First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Tipping Points

In the winter of 1969, a massive snowstorm immobilized the city of New York.  Then-mayor John Lindsay is reputed to have replied somewhat testily to critics of his management of city services, "We do so have a snow removal plan – it’s called June."  The Minneapolis road crews have done valiantly over this winter, but there is no denying that during the past week our own ultimate snow removal plan has been implemented, and chances are good that we won’t have to worry about plowing or shoveling again for seven months.  Nature’s tipping point has been reached, and now things will be different from the way they were, at least for a while.

 
Those of us educated in modern western culture accept this seasonal discontinuity, often without any particular attention or thought, for a couple of reasons.  One, it happens often enough that we have been through it before; most of us can remember last spring, and any number of years before that, so the discontinuity is part of a larger sense of continuity.  Two, we believe that we understand it; most of us could offer at least a crudely correct account of the earth’s orbit and changing orientation toward the sun, and the resulting variation of temperatures, with its impact on the properties of water, and the evolutionary adaptations of animals and plant life.  The melting of snow doesn’t come as a surprise, and we have a space for it in our mental maps of how the world works.

It was not ever thus.  Civilizations not much more primitive than our own not only were more aware of the seasonal tipping points in the year, they evidently also pondered them, or certainly celebrated them, much more profoundly than we do.  Of course, in a primarily agricultural society, such changes are of crucial interest, for everyone’s well being depends upon their timely arrival, and negotiating them successfully.  For modern urban people, snow is primarily a combination of trivial inconvenience and aesthetic pleasure; only occasionally does it actually make us change our plans, and rarely does it rise to the level of any danger.  Yet in truth, we never know; the tipping point is out there somewhere.  There is some amount of snow that would make the streets impassable, keep us in our homes, close the stores, interrupt delivery of various services, strand people in their cars, create serious dangers and even fatalities.  It may be impossible to know which flake, which inch of accumulation, which half hour of continuing blizzard tips a storm into the category of the lethal; seldom are we aware of tipping points as they pass.  But as nature reminds us from time to time, continuity and rationality are only part of the story of what’s going on in this universe; the other part has to do with large, abrupt changes in response to seemingly small or counterintuitive causes – the tipping points that dump us suddenly into a new and unanticipated reality.

Let’s do some theological anthropology for a moment here.  Human beings have evolved to our current level of success relying largely on intelligence and intentionality as our survival strategy.  We are not as individuals bigger, faster, stronger, more fertile or more lethal than most of our evolutionary competition, but we do tend to plan farther ahead, and remember more clearly.  We have, to a degree that would be considered ridiculous in the rest of the animal kingdom, lost our sense of smell, but more than any other creatures, we see patterns and connections everywhere we look, and we remember them.  It is that congenital predilection to discover regularities and similarities throughout our experiences, and to ascribe to the world out there the conscious purpose of our own actions, that gives rise to the universal human social hypothesis of the gods.  It makes perfect sense intuitively to suppose that what does not arise out of our own intention must be the product of some other will, even more powerful than our own. 

Being an obvious guess, of course, doesn’t make this proposition true.  There are plenty of other notions, both trivial and profound, that seem obvious to our pattern-seeking, purpose-ascribing minds, but that turn out not to be the case.  The whole concept of humanism is to some extent grounded in this recognition; that if we want to understand the truth about our universe, we have to be willing to not take the easy way out by just assuming that our guesses will be true because the are ours.  To be a humanist is to have a commitment to exploring assumptions, examining data, following the chain of causation as best we can, even when it takes us someplace unexpected.  This is precisely what Malcolm Gladwell, in his book on Tipping Points, invites us to do.  Using the example of disease epidemics as a model for other collective human realities, Gladwell suggests that small, trivial actions can have large, unintended consequences; that environmental factors affect our behavior far more than we imagine, regardless of our stated values and desires; that what some particular people know, or like, or do, matters more than other people making the same choices; and that our attention can be attracted and fixed in predictable, but not especially rational, ways.  None of these theories is very flattering to the sophisticated self-awareness that most of us like to think of ourselves as having.  We picture ourselves participating in an ordered universe in a deliberate way, making reasonable decisions in accordance with our values, holding other people in an abstract and equal respect, and having at best a slight impact on the course of history.  This picture is congruent with the ways in which our brains have been designed by evolution to think about things.  But Gladwell’s observations show that the evidence doesn’t always support these intuitive assumptions.

