The Tipping Point

The Tipping point, as defined on its back cover, is that majic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like wild fire.

It is a fascinating read, dealing in the hugely interesting concept of “Social Epidemics”. Of course, like most books of this genre, it is written with the benefit of hindsight and with the intention to sensationalize and sell. Highly recommended, but with a pinch of salt.

The central theme of the tipping point is the spread of social epidemics. Through fascinating and often startling examples, Gladwell discusses the characteristics of epidemics, the conditions and kind of people that propel some epidemics forward and the causes behind why a lot of ideas fail to tip.

While I found the central idea to be sufficient food for thought in itself, digressions made from point to point are utterly fascinating. Since this isn’t meant to be a formal book review, I’ll just paste from my notes one of my favourite quotes from the book-

“ When it comes to judging other people’s behavior, human beings make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context. We always reach for a “dispositional opinion” rather than a “contextual opinion”.

The human mind has a kind of reducing valve that tends to maintain continuity even in the face of perpetual observed changes in actual behavior.

When we observe a woman who seems hostile an fiercely independent some of the time but passive, dependent and feminine on other occasions, our reducing valve makes us choose between the two syndromes. We decide that one pattern is in the service of the other, or that both are in the service of a third motive. She must be a really castrating lady with a façade of passivity- or perhaps she is a warm, passive- dependent woman with a surface defense of aggressiveness. But perhaps nature is bigger than our concepts and it is possible for the lady to be a hostile, fiercely independent, passive, dependent, feminine, aggressive, castrating person all-in-one. Of course, which of these she is at any particular moment would not be random or capricious-it would depend on who she is with, when, how and much, much more. But each of these aspects of herself may be a quite genuine and real aspect of her total being.

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 why most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are reasonably good at controlling our environment.”

One of the more interesting non-fiction books I’ve read in a while. Go Read!!!