Character, then, isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment. I have a lot of fun at dinner parties. As I result, I throw a lot of dinner parties and my friends see me there and think that I’m fun. But if I couldn’t have lots of dinner parties, if my friends instead tended to see me in lots of different situations over which I had little or no control—like, say, faced with four hostile youths in a filthy, broken down subway—they probably wouldn’t think of me as fun anymore.
5.
Some years ago two Princeton University psychologists, John Darley and Daniel Batson, decided to conduct a study inspired by the biblical story of the Good Samaritan. As you may recall, that story, from the New Testament Gospel of Luke, tells of a traveler who has been beaten and robbed and left for dead by the side of the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Both a priest and a Levite—worthy, pious men—came upon the man but did not stop, “passing by on the other side.” The only man to help was a Samaritan—the member of a despised minority—who “went up to him and bound up his wounds” and took him to an inn. Darley and Batson decided to replicate that study at the Princeton Theological Seminary. This was an experiment very much in the tradition of the FAE, and it is an important demonstration of how the Power of Context has implications for the way we think about social epidemics of all kinds, not just violent crime.
Darley and Batson met with a group of seminarians, individually, and asked each one to prepare a short, extemporaneous talk on a given biblical theme, then walk over to a nearby building to present it. Along the way to the presentation, each student ran into a man slumped in an alley, head down, eyes closed, coughing and groaning. The question was, who would stop and help? Darley and Batson introduced three variables into the experiment, to make its results more meaningful. First, before the experiment even started, they gave the students a questionnaire about why they had chosen to study theology. Did they see religion as a means for personal and spiritual fulfillment? Or were they looking for a practical tool for finding meaning in everyday life? Then they varied the subject of the theme the students were asked to talk about. Some were asked to speak on the relevance of the professional clergy to the religious vocation. Others were given the parable of the Good Samaritan. Finally, the instructions given by the experimenters to each student varied as well. In some of the cases, as he sent the students on their way, the experimenter would look at his watch and say, “Oh, you’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. We’d better get moving.” In other cases, he would say, “It will be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head over now.”
If you ask people to predict which seminarians played the Good Samaritan (and subsequent studies have done just this) their answers are highly consistent. They almost all say that the students who entered the ministry to help people and those reminded of the importance of compassion by having just read the parable of the Good Samaritan will be the most likely to stop. Most of us, I think, would agree with those conclusions. In fact, neither of those factors made any difference. “It is hard to think of a context in which norms concerning helping those in distress are more salient than for a person thinking about the Good Samaritan, and yet it did not significantly increase helping behavior,” Darley and Batson concluded. “Indeed, on several occasions, a seminary student going to give his talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way.” The only thing that really mattered was whether the student was in a rush. Of the group that was, 10 percent stopped to help. Of the group who knew they had a few minutes to spare, 63 percent stopped.
What this study is suggesting, in other words, is that the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behavior. The words “Oh, you’re late” had the effect of making someone who was ordinarily compassionate into someone who was indifferent to suffering—of turning someone, in that particular moment, into a different person. Epidemics are, at their root, about this very process of transformation. When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic, convert them from hostility to acceptance. That can be done through the influence of special kinds of people, people of extraordinary personal connection. That’s the Law of the Few. It can be done by changing the content of communication, by making a message so memorable that it sticks in someone’s mind and compels them to action. That is the Stickiness Factor. I think that both of those laws make intuitive sense. But we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature.
This does not mean that our inner psychological states and personal histories are not important in explaining our behavior. An enormous percentage of those who engage in violent acts, for example, have some kind of psychiatric disorder or come from deeply disturbed backgrounds. But there is a world of difference between being inclined toward violence and actually committing a violent act. A crime is a relatively rare and aberrant event. For a crime to be committed, something extra, something additional, has to happen to tip a troubled person toward violence, and what the Power of Context is saying is that those Tipping Points may be as simple and trivial as everyday signs of disorder like graffiti and fare beating. The implications of this idea are enormous. The previous notion that disposition is everything—that the cause of violent behavior is always “sociopathic personality” or “deficient superego” or the inability to delay gratification or some evil in the genes—is, in the end, the most passive and reactive of ideas about crime. It says that once you catch a criminal you can try to help him get better—give him Prozac, put him in therapy, try to rehabilitate him—but there is very little you can do to prevent crime from happening in the first place. The old understanding of handling crime epidemics leads inevitably to a preoccupation with defensive measures against crime. Put an extra lock on the door, to slow the burglar down and maybe encourage him to go next door. Lock up criminals for longer, so that they have less opportunity to do the rest of us harm. Move to the suburbs, to put as much distance as possible between yourself and the majority of criminals.
