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

by Malcolm Gladwell

  What this means, though, is that children are going to have trouble with objects that have two names, or objects that change names. A child has difficulty with, say, the idea that an oak is both an oak and a tree; he or she may well assume that in that case “tree” is a word for a collection of oaks.

  The idea, then, that Big Bird no longer wants to be called Big Bird but instead wants to be called Roy is almost guaranteed to befuddle a preschooler. How can someone with one name decide to have another name? Big Bird is saying that Big Bird is merely a descriptive name of the type of animal he is, and that he wants a particular name. He doesn’t want to be a tree. He wants to be an oak. But three and four year olds don’t understand that a tree can also be an oak. To the extent that they understand what is going on at all, they probably think that Big Bird is trying to change into something else—into some other kind of animal, or some other collection of animals. And how could he do that?

  There’s a deeper problem. Sesame Street is a magazine show. A typical show consists of at least forty distinct segments, none more than about three minutes—street scenes with the actors and Muppets, animation, and short films from outside the studio. With shows like “Roy,” in the late 1990s, the writers of the show attempted, for the first time, to link some of these pieces together with a common theme. For most of the show’s history, though, the segments were entirely autonomous; in fact new Sesame shows were constructed, for the most part, by mixing together fresh street scenes with animated bits and filmed sequences from the show’s archives.

  The show’s creators had a reason for wanting to construct Sesame Street this way. They thought preschoolers did not have the attention span to handle anything other than very short, tightly focused segments. “We looked at the viewing patterns of young children, and we found that they were watching Laugh In,” says Lloyd Morrisett, who was one of the show’s founders. “That had a very strong effect on the early Sesame Street. Zany, relatively quick one liners. The kids seemed to love it.” Sesame Street’ s creators were impressed even more by the power of television commercials. The sixties were the golden age of Madison Avenue, and at the time it seemed to make perfect sense that if a 60 second television spot could sell breakfast cereal to a four year old, then it could also sell that child the alphabet. Part of the appeal of Jim Henson and the Muppets to the show’s creators, in fact, was that in the 1960s Henson had been running a highly successful advertising shop. Many of the most famous Muppets were created for ad campaigns: Big Bird is really a variation of a seven foot dragon created by Henson for La Choy commercials; Cookie Monster was a pitchman for Frito Lay; Grover was used in promotional films for IBM. (Henson’s Muppet commercials from the 50s and 60s are hysterically funny but have a dark and edgy quality that understandably was absent from his Sesame Street work.)

  “I think the most significant format feature in a commercial is that it’s about one thing,” said Sam Gibbon, one of the earliest Sesame Street producers. “It’s about selling one idea. The notion of breaking down the production of Sesame Street into units small enough so they could address a single educational goal like an individual letter owed a lot to that technique of commercials.”

  But is the commercial theory of learning true? Daniel Anderson says that new research suggests that children actually don’t like commercials as much as we thought they did because commercials “don’t tell stories, and stories have a particular salience and importance to young people.” The original Sesame Street was anti narrative: it was, by design, an unconnected collection of sketches. “It wasn’t just the ads that influenced the early Sesame Street,” Anderson says. “There was also a theoretical perspective at the time, based in part on [the influential child psychologist] Piaget, that a preschool child couldn’t follow an extended narrative.” Since the late 1960s, however, this idea has been turned on its head. At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them. “It’s the only way they have of organizing the world, of organizing experience,” Jerome Bruner, a psychologist at New York University, says. “They are not able to bring theories that organize things in terms of cause and effect and relationships, so they turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection. If they don’t catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn’t get remembered very well, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over.”

  Bruner was involved, in the early 1980s, in a fascinating project—called “Narratives from the Crib”—that was critical in changing the views of many child experts. The project centered on a two year old girl from New Haven called Emily, whose parents—both university professors—began to notice that before their daughter went to sleep at night she talked to herself. Curious, they put a small microcassette recorder in her crib and, several nights a week, for the next fifteen months, recorded both the conversations they had with Emily as they put her to bed and the conversations she had with herself before she fell asleep. The transcripts—122 in all—were then analyzed by a group of linguists and psychologists led by Katherine Nelson of Harvard University. What they found was that Emily’s conversations with herself were more advanced than her conversations with her parents. In fact, they were significantly more advanced. One member of the team that met to discuss the Emily tapes, Carol Fleisher Feldman, later wrote:

  In general, her speech to herself is so much richer and more complex [than her speech to adults] that it has made all of us, as students of language development, begin to wonder whether the picture of language acquisition offered in the literature to date does not underrepresent the actual patterns of the linguistic knowledge of the young child. For once the lights are out and her parents leave the room, Emily reveals a stunning mastery of language forms we would never have suspected from her [everyday] speech.