Contagious diseases have shaped human history; Jared Diamond demonstrated several instances of this in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel.  The black plague, to cite perhaps the best known example, reduced the population of Europe and Britain by approximately one third in the 14th century, and this discontinuity of growth had far-reaching political, military, economic, and intellectual consequences for hundreds of years afterwards.  But epidemics are interesting not only for their impact, but in their structure as well; epidemics illustrate the principle of tipping points, by which seemingly minor individual actions or environmental factors enable the spread of a pathogen that might otherwise have done only a little harm.   The recognition that social phenomena, like ideas, fashion, knowledge, and habits, may spread in the same way, can help us to think beyond our evolutionary program and our conditioning to understand the world in a more creative, and ultimately perhaps more accurate, way.

Part of the difficulty is that our minds are adapted to think in linear ways, rather than in geometric progressions.  Look at the following thought experiment:  Suppose I gave you a large piece of newsprint paper, and you cut it in half, and placed one half on top of the other, and did the same thing again.  Now you have a stack of four pieces of paper, and you have performed the operation twice.  How high do you think the stack is, after you have performed the same operation fifty times?  If you have some mathematical background, you know that two to the fiftieth power is a lot more than anyone can think about, but let’s stay with the intuitive for a moment longer.  The third doubling gets you eight pages, and the fourth, sixteen; still easy to picture.  Then we have 32, 64, and 128; the stack is starting to have some measurable thickness. The eighth operation yields 256, and the ninth, 512.  That’s a reasonable size book, wouldn’t you say?  So the tenth operation gives you two books, then four, then eight, then sixteen again, and by the 14^th repetition, you have 32 books.  The stack is starting to get unmanageable, and we’ve only done 14 out of 50 iterations!  Gladwell’s answer is that by the time you have doubled the stack 50 times, it will be approximately as tall as the distance from the earth to the sun.  Epidemics, and tipping points in general, have this exponential quality; if one person infects two others, and each of those infects two others, the result is at first trivial, and then manageable, and then suddenly explosive.  This is also how effective word of mouth advertising functions; if each person who becomes aware of a new product tells two others, the message becomes general public knowledge with startling rapidity.  Gladwell calls this the Law of the Few; it only takes a very small number of people to originate an idea, if that idea is something that will spread in a geometric progression.

What makes an idea a candidate for exponential distribution is something that Gladwell calls ‘stickiness.’  This has to do with how memorable it is, whether it will have enough of an impact on each next recipient that they in turn will pass it along.  Many of the most virulent diseases in human experience, perhaps even including AIDS, have appeared and circulated from time to time in local outbreaks without reaching epidemic proportions.  It is when they mutate in some small but crucial way that makes it prohibitively difficult for each victim not to infect others, that geometric progression takes hold, and a true epidemic occurs.  As public relations experts know, the holy grail of advertising is not persuasiveness, but stickiness.   Counterintuitive though the idea seems, it doesn’t really matter whether people are pleased or annoyed; as long as they remember and pass along an idea, the idea will spread.  Getting someone’s attention, in this context, is more challenging, and more to the point, than getting that person’s agreement.

The third principle that Gladwell cites has to do with the power of setting.  One of the earliest uses of the tipping point concept dealt with the dynamics of racial integration in the housing markets of the sixties.  Below a certain degree of concentration, white neighborhoods could remain stable even when several black families moved in, but as real estate agents were well aware, when the tipping point was reached, all the remaining whites would leave very suddenly.  While these were at some level a series of individual decisions, the end result was a form of collective behavior that was quite predictable.  Studies demonstrate that the willingness to cheat -- on exams, or subway fares, to take two examples -- is far more a function of the setting and what other people are doing, than it is of personal principle.  At a certain point, the obviousness of the opportunity to cheat, and the observation that a certain percentage of others are cheating without consequence, tips the majority of people into the same category.  What this implies is that in many ways changing the context predictably changes behavior more effectively than changing what people believe.

This may be the hardest notion for those of us committed to the integrity of human reason and intention to embrace.  We generally prefer to believe that our behavior is governed by our internal convictions, rather than by external influences like what other people are doing, or the physical environment, or the stickiness of ideas as they propagate across the culture.  And yet, it seems to me that it is precisely because neither the natural world nor the human condition is entirely a linear function, that there are grounds for hope and novelty, as well as anxiety.  Not all change is incremental, the product of rational effort, proportional to the investment of time and energy seeking to bring it about.  The universe responds, and so do we as creatures of our own organic existence, to the tipping points – the temperature at which snow is suddenly rain, the street on which one more broken window seems not to matter any more, the purchase of a fax machine which one day just makes sense, since by now everybody else has one.  The human condition is full of problems that no amount of reasonable effort is likely to solve – we have mostly all had a taste of those from time to time.  But it is also full of tipping points – those moments when the right connections, or one memorable idea, or a fortunate accident in the environment, combine to bring about an immediate change that no one could have predicted.

