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

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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Page 25

by Malcolm Gladwell


  Page 19.

  Richard Koch, The 80/ 20 Principle: The Art of Achieving More with Less (New York: Bantam, 1998).

  John Potteratt, “Gonorrhea as a social disease,” Sexually Transmitted Disease (1985), vol. 12, no. 25.

  Page 21.

  Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).

  Page 22.

  Jaap Goudsmit, Viral Sex: The Nature of AIDS (New York: Oxford Press, 1997), pp. 25–37.

  Page 25.

  Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 158–159.

  Page 27.

  A. M. Rosenthal, Thirty Eight Witnesses (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).

  Page 28.

  John Darley and Bibb Latane, “Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1968), vol. 8, pp. 377–383.

  CHAPTER TWO: THE LAW OF THE FEW

  Page 30.

  All discussion of Paul Revere comes from the remarkable book by David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  Page 34.

  Stanley Milgram, “The Small World Problem,” Psychology Today (1967), vol. 1, pp. 60–67. For a (highly) theoretical treatment of the small world subject, see: Manfred Kochen (ed.), The Small World (Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1989).

  Page 35.

  Carol Werner and Pat Parmelee, “Similarity of Activity Preferences Among Friends: Those Who Play Together Stay Together,” Social Psychology Quarterly (1979), vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 62–66.

  Page 47.

  Brett Tjaden’s project, now maintained by the University of Virginia computer science department, is called the Oracle of Bacon at Virginia and can be found at www.cs.virginia.edu/oracle/.

  Page 53.

  Mark Granovetter, Getting a Job (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

  Page 60.

  The supermarket promotion work is described in: J. Jeffrey Inman, Leigh McAlister, and Wayne D. Hoyer, “Promotion Signal: Proxy for a Price Cut?” Journal of Consumer Research (1990), vol. 17, pp. 74–81.

  Page 61.

  Linda Price and colleagues have written a number of explorations of the Market Maven phenomenon, among them:

  Lawrence F. Feick and Linda L. Price, “The Market Maven: A Diffuser of Marketplace Information,” Journal of Marketing (January 1987), vol. 51, pp. 83–97.

  Robin A. Higie, Lawrence F. Feick, and Linda L. Price, “Types and Amount of Word of Mouth Communications About Retailers,” Journal of Retailing (Fall 1987), vol. 63, no. 3, pp. 260–278.

  Linda L. Price, Lawrence F. Feick, and Audrey Guskey, “Everyday Market Helping Behavior,” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing (Fall 1995), vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 255–266.

  Page 74.

  Brian Mullen et al., “Newscasters’ facial expressions and voting behavior of viewers: Can a smile elect a President?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1986), vol. 51, pp. 291–295.

  Page 77.

  Gary L. Wells and Richard E. Petty, “The Effects of Overt Head Movements on Persuasion,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology (1980), vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 219–230.

  Page 81.

  William S. Condon, “Cultural Microrhythms,” in M. Davis (ed.), Interaction Rhythms: Periodicity in Communicative Behavior (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1982), pp. 53–76.

  Page 84.

  Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  Page 85.

  Howard Friedman et al., “Understanding and Assessing Nonverbal Expressiveness: The Affective Communication Test,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1980), vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 333–351.

  Howard Friedman and Ronald Riggio, “Effect of Individual Differences in Nonverbal Expressiveness on Transmission of Emotion,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior (Winter 1981), vol. 6, pp. 96–104.

  CHAPTER THREE: THE STICKINESS FACTOR

  Page 89.

  The best history of Sesame Street is probably: Gerald Lesser, Children and Television: Lessons from Sesame Street (New York: Vintage Books, 1975).

  See also Jim Henson, The Works: The Art, the Magic, the Imagination (New York: Random House, 1993).

  Page 91.

