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Title: The Tipping Point Authors: Malcolm Gladwell Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 35 Date: 2025-06-05 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
Six degrees of separation doesnât mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.
Tags:algorithm,connection,favorite
The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.
Tags:communication
Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment.
Tags:environment,epidemics
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.
Tags:communication,law
In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of peopleâSalesmenâwith the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.
Tags:epidemics
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
Tags:epidemics,problem_solving
These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.
Tags:change
The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.
Tags:cognition,environment,perception
We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us.
Tags:influence,perception
When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused.
Note: Bystander affect
Tags:bias
Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.
Tags:connection
The essence of the Power of Context is that the same thing is true for certain kinds of environmentsâthat in ways that we donât necessarily appreciate, our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances.
Tags:cognition,environment
Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.
Tags:communication
The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.
Tags:problem_solving
The word Maven comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge.
Tags:knowledge
Weâre friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We donât seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do.
Sprinkled among every walk of life, in other words, are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. They are Connectors.
Tags:connection
âThe figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, itâs the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.â
Tags:relationships,social_construct,society
To be a Maven is to be a teacher. But it is also, even more emphatically, to be a student. Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know.
Tags:information,learning
But in the case of Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.
Tags:communication,connection
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.
Tags:habits,perspective
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.
Tags:action,behavior,cognition
This was the legacy of Sesame Street: If you paid careful attention to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness.
Tags:stories
Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more power ful you are.
Tags:connection
These three characteristicsâone, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment âare the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter.
Tags:perspective,social_construct,viral
When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, admire, and trust. The cure for immunity is finding Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen.
To appreciate the power of epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.
Tags:epidemics,perception
The Law of the Few says the answer is that one of these exceptional people found out about the trend, and through social connections and energy and enthusiasm and personality spread the word about Hush Puppies just as people like Gaetan Dugas and Nushawn Williams were able to spread HIV.
Tags:epidemics
There is something in all of us that makes us instinctively want to explain the world around us in terms of peopleâs essential attributes: heâs a better basketball player, that person is smarter than I am.
The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.
Part of what it means to have a powerful or persuasive personality, then, is that you can draw others into your own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction.
Tags:personality,persuasion
The point about Connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.
What Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning.
Tags:communication,viral
Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other peopleâs behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context. We will always reach for a âdispositionalâ explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation.
Tags:fallacy
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.
Tags:family