  Feldman was referring to things like vocabulary and grammar and—most important—the structure of Emily’s monologues. She was making up stories, narratives, that explained and organized the things that happened to her. Sometimes these stories were what linguists call temporal narratives. She would create a story to try to integrate events, actions, and feelings into one structure—a process that is a critical part of a child’s mental development. Here is a story Emily told herself at 32 months, which I will quote at length to emphasize just how sophisticated children’s speech is when they are by themselves:

  Tomorrow when we wake up from bed, first me and Daddy and Mommy, you, eat breakfast eat breakfast like we usually do, and then we’re going to play and then soon as Daddy comes, Carl’s going to come over, and then we’re going to play a little while. And then Carl and Emily are both going down the car with somebody, and we’re going to ride to nursery school [whispered], and then when we get there, we’re all going to get out of the car, go into nursery school, and Daddy’s going to give us kisses, then go, and then say, and then we will say goodbye, then he’s going to work and we’re going to play at nursery school. Won’t that be funny? Because sometimes I go to nursery school cause it’s a nursery school day. Sometimes I stay with Tanta all week. And sometimes we play mom and dad. But usually, sometimes, I, um, oh go to nursery school. But today I’m going to nursery school in the morning. In the morning, Daddy in the, when and usual, we’re going to eat breakfast like we usually do, and then we’re going to...and then we’re going to...play. And then we’re, then the doorbell’s going to ring, and here comes Carl in here, and then Carl, and then we are all going to play, and then...

  Emily is describing her Friday routine. But it’s not a particular Friday. It’s what she considers an ideal Friday, a hypothetical Friday in which everything she wants to happen happens. It is, as Bruner and Joan Lucariello write in their commentary on the segment,

  a remarkable act of world making...she uses tonal emphasis, prolongation of key words, and
a kind of “re enactment” reminiscent of the we are there cinema verité (with her friend Carl practically narrated through the door as he enters). As if to emphasize that she has everything “down pat” she delivers the monologue in a rhythmic, almost singsong way. And in the course of the soliloquy, she even feels free to comment on the drollness of the course that events are taking (“Won’t that be funny”).

  It is hard to look at this evidence of the importance of narrative and not marvel at the success of Sesame Street. Here was a show that eschewed what turns out to be the most important of all ways of reaching young children. It also diluted its appeal to preschoolers with jokes aimed only at adults. Yet it succeeded anyway. That was the genius of Sesame Street, that through the brilliance of its writing and the warmth and charisma of the Muppets it managed to overcome what might otherwise have been overwhelming obstacles. But it becomes easy to understand how you would make a children’s show even stickier than Sesame Street. You’d make it perfectly literal, without any wordplay or comedy that would confuse preschoolers. And you’d teach kids how to think in the same way that kids teach themselves how to think—in the form of the story. You would make, in other words, Blue’s Clues.

  4.

  Every episode of Blue’s Clues is constructed the same way. Steve, the host, presents the audience with a puzzle involving Blue, the animated dog. In one show the challenge is to figure out Blue’s favorite story. In another, it is to figure out Blue’s favorite food. To help the audience unlock the puzzle, Blue leaves behind a series of clues, which are objects tattooed with one of her paw prints. In between the discovery of the clues, Steve plays a series of games—mini puzzles—with the audience that are thematically related to the overall puzzle. In the show about Blue’s favorite story, for example, one of the mini puzzles involves Steve and Blue sitting down with the Three Bears, whose bowls of porridge have been mixed up, and enlisting the audience’s help in matching the small, middle, and large bowls with Mama, Papa, and Baby Bear. As the show unfolds, Steve and Blue move from one animated set to another, from a living room to a garden to fantastical places, jumping through magical doorways, leading viewers on a journey of discovery, until, at the end of the story, Steve returns to the living room. There, at the climax of every show, he sits down in a comfortable chair to think—a chair known, of course, in the literal world of Blue’s Clues, as the Thinking Chair. He puzzles over Blue’s three clues and attempts to come up with the answer.

  This much is, obviously, a radical departure from Sesame Street. But having turned their back on that part of the Sesame Street legacy, the creators of Blue’s Clues then went back and borrowed those parts of Sesame Street that they thought did work. In fact, they did more than borrow. They took those sticky elements and tried to make them even stickier. The first was the idea that the more kids are engaged in watching something—intellectually and physically—the more memorable and meaningful it becomes. “I’d noticed that some segments on Sesame Street elicited a lot of interaction from kids, where the segments asked for it,” says Daniel Anderson, who worked with Nickelodeon in designing Blue’s Clues. “Something that stuck in my mind was when Kermit would hold his finger to the screen and draw an animated letter, you’d see kids holding their fingers up and drawing a letter along with him. Or occasionally, when a Sesame Street character would ask a question, you’d hear kids answer out loud. But Sesame Street just somehow never took that idea and ran with it. They knew that kids did this some of the time, but they never tried to build a show around that idea. Nickelodeon did some pilot shows before Blue’s Clues where kids would be explicitly asked to participate, and lo and behold, there was a lot of evidence that they would. So putting these ideas together, that kids are interested in being intellectually active when they watch TV, and given the opportunity they’ll be behaviorally active, that created the philosophy for Blue’s Clues.”

