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

by Malcolm Gladwell

  The script being tested was about animal behavior. It was, essentially, a first draft, laid out in a picture book that roughly corresponded to the way the actual episode would unfold, scene by scene, on television. The Blue’s Clues tester played the part of Steve, and walked the kids through the script, making a careful note of all the questions they answered correctly and those that seemed to baffle them. At one point, for example, Sherman sat down with a towheaded five year old named Walker and a four and a half year old named Anna in a purple and white checked skirt. She began reading from the script. Blue had a favorite animal. Would they help us find out what it was? The kids were watching her closely. She began going through some of the subsidiary puzzles, one by one. She showed them a picture of an anteater.

  “What does an anteater eat?” she asked.

  Walker said, “Ants.”

  Sherman turned the page to a picture of an elephant. She pointed at its trunk.

  “What’s that?”

  Walker peered in. “A trunk.”

  She pointed at the tusks. “Do you know what the white things are?”

  Walker looked again. “Nostrils.”

  She showed them a picture of a bear, then came the first Blue’s clue, a little splotch of white and black tattooed with one of Blue’s paw prints.

  “That’s black and white,” Anna said.

  Sherman looked at the two of them. “What animal could Blue want to learn about?” She paused. Anna and Walker looked puzzled. Finally Walker broke the silence:

  “We had better go to the next clue.”

  The second round of puzzles was a little harder. There was a picture of a bird. The kids were asked what the bird was doing—the answer was singing—and then why it was doing that. They talked about beavers and worms and then came to the second Blue’s clue—an iceberg. Anna and Walker were still stumped. On they went to the third round, a long discussion of fish. Sherman showed them a picture of a little fish lying camouflaged at the bottom of the sea, eying a big fish.

  “Why is the fish hiding?” Sherman asked.

  WALKER: “Because of the giant fish.”

  ANNA: “Because he will eat him.”

  They came to the third Blue’s clue. It was a cardboard cutout of one of Blue’s paw prints. Sherman took the paw print and moved it toward Walker and Anna, wiggling it as she did.

  “What’s this doing?” she asked.

  Walker screwed up his face in concentration. “It’s walking like a human,” he said.

  “Is it wriggling like a human?” Sherman asked.

  “It’s waddling,” Anna said.

  Sherman went over the clues in order: black and white, ice, waddling.

  There was a pause. Suddenly Walker’s face lit up. “It’s a penguin!” He was shouting with the joy of discovery. “A penguin’s black and white. It lives on the ice and it waddles!”

  Blue’s Clues succeeds as a story of discovery only if the clues are in proper order. The show has to start out easy—to give the viewers confidence—and then get progressively harder and harder, challenging the preschoolers more and more, drawing them into the narrative. The first set of puzzles about anteaters and elephants had to be easier than the set of puzzles about beavers and worms, which in turn had to be easier than the final set about fish. The layering of the show is what makes it possible for a child to watch the show four and five times: on each successive watching they master more and more, guessing correctly deeper into the program, until, by the end, they can anticipate every answer.

  After the morning of testing, the Blue’s Clues team sat down and went through the results of the puzzles, one by one. Thirteen out of the 26 children guessed correctly that anteaters ate ants, which wasn’t a good response rate for the first clue. “We like to open strong,” Wilder said. They continued on, rustling through their papers. The results of a puzzle about beavers drew a frown from Wilder. When shown a picture of a beaver dam, the kids did badly on answering the first question—what is the beaver doing?—but very well (19 out of 26) on the second question, why is he doing it? “The layers are switched,” Wilder said. She wanted the easier question first. On to the fish questions: Why was the little fish hiding from the big fish? Sherman looked up from her notes. “I had a great answer. ‘The little fish didn’t want to scare the big fish.’ That’s why he was hiding.” They all laughed.

  Finally, came the most important question. Was the order of Blue’s clues correct? Wilder and Gilman had presented the clues in the order that the script had stipulated: ice, waddle, then black and white. Four of the 17 kids they talked to guessed penguin after the first clue, six more guessed it after the second clue and four after all three clues. Wilder then turned to Sherman, who had given her clues in a different order: black and white, ice, waddle.

  “I had no correct answers out of nine kids after one clue,” she reported. “After ice, I was one of nine, and after waddle I was six of nine.”

  “Your clincher clue was waddle? That seems to work,” Wilder responded. “But along the way were they guessing lots of different things?”

  “Oh yes,” Sherman said. “After one clue, I had guesses of dogs, cows, panda bears, and tigers. After ice, I got polar bears and cougars.”

  Wilder nodded. Sherman’s clue order got the kids thinking as broadly as possible early in the show, but still preserved the suspense of penguin until the end. The clue order they had—the clue order that seemed the best back when they were writing the script—gave the answer away far too soon. Sherman’s clue order had suspense. The original order did not. They had spent a morning with a group of kids and come away with just what they wanted. It was only a small change. But a small change is often all that it takes.

  There is something profoundly counterintuitive in the definition of stickiness that emerges from all these examples. Wunderman stayed away from prime time slots for his commercials and bought fringe time, which goes against every principle of advertising. He eschewed slick “creative” messages for a seemingly cheesy “Gold Box” treasure hunt. Levanthal found that the hard sell—that trying to scare students into getting tetanus shots—didn’t work, and what really worked was giving them a map they didn’t need directing them to a clinic that they already knew existed. Blue’s Clues got rid of the cleverness and originality that made Sesame Street the most beloved television program of its generation, created a plodding, literal show, and repeated each episode five times in a row.

  We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with the presentation of their ideas, by putting the Muppet behind the H U G, by mixing Big Bird with the adults, by repeating episodes and skits more than once, by having Steve pause just a second longer than normal after he asks a question, by putting a tiny gold box in the corner of the ad. The line between hostility and acceptance, in other words, between an epidemic that tips and one that does not, is sometimes a lot narrower than it seems. The creators of Sesame Street did not junk their entire show after the Philadelphia disaster. They just added Big Bird, and he made all the difference in the world. Howard Levanthal didn’t redouble his efforts to terrify his students into getting a tetanus shot. He just threw in a map and a set of appointment times. The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.

  FOUR

  The Power of Context

  (Part One)

  BERNIE GOETZ AND

  THE RISE AND FALL

  OF NEW YORK CITY CRIME

  On December 22, 1984, the Saturday before Christmas, Bernhard Goetz left his apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and walked
to the IRT subway station at Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. He was a slender man in his late thirties, with sandy colored hair and glasses, dressed that day in jeans and a windbreaker. At the station, he boarded the number two downtown express train and sat down next to four young black men. There were about twenty people in the car, but most sat at the other end, avoiding the four teenagers, because they were, as eyewitnesses would say later, “horsing around” and “acting rowdy.” Goetz seemed oblivious. “How are ya?” one of the four, Troy Canty, said to Goetz, as he walked in. Canty was lying almost prone on one of the subway benches. Canty and another of the teenagers, Barry Allen, walked up to Goetz and asked him for five dollars. A third youth, James Ramseur, gestured toward a suspicious looking bulge in his pocket, as if he had a gun in there.

  “What do you want?” Goetz asked.

  “Give me five dollars,” Canty repeated.

  Goetz looked up and, as he would say later, saw that Canty’s “eyes were shiny, and he was enjoying himself....He had a big smile on his face,” and somehow that smile and those eyes set him off. Goetz reached into his pocket and pulled out a chrome plated five shot Smith and Wesson .38, firing at each of the four youths in turn. As the fourth member of the group, Darrell Cabey, lay screaming on the ground, Goetz walked over to him and said, “You seem all right. Here’s another,” before firing a fifth bullet into Cabey’s spinal cord and paralyzing him for life.

  In the tumult, someone pulled the emergency brake. The other passengers ran into the next car, except for two women who remained riveted in panic. “Are you all right?” Goetz asked the first, politely. Yes, she said. The second woman was lying on the floor. She wanted Goetz to think she was dead. “Are you all right?” Goetz asked her, twice. She nodded yes. The conductor, now on the scene, asked Goetz if he was a police officer.

  “No,” said Goetz. “I don’t know why I did it.” Pause. “They tried to rip me off.”

  The conductor asked Goetz for his gun. Goetz declined. He walked through the doorway at the front of the car, unhooked the safety chain, and jumped down onto the tracks, disappearing into the dark of the tunnel.

  In the days that followed, the shooting on the IRT caused a national sensation. The four youths all turned out to have criminal records. Cabey had been arrested previously for armed robbery, Canty for theft. Three of them had screwdrivers in their pockets. They seemed the embodiment of the kind of young thug feared by nearly all urban dwellers, and the mysterious gunman who shot them down seemed like an avenging angel. The tabloids dubbed Goetz the “Subway Vigilante” and the “Death Wish Shooter.” On radio call in shows and in the streets, he was treated as a hero, a man who had fulfilled the secret fantasy of every New Yorker who had ever been mugged or intimidated or assaulted on the subway. On New Year’s Eve, a week after the shooting, Goetz turned himself in to a police station in New Hampshire. Upon his extradition to New York City, the New York Post ran two pictures on its front page: one of Goetz, handcuffed and head bowed, being led into custody, and one of Troy Canty—black, defiant, eyes hooded, arms folded—being released from the hospital. The headline read, “Led Away in Cuffs While Wounded Mugger Walks to Freedom.” When the case came to trial, Goetz was easily acquitted on charges of assault and attempted murder. Outside Goetz’s apartment building, on the evening of the verdict, there was a raucous, impromptu street party.

  1.

  The Goetz case has become a symbol of a particular, dark moment in New York City history, the moment when the city’s crime problem reached epidemic proportions. During the 1980s, New York City averaged well over 2,000 murders and 600,000 serious felonies a year. Underground, on the subways, conditions could only be described as chaotic. Before Bernie Goetz boarded the number two train that day, he would have waited on a dimly lit platform,

  surrounded on all sides by dark, damp, graffiti covered walls. Chances are his train was late, because in 1984 there was a fire somewhere on the New York system every day and a derailment every other week. Pictures of the crime scene, taken by police, show that the car Goetz sat in was filthy, its floor littered with trash and the walls and ceiling thick with graffiti, but that wasn’t unusual because in 1984 every one of the 6,000 cars in the Transit Authority fleet, with the exception of the midtown shuttle, was covered with graffiti—top to bottom, inside and out. In the winter, the cars were cold because few were adequately heated. In the summer, the cars were stiflingly hot because none were air conditioned. Today, the number two train accelerates to over 40 miles an hour as it rumbles toward the Chambers Street express stop. But it’s doubtful Goetz’s train went that fast. In 1984, there were 500 “red tape” areas on the system—places where track damage had made it unsafe for trains to go more than 15 miles per hour. Fare beating was so commonplace that it was costing the Transit Authority as much as $150 million in lost revenue annually. There were about 15,000 felonies on the system a year—a number that would hit 20,000 a year by the end of the decade—and harassment of riders by panhandlers and petty criminals was so pervasive that ridership of the trains had sunk to its lowest level in the history of the subway system. William Bratton, who was later to be a key figure in New York’s successful fight against violent crime, writes in his autobiography of riding the New York subways in the 1980s after living in Boston for years, and being stunned at what he saw:

  After waiting in a seemingly endless line to buy a token, I tried to put a coin into a turnstile and found it had been purposely jammed. Unable to pay the fare to get into the system, we had to enter through a slam gate being held open by a scruffy looking character with his hand out; having disabled the turnstiles, he was now demanding that riders give him their tokens. Meanwhile, one of his cohorts had his mouth on the coin slots, sucking out the jammed coins and leaving his slobber. Most people were too intimidated to take these guys on: Here, take the damned token, what do I care? Other citizens were going over, under, around, or through the stiles for free. It was like going into the transit version of Dante’s Inferno.

  This was New York City in the 1980s, a city in the grip of one of the worst crime epidemics in its history. But then, suddenly and without warning, the epidemic tipped. From a high in 1990, the crime rate went into precipitous decline. Murders dropped by two thirds. Felonies were cut in half. Other cities saw their crime drop in the same period. But in no place did the level of violence fall farther or faster. On the subways, by the end of the decade, there were 75 percent fewer felonies than there had been at the decade’s start. In 1996, when Goetz went to trial a second time, as the defendant in a civil suit brought by Darrell Cabey, the case was all but ignored by the press, and Goetz himself seemed almost an anachronism. At a time when New York had become the safest big city in the country, it seemed hard to remember precisely what it was that Goetz had once symbolized. It was simply inconceivable that someone could pull a gun on someone else on the subway and be called a hero for it.

  2.

  This idea of crime as an epidemic, it must be said, is a little strange. We talk about “epidemics of violence” or crime waves, but it’s not clear that we really believe that crime follows the same rules of epidemics as, say, Hush Puppies did, or Paul Revere’s ride. Those epidemics involved relatively straightforward and simple things—a product and a message. Crime, on the other hand, isn’t a single discrete thing, but a word used to describe an almost impossibly varied and complicated set of behaviors. Criminal acts have serious consequences. They require the criminal to do something that puts himself at great personal peril. To say someone is a criminal is to say that he or she is evil or violent or dangerous or dishonest or unstable or any combination of any of those things—none of which is a psychological state that would seem to be transmitted, casually, from one person to another. Criminals do not, in other words, sound like the kind of people who could be swept up by the infectious winds of an epidemic. Yet somehow, in New York City, this is exactly what occurred. In the years between the beginning and the middle of the 1990s, N
ew York City did not get a population transplant. Nobody went out into the streets and successfully taught every would be delinquent the distinction between right and wrong. There were just as many psychologically damaged people, criminally inclined people, living in the city at the peak of the crime wave as in the trough. But for some reason tens of thousands of those people suddenly stopped committing crimes. In 1984, an encounter between an angry subway rider and four young black youths led to bloodshed. Today, in New York’s subways, that same encounter doesn’t lead to violence anymore. How did that happen?

  The answer lies in the third of the principles of epidemic transmission, the Power of Context. The Law of the Few looked at the kinds of people who are critical in spreading information. The chapter on Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues looked at the question of Stickiness, suggesting that in order to be capable of sparking epidemics, ideas have to be memorable and move us to action. We’ve looked at the people who spread ideas, and we’ve looked at the characteristics of successful ideas. But the subject of this chapter—the Power of Context—is no less important than the first two. Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur. In Baltimore, syphilis spreads far more in the summer than in the winter. Hush Puppies took off because they were being worn by kids in the cutting edge precincts of the East Village—an environment that helped others to look at the shoes in a new light. It could even be argued that the success of Paul Revere’s ride—in some way—owed itself to the fact that it was made at night. At night, people are home in bed, which makes them an awful lot easier to reach than if they are off on errands or working in the fields. And if someone wakes us up to tell us something, we automatically assume the news is going to be urgent. One can only imagine how “Paul Revere’s afternoon ride” might have compared.