that medical services in Baltimore declined in the 90s—there were fewer doctors per person in the 90s than in almost any earlier decade, suggesting that doctors failed to address the syphilis problem before it became an epidemic. Finally, some theorists argue that the epidemic started because of the destruction of a set of housing projects. People who lived in the projects moved to different parts of Baltimore, spreading syphilis with them.

The three explanations for the syphilis epidemic all propose that there was a subtle change in life in Baltimore—a small, steady decline in doctors, the destruction of a couple projects, etc. But the three explanations also show that there are at least three different ways to “frame” an epidemic: in terms of environment (explanation one); in terms of the disease itself (explanation two) and in terms of people who have the disease (explanation three). To generalize: every “Tipping Point” is caused when there is a change in a) the “infectious agent” (the idea, behavior, product, or message being spread), b) the environment, or c) the people who transmit the infectious agent.

Gladwell proposes three laws for studying Tipping Points. The first is called the Law of the Few. It’s an accepted idea in economics that often, the majority of work will be done by a minority of people, no matter what the work is. In epidemics, the “work” of spreading an infectious agent is in the hands of a particularly small group. In a study of a gonorrhea epidemic in Colorado, it was discovered that 168 people, out of the tens of thousands who’d contracted the disease, had infected the vast majority of gonorrhea patients in Colorado. These 168 people had staggering numbers of sexual partners, went out every night, and were generally unlike the average adult. Yet they had a huge influence on Colorado. Gaetan Dugas, often called “Patient Zero” for the North American AIDS epidemic (i.e., the first person known to have AIDS) had sex with more than 2,500 people—had it not been for Dugas, it’s entirely possible that AIDS would not have “tipped” to become an epidemic at all. Whether in social epidemics or viral epidemics, a small group of people plays a disproportionally large part in starting a trend—hence the Law of the Few.

The second law is the Law of Stickiness. Sometimes, disease epidemics begin because of sudden changes in the deadliness of the disease. The Spanish flu epidemic of 1917, which killed millions of people, began because the influenza virus itself became more deadly, not because of any new patterns in how the disease spread. Similarly, the HIV epidemic of the 1980s emerged not because people were behaving very differently from how they’d behaved in the 70s, but because the HIV virus itself became significantly more lethal. What’s true of viruses is true of ideas as well—the idea itself has to be memorable in order for there to be a social epidemic. Advertisers spend millions of dollars ensuring that slogans and brand names are as catchy as possible—if not, people will never remember the brand in the first place, and therefore won’t spread it to other people. Gladwell calls this principle the Stickiness Factor—the memorability or reproducibility of an idea, product, or behavior.

The third law is the Law of Context. During the famous Kitty Genovese incident in New York City, 38 people watched and did nothing while Kitty Genovese, a young woman, was raped and killed on the street. This incident was so infamous that Genovese has become a symbol for the “bystander problem,” the problem whereby, when an individual is in danger, a large crowd will remain inactive. Sociologists have argued that the 38 people did nothing to help a woman in danger because, as big city dwellers, they were used to ignoring thousands of people every day—beggars, solicitors, salesmen, etc. Others have pointed out that individual people will usually help other individuals—but a large crowd will often hesitate to help an individual, since people will assume that “someone else” will solve the problem. So the third law, the Law of Context, says that people often change their behavior because of environmental factors, such as the size of a crowd, the density of a city, etc. Armed with his three laws—the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context—Gladwell will try to understand why and how Tipping Points occur.