  Virtually every time Sesame Street’s educational value has been tested—and the show has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history—it has been proved to improve the reading and learning skills of its viewers. Most recently, a group of researchers at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Kansas went back and recontacted close to 600 children whose television watching as preschoolers they had tracked back in the 1980s. The kids were now all in high school, and the researchers found—to their astonishment—that the kids who had watched Sesame Street the most as four and five year olds were still doing better in school than those who didn’t. Even after controlling for things like parent’s education, family size, and preschool vocabulary level, the Sesame Street watchers did better in high school in English, math, and science and they were also much more likely to read books for leisure than those who didn’t watch the show, or who watched the show less. According to the study, for every hour per week of Sesame Street viewing, high school grade point averages increased by .052, which means that a child who watched five hours of Sesame Street a week at age five was earning, on average, about one quarter of a grade level higher than a child of similar background who never watched the show. Somehow a single television show an hour long, watched over the course of no more than two or three years, was still making a difference twelve and fifteen years later.

  This research is summarized in “Effects of Early Childhood Media Use on Adolescent Achievement” by the “Recontact” Project of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Kansas, Lawrence (1995).

  See also: John C. Wright and Aletha C. Huston, “Effects of educational TV viewing of lower income preschoolers on academic skills, school readiness, and school adjustment one to three years later,” A Report to Children’s Television Workshop, University of Kansas (1995).

  Page 93.

  Lester Wunderman has written a perfectly wonderful autobiography that tells the story of Columbia Record House and many other tales of direct marketing.

  Lester Wunderman, Being Direct: Making Advertising Pay (New York: Random House, 1996), chapters 10 and 11.

  Page 96.

  Howard Levanthal, Robert Singer, and Susan Jones, “Effects on Fear and Specificity of Recommendation Upon Attitudes and Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1965), vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 20–29.

  Page 100.

  The best summary of the “active” theory of television watching is:

  Daniel Anderson and Elizabeth Lorch, “Looking at Television: Action or Reaction?” in Children’s Understanding of Television: Research on Attention and Comprehension (New York: Academic Press, 1983).

  Page 102.

  Palmer’s work is written up in a number of places. For example: Edward Palmer, “Formative Research in Educational Television Production: The Experience of CTW,” in W. Schramm (ed.), Quality in Instructional Television (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1972), pp. 165–187.

  Page 108.

  Barbara Flagg’s eye movement research on “Oscar’s Blending” and “Hug” is summarized in Barbara N. Flagg, “Formative Evaluation of Sesame Street Using Eye Movement Photography,” in J. Baggaley (ed.), Experimental Research in Televised Instruction, vol. 5 (Montreal, Canada: Concordia Research, 1982).

  Page 115.

  Ellen Markman, Categorization and Naming in Children (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

  Page 118.

  Nelson, Katherine (ed.), Narratives from the Crib (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). See essays by Bruner and Lucariello, and Feldman.

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE POWER OF CONTEXT (PART ONE)

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nbsp; Page 133.

  The best accounts of the Goetz shooting can be found in: George P. Fletcher, A Crime of Self Defense (New York: Free Press, 1988).

  Also: Lillian Rubin, Quiet Rage: Bernie Goetz in a Time of Madness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).

  Page 136.

  For a good summary of New York City crime statistics see: Michael Massing, “The Blue Revolution,” in New York Review of Books, November 19, 1998, pp. 32–34.

  William Bratton, Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 141.

  Page 140.

  Malcolm Gladwell, “The Tipping Point,” The New Yorker, June 3, 1996, pp. 32–39. This article is archived at www.gladwell.com. There is another good discussion of the anomalous nature of the New York crime drop in William Bratton and William Andrews, “What We’ve Learned About Policing,” in City Journal, Spring 1999, p. 25.

  Page 141.

  George L. Kelling and Catherine M. Coles, Fixing Broken Windows (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 20.

  Page 152.

  The description of the Zimbardo experiments comes from Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology (1973), no. 1, p. 73. The quotes from guards and Zimbardo come from CBS 60 Minutes, August 30, 1998, “The Stanford Prison Experiment.”

  Page 155.