It seems to me there are two morals to be taken from this account.  One, of course, is that we are each less existentially the captains of our own fates and souls than we usually like to think.  So it behooves us both to be modest about the extent to which we make our decisions independently on the basis of principled values, as well as somewhat skeptical of the social and environmental forces that will have even more power over us if we think they don’t matter.  Second, those of us who want the message of humanism -- or of justice, or of liberalism -- to be a kind of social virus, spreading in the geometric progression that could get it to a tipping point, might be better advised to look for ways to make that message ‘stickier’; more memorable, rather than more persuasive. 

Our minds are designed to assume that things will work the way they always have done, and that if change occurs, it will take place a little at a time, according to some intention that wants it to happen.  It requires a concentrated abstract mental effort for us to agree with the philosophical assertion of a thinker like Hume, that the future is under no obligation to repeat the past; and it is all but impossible for human consciousness, constructed the way it is, to stay with that proposition for any length of time.  The predictabilities of the world are precious to our reason; they are what enables us to make sense of what’s going on around here.  The thing is, that what is going on around here is more complex than we normally imagine.  It’s not that we can’t understand how rain turns into snow, or how lethal the geometric spread of a disease can be, or how a street can tip from safe to dangerous to walk down; it’s just that we have to stretch, think differently, re-examine our comfortable assumptions, or else be crucially mistaken in our simplicity.  These phenomena, these tipping points, show us a universe more complex than it was useful for our early ancestors to understand, when their main task was to avoid saber toothed tigers and poison mushrooms, and their survival shaped our genetic inheritance.  But it may be that our task today is different; that these are the very kinds of realities we must learn to comprehend, if we are going to survive the challenges of our own time, and leave an enriched genetic inheritance to those who follow us.   For the truth is that we are more connected, in more subtle ways than we might guess, to everything that is; the interdependent web of all creation can be surprisingly taut, the strands joined in unexpectedly powerful ways.  And change can come suddenly, flowing out of causes and processes that only appear in hindsight.  In this knowledge is both power and hope, for tipping points may well destroy us if we do not pay attention, but they also offer the possibility that simple ideas, spreading widely, and little changes in the way we behave, and structure our environments, can tip us into a future that is different, and maybe better, than anything we have imagined.

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 Reading: from Tipping Points by Malcolm Gladwell

The second principle of epidemics – that little changes can somehow have big effects – is a fairly radical notion.  We are, as human beings, heavily socialized to make a rough approximation between cause and effect.  We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out.  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 sometimes these changes happen very quickly.
 
I remember once as a child seeing our family’s puppy encounter snow for the first time.  He was shocked and delighted and overwhelmed, wagging his tail nervously, sniffing about in this strange, fluffy substance, whimpering with the mystery of it all.  It wasn’t much colder on the morning of his first snowfall than it had been the evening before.  It might have been 34 degrees the previous evening, and now it was 31 degrees.  Almost nothing had changed, in other words, yet – and this was the amazing thing – everything had changed.  Rain had become something entirely different.  Snow!  We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time.  But the world of the Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility.  It is – contrary to all our expectations – a certainty.

 
We have an instinctive disdain for the kind of solution called band aids because there is something in all of us that feels that true answers to problems have to be comprehensive, that there is virtue in the dogged and indiscriminate application of effort, that slow and steady should win the race.  The problem, or course, is that the indiscriminate application of effort is something that is not always possible.  There are times when we need a convenient shortcut, a way to make a lot out of a little, and that is what Tipping Points, in the end, are all about.

 
The theory of Tipping Points requires, however, that we reframe the way we think about the world.  I have spent a lot of time in this book talking about the idiosyncrasies of the way we relate to new information and toe each other.  There are abrupt limits to the number of cognitive categories we can make and the number of people we can truly love and the number of acquaintances we can truly know.  We throw up our hands at a problem phrased in an abstract way, but have no difficulty at all solving the same problem rephrased as a social dilemma.  All of these things are expressions of the peculiarities of the human mind and heart, a refutation of the notion that the way we function and communicate and process information is straightforward and transparent.  It is not.  It is messy and opaque.  Who would have predicted that going from 100 to 150 workers in a plant isn’t a problem, but going from 150 to 200 is a huge problem?

 
The world – much as we want it to – does not accord with our intuition.  This is the second lesson of the Tipping Point.  Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right.  The deliberately test their intuitions.  To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.

 
What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.  This, too, contradicts some of the most ingrained assumptions we hold about ourselves and each other.  We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament.  But in fact we are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us.  To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life.  That’s why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.

 
But if there is difficulty and volatility in the world of the Tipping Point, there is a large measure of hopefulness as well.  Merely by manipulating the size of a group, we can dramatically improve its receptivity to new ideas.  By tinkering with the presentation of information, we can significantly improve its stickiness.  Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics.  In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action.  Look at the world around you.  It may seem like an immovable, implacable place.  It is not.  With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped.