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

The Tipping Point argues that “ideas and products and message and behaviors spread just like viruses do” (7). Thus, Gladwell presents such phenomena as crime waves and fashion trends as epidemics. He observes that social epidemics like New York City’s sudden drop in crime in the 1990s and the rise in popularity of Hush Puppies shoes broadly share three patterns: “contagiousness”; “little causes can have big effects”; and “change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment” (9). Gladwell calls this dramatic moment of change a Tipping Point.

Thinking about social epidemics is unintuitive and requires one to abandon common sense. People may not often consider the ways that unconscious behaviors like the simple act of yawning can be extremely contagious. Further, people are trained to engage in cause-and-effect thinking. This makes it difficult for them to predict situations in which “the end result—the effect—seems far out of proportion to the cause” (11), such as trying to imagine how tall a piece of paper folded 50 times would grow.

The author intends to answer two major questions in this book: “Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don’t? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?” (14).