  For a good summary of the cheating experiments on schoolchildren, see: Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May, “Studies in the Organization of Character,” in H. Munsinger (ed.), Readings in Child Development (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 190–197.

  Their complete findings can be found in Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May, Studies in the Nature of Character, vol. 1, Studies in Deceit (New York: Macmillan, 1928).

  Page 159.

  The vervet and card game work is described in Robin Dunbar, The Trouble with Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapters six and seven.

  Page 160.

  The FAE is summarized in Richard E. Nisbett and Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

  The quiz game experiment is described in: “Lee D. Ross, Teresa M. Amabile, and Julia L. Steinmetz, “Social Roles, Social Control, and Biases in Social Perception Process,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1977), vol. 35, no. 7, pp. 485–494.

  Page 161.

  The birth order myth is brilliantly dissected in Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 365.

  Page 162.

  Walter Mischel, “Continuity and Change in Personality,” American Psychologist (1969), vol. 24, pp. 1012–1017.

  Page 163.

  John Darley and Daniel Batson, “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1973), vol. 27, pp. 100–119.

  Page 168.

  Myra Friedman, “My Neighbor Bernie Goetz,” New York, February 18, 1985, pp. 35–41.

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE POWER OF CONTEXT (PART TWO)

  Page 176.

  George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven,” Psychological Review (March 1956), vol. 63, no. 2.

  C. J. Buys and K. L. Larsen, “Human Sympathy Groups,” Psychology Reports (1979), vol. 45, pp. 547–553.

  Page 177.

  S. L. Washburn and R. Moore, Ape into Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).

  Dunbar’s theories have been described in a number of places. The best academic summary is probably: R. I. M. Dunbar, “Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates,” Journal of Human Evolution (1992), vol. 20, pp. 469–493.

  He has also written a marvelous work of popular science: Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

  Page 187.

  Daniel Wegner, “Transactive Memory in Close Relationships,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1991), vol. 61, no. 6, pp. 923–929.

  Another good discussion of the issue is: Daniel Wegner, “Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind,” in Brian Mullen and George Goethals (eds.), Theories of Group Behavior (New York: Springer Verlag, 1987), pp. 200–201.

  CHAPTER SIX: CASE STUDY

  Page 196.

  Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross, “The Diffusion of Hybrid Seed Corn in Two Iowa Communities,” Rural Sociology (1943), vol. 8, pp. 15–24.

  The study is nicely described (along with other work on diffusion theory) in Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press, 1995).

  Page 197.

  Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 9–14.

  Page 201.

  Gordon Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), pp. 135–158.

  Page 204.

  Thomas Valente, Robert K. Foreman, and Benjamin Junge, “Satellite Exchange in the Baltimore Needle Exchange Program,” Public Health Reports, in press.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: CASE STUDY

  Page 216.

  The story of Sima is beautifully told by the anthropologist Donald H. Rubinstein in several papers, among them: “Love and Suffering: Adolescent Socialization and Suicide in Micronesia,” Contemporary Pacific (Spring 1995), vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 21–53.

  Donald H. Rubinstein, “Epidemic Suicide Among Micronesian Adolescents,” Social Science and Medicine (1983), vol. 17, p. 664.

  Page 220.

  W. Kip Viscusi, Smoking: Making the Risky Decision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 61–78.

  Page 221.

  These statistics on the teen smoking rise come from a number of sources, and they differ according to how “new smokers” are measured. According to a Centers for Disease Control study released in October of 1998, for example, the number of American youths—people under the age of 18—taking up smoking as a daily habit increased from 708,000 in 1988 to 1.2 million in 1996, an increase of 73 percent. The rate at which teens became smokers also increased. In 1996, 77 out of every 1,000 nonsmoking teens picked up the habit. In 1988, the rate was 51 per 1,000. The highest rate ever recorded was 67 per 1,000 in 1977, and the lowest was 44 per 1,000 in 1983. (“New teen smokers up 73 percent”: Associated Press, October 9, 1998.) It is also the case that smoking among college students—a slightly older cohort—is also on the rise. In this study by the Harvard School of Public Health—published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, November 18, 1998—the statistic used was percentage of college students who had smoked at least one cigarette in the past 30 days. In 1993, the number was 22.3 percent. By 1997, it had increased to 28.5 percent.