Once you understand that context matters, however, that specific and relatively small elements in the environment can serve as Tipping Points, that defeatism is turned upside down. Environmental Tipping Points are things that we can change: we can fix broken windows and clean up graffiti and change the signals that invite crime in the first place. Crime can be more than understood. It can be prevented. There is a broader dimension to this. Judith Harris has convincingly argued that peer influence and community influence are more important than family influence in determining how children turn out. Studies of juvenile delinquency and high school drop out rates, for example, demonstrate that a child is better off in a good neighborhood and a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighborhood and a good family. We spend so much time celebrating the importance and power of family influence that it may seem, at first blush, that this can’t be true. But in reality it is no more than an obvious and commonsensical extension of the Power of Context, because it says simply that children are powerfully shaped by their external environment, that the features of our immediate social and physical world—the streets we walk down, the people we encounter—play a huge role in shaping who we are and how we act. It isn’t just serious criminal behavior, in the end, t
hat is sensitive to environmental cues, it is all behavior. Weird as it sounds, if you add up the meaning of the Stanford prison experiment and the New York subway experiment, they suggest that it is possible to be a better person on a clean street or in a clean subway than in one littered with trash and graffiti.
“In a situation like this, you’re in a combat situation,” Goetz told his neighbor Myra Friedman, in an anguished telephone call just days after the shooting. “You’re not thinking in a normal way. Your memory isn’t even working normally. You are so hyped up. Your vision actually changes. Your field of view changes. Your capabilities change. What you are capable of changes.” He acted, Goetz went on, “viciously and savagely....If you corner a rat and you are about to butcher it, okay? The way I responded was viciously and savagely, just like that, like a rat.”
Of course he did. He was in a rat hole.
FIVE
The Power of Context
(Part Two)
THE MAGIC NUMBER
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY
In 1996, a sometime actress and playwright by the name of Rebecca Wells published a book entitled Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood. Its arrival in the bookstores was not a major literary event. Wells had written one previous book—Little Altars Everywhere—which had been a minor cult hit in and around her hometown of Seattle. But she was not Danielle Steel or Mary Higgins Clark. When Wells gave a reading soon after her book was published in Greenwich, Connecticut, there were seven people in the audience. She had a smattering of reviews here and there, mostly positive, and in the end her book sold a very respectable 15,000 copies in hardcover.
A year later, Ya Ya Sisterhood came out in paperback. The first edition of 18,000 copies sold out in the first few months, exceeding expectations. By early summer, total paperback sales had reached 30,000, and both Wells and her editor began to get the sense that something strange and wonderful was about to happen. “I’d be signing books and there would be groups of women who would come together—six or seven women—and they would have me sign anywhere between three and ten books,” Wells remembered later. Wells’s editor, Diane Reverand, went to her marketing people and said it was time for an advertising campaign. They bought one ad, opposite the contents page of the New Yorker magazine, and in the space of a month sales doubled to 60,000. Going from one reading to the next, across the country, Wells began to see changes in the composition of her audience. “I started noticing mothers and daughters coming. The daughters would be in their late thirties, early forties. The mothers were of the generation who went to high school during World War Two. Then I noticed that there started to be three generations coming, twentysomethings as well. And then, to my total delight—and this didn’t happen until later—there would be teenagers and fifth graders.”
Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood was not yet on the bestseller lists. That wouldn’t happen until February 1998, when it would hit the charts and stay there, through 48 printings and 2.5 million copies. The national media attention—the articles in the big women’s magazines and the appearance on television shows that would turn Wells into a celebrity—hadn’t started yet either. But through the power of word of mouth, her book had tipped. “The turning point for me was probably in northern California, the winter after the paperback came out,” Wells said. “I walked into a situation where all of a sudden there were seven hundred and eight hundred people at my readings.”
Why did Ya Ya Sisterhood turn into an epidemic? In retrospect, the answer seems fairly straightforward. The book itself is heartwarming and beautifully written, a compelling story of friendship and mother daughter relationships. It spoke to people. It’s sticky. Then there’s the fact that Wells herself is an actress. She didn’t read from her novel as she traveled across the country so much as she acted it out, playing each character with such skill that she turned her readings into performances. Wells is a classic Salesman. But there is a third, less obvious, factor here, which has to do with the last of the principles of epidemics. The success of Ya Ya is a tribute to the Power of Context. More specifically, it is testimony to the power of one specific aspect of context, which is the critical role that groups play in social epidemics.
