Malcolm Gladwell may not have invented the term “tipping point,” but if we lived in a fairer world his popularization of the phrase surely would have earned him a licensing fee. The Tipping Point, published in 2000, has sold millions of copies, and Gladwell followed that book, his first, with a string of other best-sellers, including Blink and Talking to Strangers. In true Gladwellian fashion, he re-evaluates and expands the conclusions he reached in his first book with his latest work, Revenge of the Tipping Point.
JIM KELLY: Twenty-five years ago, you published The Tipping Point, an examination of those moments “when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.” Your own book spread like wildfire, and the term tipping point seemed to be on everyone’s lips, even those who I suspect never read your book. Most folks, I assume, grasped what you were saying, but have you run into misconceptions about what you wrote?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: There have been lots of occasions over the course of my writing career that I think ideas of mine have been taken out of context: the 10,000-hour rule that I wrote about in Outliers being Exhibit A. (It does not mean that anyone who practices 10,000 hours at something is going to be an expert!) But I don’t think this happened with The Tipping Point. I think the idea is very simple and intuitive. And it was floating around for years before I popularized it, so it had a certain previous legitimacy. Ideas and behaviors are contagious, just like viruses are! The fact that the phrase “going viral” has since become part of the vernacular is, I think, proof of how easily people grasp this idea.
J.K.: When you sat down to write this book, you saw it as a sort of Tipping Point 2.0, but when you re-read your first book, you realized that the principles you established to explain sudden shifts in behavior and belief no longer quite fit our current world. Was there a eureka! moment reading The Tipping Point when you realized you needed to come up with additional theories?
M.G.: There was an exact moment! It came when I started getting interested in this fascinating legal case involving a high-flying health-care tycoon named Philip Esformes. (I think I read at least 10,000 pages of trial transcripts on the case.) Esformes was from Miami, and I realized that the only way to understand what happened to him was to talk about Miami—and that this was a story that lay outside the framework of the original Tipping Point. So I had a choice. Give up on Esformes, or write a new book. I chose the latter.
The bigger problem, I then realized, was that in the original Tipping Point I was introducing a relatively novel idea. But this time around, the idea is well accepted. The task is now to deepen and complicate our understanding of tipping points.
J.K.: Your discussion of small-area variation is fascinating, showing, for example, that in the pretty much identical Vermont towns of Stowe and Waterbury, 70 percent of the kids in Stowe had their tonsils removed by the age of 15 and only 20 percent in Waterbury.
You ascribe this to a community’s “overstory,” which is this sort of atmosphere of feeling that we may not be aware of but permeates the local air anyway. This may be a leap on my part, but would this explain the popularity of Donald Trump in poorer, rural districts?
M.G.: I hadn’t thought of that! And as you know, I try to avoid any overt partisanship in my books. But I will say this. The idea of the “overstory” is, I think, the most interesting part of the book. My feeling was that we need some way to explain how communities can come to possess such wildly different characteristics. So Waterbury and Stowe are down the road from each other. They aren’t wildly different. They are a product of the same economic and social ecosystem. But something as basic as how medicine is practiced differs dramatically from one town to the other. Why?
And this pattern, by the way, is repeated over and over again, along all kinds of dimensions. That’s what the Esformes chapter is about: how do we explain why Miami is—by almost any measure—an extraordinarily corrupt place. And Fort Lauderdale or Boca Raton or West Palm Beach, up the road, are not!
There are no adequate conventional explanations for these kinds of differences. So I wonder whether there may be something “in the air” in the communities we live in—some jumble of history and culture and shared experience—that shapes how we make sense of the world. Could this explain the appeal of Donald Trump to certain communities? I’ll let you decide, Jim.
J.K.: Now let’s talk about cheetahs. These animals are almost impossible to reproduce in captivity, and that is not just because of a low sperm count. It is because cheetahs are about as inbred as they come, and since they are all descended from the same female in the Pleistocene age who happened to carry the coronavirus, they are quite susceptible to illness transmitted by their genetic doubles.
“We need some way to explain how communities can come to possess such wildly different characteristics.”
Cheetahs are actually better off as loners in the wild, roaming far away from their peers. You take the lessons from that monoculture to explain how a small, idyllic, homogenous town, a monoculture of its own, can suddenly experience a suicide outbreak among high-school students. Can you explain why, despite the drawbacks of a monoculture, we continue to create them?
M.G.: That’s such a great question! The chapter you’re talking about tells the story of a small town (I don’t identify it) that is, in every measurable way, perfect: wealthy, high-achieving, beautiful, close-knit, crime-free. And I talk about how that perfection—the uniformity and pervasiveness of the town’s high-achieving culture—created a crisis for its teenagers. So why didn’t the town recognize the fact, and change? Because, and I have reached this insight only because I am myself a new parent, I think the dominant feature of modern parenting culture is that more and more of the things allegedly done in the interests of kids are actually being done in the interests of parents. Uniform, high-pressure high schools are to alleviate the anxiety of parents. And the fact that same culture exacts a terrible price on kids is secondary.