  Page 222.

  David Phillips’s first paper on suicide rates after news stories of celebrity suicides was: D. P. Phillips, “The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide: Substantive and Theoretical Implications of the Werther Effect,” American Sociological Review (1974), vol. 39, pp. 340–354. A good summary of that paper—and the statistic about Marilyn Monroe—can be found at the beginning of his paper on traffic accidents, David P. Phillips, “Suicide, Motor Vehicle Fatalities, and the Mass Media: Evidence toward a Theory of Suggestion,” American Journal of Sociology (1979), vol. 84, no. 5, pp. 1150–1174.

  Page 224.

  V. R. Ashton and S. Donnan, “Suicide by burning as an epidemic phenomenon: An analysis of 82 deaths and inquests in England and Wales in 1978–79, Psychological Medicine (1981), vol. 11, pp. 735–739.

  Page 225.

  Norman Kreitman, Peter Smith, and Eng Seong Tan, “Attempted Suicide as Language: An Empirical Study,” British Journal of Psychiatry (1970), vol. 116, pp. 465–473.

  Page 230.

  H. J. Eysenck. Smoking, Health and Personality (New York: Basic Books, 1965), p. 80. This reference is found in David Krogh’s Smoking: The Artificial Passion, p. 107.

  The statistics on smoking and sexual behavior come
from: H. J. Eysenck, Smoking, Personality and Stress (New York: Springer Verlag, 1991), p. 27.

  Page 231.

  David Krogh, Smoking: The Artificial Passion. (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1991).

  Page 234.

  Ovide Pomerleau, Cynthia Pomerleau, Rebecca Namenek, “Early Experiences with Tobacco among Women Smokers, Ex smokers, and Never smokers,” Addiction (1998), vol. 93, no. 4, pp. 595–601.

  Page 235.

  Saul Shiffman, Jean A. Paty, Jon D. Kassel, Maryann Gnys, and Monica Zettler Segal, “Smoking Behavior and Smoking History of Tobacco Chippers,” Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology (1994), vol. 2, no. 2, p. 139.

  Page 239.

  Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption.

  Page 242.

  David C. Rowe, The Limits of Family Influence (New York: Guilford Press, 1994). Rowe has a very good summary of the twins and adoption work.

  Page 244.

  Alexander H. Glassman, F. Stetner, B. T. Walsh et al., “Heavy smokers, smoking cessation, and clonidine: results of a double blind, randomized trial,” Journal of the American Medical Association (1988), vol. 259, pp. 2863–2866.

  Page 246.

  Alexander H. Glassman, John E. Helzer, Lirio Covey et al., “Smoking, Smoking Cessation, and Major Depression,” Journal of the American Medical Association (1990), vol. 264, pp. 1546–1549.

  Page 247.

  Wendy Fidler, Lynn Michell, Gillian Raab, Anne Charlton, “Smoking: A Special Need?” British Journal of Addiction (1992), vol. 87, pp. 1583–1591.

  Page 249.

  The Neal Benowitz/Jack Henningfield strategy has been described in two places. Neal L. Benowitz and Jack Henningfield, “Establishing a nicotine threshold for addiction,” New England Journal of Medicine (1994), vol. 331, pp. 123–125. Also: Jack Henningfield, Neal Benowitz, and John Slade, “Report to the American Medical Association: Reducing Illness and Death Caused by Cigarettes by Reducing Their Nicotine Content” (1997).

  Page 251.

  There is a good summary of the available statistics on drug use and addiction in: Dirk Chase Eldredge, Ending the War on Drugs (Bridgehampton, New York: Bridge Works Publishing, 1998), pp. 1–17.

 

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