1.
In a way, this is an obvious observation. Anyone who has ever been to the movies knows that the size of the crowd in the theater has a big effect on how good the movie seems: comedies are never funnier and thrillers never more thrilling than in a packed movie house. Psychologists tell us much the same thing: that when people are asked to consider evidence or make decisions in a group, they come to very different conclusions than when they are asked the same questions by themselves. Once we’re part of a group, we’re all susceptible to peer pressure and social norms and any number of other kinds of influence that can play a critical role in sweeping us up in the beginnings of an epidemic.
Have you ever wondered, for example, how religious movements get started? Usually, we think of them as a product of highly charismatic evangelists, people like the Apostle Paul or Billy Graham or Brigham Young. But the spread of any new and contagious ideology also has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, the Methodist movement became epidemic in England and North America, tipping from 20,000 to 90,000 followers in the U.S. in the space of five or six years in the 1780s. But Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, was by no means the most charismatic preacher of his era. That honor belonged to George Whitfield, an orator of such power and charisma that, it was said, he once charmed a five pound contribution out of Benjamin Franklin—who was, of course, the furthest thing from a churchgoer. Nor was Wesley a great theologian, in the tradition of, say, John Calvin or Martin Luther. His genius was organizational. Wesley would travel around England and North America delivering open air sermons to thousands of people. But he didn’t just preach. He also stayed long enough in each town to form the most enthusiastic of his converts into religious societies, which in turn he subdivided into smaller classes of a dozen or so people. Converts were required to attend weekly meetings and to adhere to a strict code of conduct. If they failed to live up to Methodist standards, they were expelled from the group. This was a group, in other words, that stood for something. Over the course of his life, Wesley traveled ceaselessly among these groups, covering as much as four thousand miles a year by horseback, reinforcing the tenets of Methodist belief. He was a classic Connector. He was a super Paul Revere. The difference is, though, that he wasn’t one person with ties to many other people. He was one person with ties to many groups, which is a small but critical distinction. Wesley realized that if you wanted to bring about a fundamental change in people’s belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced and expressed and nurtured.
This, I think, helps to explain why the Ya Ya Sisterhood tipped as well. The first bestseller list on which Ya Ya Sisterhood appeared was the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s list. Northern California, as Wells said, was where 700 and 800 people first began showing up at her readings. It was where the Ya Ya epidemic began. Why? Because, according to Reverand, the San Francisco area is home to one of the country’s strongest book group cultures, and from the beginning Ya Ya was what publishers refer to as a “book group book.” It was the kind of emotionally sophisticated, character driven, multi layered novel that invites reflection and discussion, and book groups were flocking to it. The groups of women who were coming to Wells’s readings were members of reading groups, and they were buying extra copies not just for family and friends but for other members of their group. And because Ya Ya was being talked about and read in groups, the book itself became that much stickier. It’s easier to remember and appreciate something, after all, if you discuss it for two hours with your best friends. It becomes a social experience, an object of conversation. Ya Ya’s roots in book group culture tipped it into a larger wo
rd of mouth epidemic.
Wells says that at the end of readings, during the question and answer session, women in the audience would tell her, “We’ve been in a book group for two years, and then we read your book and something else happened. It started to drop down to a level of sharing that was more like friendship. They told me that they had started going to the beach together, or having parties at each other’s houses.” Women began forming Ya Ya Sisterhood groups of their own, in imitation of the group described in the book, and bringing Wells pictures of their group for her to sign. Wesley’s Methodism spread like wildfire through England and America because Wesley was shuttling back and forth among hundreds and hundreds of groups, and each group was then taking his message and making it even stickier. The word about Ya Ya was spreading in the same way, from reading group to reading group, from Ya Ya group to Ya Ya group and from one of Wells’s readings to another, because for over a year she stopped everything else and toured the country nonstop.
The lesson of Ya Ya and John Wesley is that small, close knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic potential of a message or idea. That conclusion, however, still leaves a number of critical questions unanswered. The word group, for instance, is a term used to describe everything from a basketball team to the Teamsters Union, from two couples on a holiday to the Republican Party. If we are interested in starting an epidemic—in reaching a Tipping Point—what are the most effective kinds of groups? Is there a simple rule of thumb that distinguishes a group with real social authority from a group with little power at all? As it turns out, there is. It’s called the Rule of 150, and it is a fascinating example of the strange and unexpected ways in which context affects the course of social epidemics.
The Tipping Point Page 15