This is a random analogy. But one of my favorite books of the past year was Linda Flanagan’s Take Back the Game, which is all about the crisis in youth sports. One of her suggestions is that parents stop coming to their kid’s practices and games. Why? Because sports are for kids, and when parents show up they have the effect of capturing the game from their children and making the experience about themselves: their own hopes and expectations and frustrations. Enough already!
J.K.: Another theory you test is the Magic Third, where, say, a board of directors composed of six men and three women will be a different board than one with just one or two women. The former will be a more collaborative board, with better listeners and tougher questions. Why does it take three to make this happen, and why do you call the Magic Third pretty much a universal law?
M.G.: No one loves a universal law like me! This is actually an empirical question that has been looked at by a very wide range of researchers in both experimental and real-world settings. The question is this: if I have a homogenous group, how many outsiders do I have to introduce before that group is no longer homogenous? Before that single culture becomes truly diverse?
“I think the dominant feature of modern parenting culture is that more and more of the things allegedly done in the interests of kids are actually being done in the interests of parents.”
This was an issue in the great migration of white people out of American cities in the 1950s and 1960s, in the face of African-American newcomers. It wasn’t one Black family moving in that triggered white flight. The number of Black families had to reach a certain threshold. (That threshold is actually where the term “tipping point” comes from.)
Since then, that idea has been explored in a wide number of settings. How many women do you need on a board before you get the benefit of having women on a board? How many minority students do you need in a classroom before the minority students can feel comfortable about being in the minority?
The idea of the Magic Third comes from the fact that the answer to all those questions is that once outsiders comprise somewhere between a quarter and a third of the overall group their status seems to “magically” change.
J.K.: Controlling proportions can be a dangerous game, as you explore when you discuss how Harvard, back in the 1920s, decided that too many Jews were gaining admission and decided to expand the criteria for applicants, asking for letters of recommendation and extracurricular activities, and, later, evidence of exceptional athletic prowess, all in the name of increasing diversity.
The desire to cap the number of Jewish students has disappeared, but the legacy of favoring athletics (Harvard even has a female Rugby team!) seems misaligned with academic excellence and should be eliminated. Is that a fair statement?
M.G.: Don’t get me started on this! Listeners of Revisionist History will know that I have an (un)healthy obsession with the moral failings of elite universities. But yes. I have an entire chapter devoted to the surprisingly mysterious question of why Harvard has more varsity sports teams than any other university in the country—and why Harvard and the other Ivies give such extraordinary admissions preferences to all those tennis players, fencers, and rowers. The answer isn’t encouraging. Elites like to pretend that it is the rest of America that has an unhealthy obsession with sports. Wrong. It’s the other way around.
J.K.: Your account of how the Holocaust became an ugly history that must be taught and recognized is a tribute to the power of television, since that epic tragedy was rarely discussed even (and perhaps especially) by its survivors in the immediate decades after World War II. Then, along came the four-part NBC series Holocaust, which aired in 1978 and was watched by 120 million people in America alone. But the show was almost not called Holocaust. What happened, and what does that say about the power of the right kind of storytelling?
M.G.: Usually, when I write about a topic, some portion of what I discover in the reporting process I already know—and what I’m doing is deepening my understanding. But I have to say, the chapter on the Holocaust is a rare example of a situation where virtually everything I found out came as a surprise to me.
First—yes—the Holocaust as a subject of discussion or historical understanding or popular knowledge was simply absent prior to the end of the 1970s. If you used the term “Holocaust” in conversation in, say, 1970, to describe what Hitler did to the Jews in Europe during the Second World War, people would have looked at you blankly.
What changed things? I think (and lots of people agree) that one of the main catalysts was that mini-series that was watched by half of the American viewing public. Like I said, this is one of those weird facts that I literally knew nothing about until I started the book. And I have to say that the story makes me nostalgic for an era when a single medium—television—had the power to forge a wide social consensus about an issue. Modern-day television is a lot “better” than the television of the 1970s. But it’s a lot less powerful.
J.K.: A personal question, if I may. What kind of kid were you growing up? I imagine you surveying your friends in first grade, asking who was vaccinated and who was not, but perhaps I am wrong! What drove your interests in behavior, and was there a particular teacher or book that ignited your curiosity about why we behave the way we do?
M.G.: Well, you should probably ask my mother what kind of child I was. But I recall being quite solitary. I played for hours in my room by myself. I was obsessed with cars and, later, running. I read lots of history books. I was really interested in the question of what the world was like outside our little town.
I once wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper defending socialism, and another defending Israel’s actions during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. But now that I actually have kids of my own, I’m reluctant to try and put a label on my childhood self: there’s a lot of “noise” in behavior of that age. Who influenced me the most? It was all peers for me—particularly my friends Bruce and Terry. I was pretty skeptical of the adults in my life. I think I still am.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIL
