Spreading the Word

By Richard Lacayo

To begin with, there's the midnight ride of William Dawes. On the April night in 1775 that Paul Revere got on his horse, Dawes set off along different roads on the same mission, spreading word that the British were coming. Revere mobilized the local militiamen everywhere he rode. Dawes didn't. Was it something he said?

Or maybe something he was? This is the kind of thing that Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for the New Yorker, thinks about in The Tipping Point (Little, Brown; 279 pages; $24.95), a somersaulting exercise in social theory that tries to explain how ideas and trends are spread. Like germs, is Gladwell's answer. Hush Puppies and Big Bird, hypodermics and Republicanism--every notion and product can catch on in ways that resemble medical contagions. The most explosive are set off when very effective carriers spread very potent strains in very conducive settings. And in these social outbursts, Gladwell tells us, small things have big consequences.

So Gladwell tells us that Revere was a first-rate agent of contamination. On good historical evidence he was a classic networker, one of those barroom backslappers who belonged to half the organizations in colonial Boston. Not Dawes. On the night of his ride, Revere would have known just which anti-Royalists to alert along the road. Dawes, who may never have clanked a tankard with anybody, would have been clueless.

People like Revere are what Gladwell calls Connectors. He groups them with Mavens (info freaks) and Salesmen (good persuaders) as the types who spread data the way the most engageable boys and girls spread venereal disease: fast. Gladwell plays Connector in the world of ideas. He links the company that makes Gore-Tex fabric, and which starts a new plant every time an old one has more than roughly 150 workers, with the Hutterites, the religious sect that splits off a new community every time an existing one approaches the same number. This would be a "So what?" coincidence if he didn't also connect both of them to an argument by a British anthropologist that 150 is the maximum number of people whom anyone can really know intimately enough to bond with. Bunches no bigger than that are the best incubators for "contagious messages," Gladwell writes, leaping from there to explain how tight-knit book-discussion clubs talked up the novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood until it hit the best-seller list.

A British-born Canadian, Gladwell, 36, started thinking about the large consequences of marginal actions while working on a story about the crime rate in New York City. William Bratton, then the city's police commissioner, was a believer in the "broken windows" theory, which says such big crimes as assault and robbery happen where small decay, like litter and graffiti, is tolerated. To ward off shootings and break-ins, Bratton cracked down on things like public urination and subway spray painting, a tactic that explains at least part of the city's crime drop in the 1990s.

Gladwell says his book is intended partly as antidote to the current and somewhat fatalistic intellectual climate, in which immutable genes are supposed to explain the present and set the future in concrete. "Sometimes we talk as if there were no such thing as culture," he says. "Culture has a real effect on how we act and what we believe." So, there's the 1984 study that found that ABC News anchor Peter Jennings was more likely to smile on camera when talking about Ronald Reagan than Walter Mondale, and that in the same year the people who watched ABC News voted for Reagan in greater proportions than the people who watched other network-news shows. And he tells us about the psychologists who believe that if you simply nod in agreement when you are told something, you are more likely to actually agree.

The Tipping Point assembles talking points from childhood development, marketing and social epidemiology, and holds them up at an angle that lets one distant notion attach to another. If sometimes the book reads like a primer in sales technique--Get that message out!--it's also an ingenious guide to the ways in which antismoking and needle-exchange programs, well, get that message out. Gladwell's message is optimistic. The world "may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push--in just the right place--it can be tipped." Got that? Just nod.