  Steve, as a result, spends almost all his time on screen talking directly at the camera. When he enlists the audience’s help, he actually enlists the audience’s help. Often, there are close ups of his face, so it is as if he is almost in the room with his audience. Whenever he asks a question, he pauses. But it’s not a normal pause. It’s a preschooler’s pause, several beats longer than any adult would ever wait for an answer. Eventually an unseen studio audience yells out a response. But the child at home is given the opportunity to shout out an answer of his own. Sometimes Steve will play dumb. He won’t be able to find a certain clue that might be obvious to the audience at home and he’ll look beseechingly at the camera. The idea is the same: to get the children watching to verbally participate, to become actively involved. If you watch Blue’s Clues with a group of children, the success of this strategy is obvious. It’s as if they’re a group of diehard Yankees fans at a baseball game.

  The second thing that Blue’s Clues took from Sesame Street was the idea of repetition. This was something that had fascinated the CTW pioneers. In the five pilot shows that Palmer and Lesser took to Philadelphia in 1969, there was a one minute bit called Wanda the Witch that used the w sound over and over: Wanda the Witch wore a wig in the windy winter in Washington, etc., etc. “We didn’t know how much we could repeat elements,” Lesser says. “We put it in three times on the Monday, three times on the Tuesday, three times on the Wednesday, left it out on Thursday, then put it in right at the end of the Friday show. Some of the kids toward the end of the day Wednesday were saying, not Wanda the Witch again. When Wanda the Witch came back Friday, they jumped and clapped. Kids reach a saturation point. But then nostalgia sets in.”

  Not long afterward (and quite by accident), the Sesame Street writers figured out why kids like repetition so much. The segment in question this time featured the actor James Earl Jones reciting the alphabet. As originally taped, Jones took long pauses between letters, because the idea was to insert other elements between the letters. But Jones, as you can imagine, cut such a compelling figure that the Sesame Street producers left the film as it was and played it over and over again for years: the letter A or B, etc., would appear on the screen, there would be a long pause, and then Jones would boom out the name and the letter would disappear. “What we noticed was that the first time through, kids would shout out the name of the letter after Jones did,” Sam Gibbon says. “After a couple of repetitions, they would respond to the appearance of the letter before he did, in the long pause. Then, with enough repetitions, they would anticipate the letter before it appeared. They were sequencing themselves through the piece; first they learned the name of the letter, then they learned to associate the name of the letter with its appearance, then they learned the sequence of letters.” An adult considers constant repetition boring, because it requires reliving the same experience over and again. But to preschoolers repetition isn’t boring, because each time they watch something they are experiencing it in a completely different way. At CTW, the idea of learning through repetition was called the James Earl Jones effect.

  Blue’s Clues is essentially a show built around the James Earl Jones effect. Instead of running new episodes one after another, and then repeating them as reruns later in the seasons—like every other television show—Nickelodeon runs the same Blue’s Clues episode for five straight days, Monday through Friday, before going on to the next one. As you can imagine, this wasn’t an idea that came easily to Nickelodeon. Santomero and Anderson had to convince them. (It also helped that Nickelodeon didn’t have the money to produce a full season of Blue’s Clues shows.) “I had the pilot in my house, and at the time my daughter was three and a half and she kept watching it over and over again,” Anderson says. “I kept track. She watched it fourteen times without any lagging of enthusiasm.” When the pilot was taken out into the field for testing, the same thing happened. They showed it five days in a row to a large group of preschoolers, and attention and comprehension actually increased over the course of the week—with the exception of the oldest children, the five year olds, whose attention fell off at th
e very end. Like the kids watching James Earl Jones, the children responded to the show in a different way with each repeat viewing, becoming more animated and answering more of Steve’s questions earlier and earlier. “If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don’t understand—things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it’s a search for understanding and predictability,” says Anderson. “For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, they not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self worth. And Blue’s Clues doubles that feeling, because they also feel like they are participating in something. They feel like they are helping Steve.”

  Of course, kids don’t always like repetition. Whatever they are watching has to be complex enough to allow, upon repeated exposure, for deeper and deeper levels of comprehension. At the same time, it can’t be so complex that the first time around it baffles the children and turns them off. In order to strike this balance, Blue’s Clues engages in much of the same kind of research as Sesame Street—but at a far more intense level. Where Sesame Street tests a given show only once—and after it’s completed—Blue’s Clues tests shows three times before they go on the air. And while Sesame Street will typically only test a third of its episodes, Blue’s Clues tests them all.

  I accompanied the Blue’s Clues research team on one of their weekly excursions to talk to preschoolers. They were led by Alice Wilder, director of research for the show, a lively dark haired woman who had just finished her doctorate in education at Columbia University. With her were two others, both women in their early twenties—Alison Gilman and Allison Sherman. On the morning that I joined them they were testing a proposed script at a preschool in Greenwich Village.