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What do the weird resurgence of Hush Puppies shoes, the sudden drop in New York City's crime rate, the steady rise in teen smoking, and the revolutionary success of Sesame Street have to do with proclaiming the gospel? A lot, if you take to heart Malcolm Gladwell's thesis in his bestseller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has taken principles of epidemiology (the study of how diseases spread) and translated them into strategies for understanding the life cycle of cultural trends. Just like disease epidemics, he says, ideas and messages have "tipping points"—dramatic moments when, all at once, they explode upon a society and "infect" it. Studying these phenomena could help us "start and control positive social epidemics of our own."CT advisory editor Michael Cromartie spoke to Gladwell at his New Yorker office in Manhattan about social epidemics and their potential implications for the church.

How does thinking in terms of epidemics help us understand our social worlds?

It gives us a new appreciation for the extent to which ideas and behaviors can be contagious, and that we pick things up largely involuntarily. When your 6-year-old decides she wants a Cabbage Patch Doll, she's not sitting down and making a rational choice. She has caught the Cabbage Patch "virus." She caught it the same way kids catch a cold virus in first grade.There are moments when all of us get swept up in causes, ideas, and behaviors. There's this notion that every time we do something, it's because we sit down and make a rational choice. But we fool ourselves when we think that individuals are autonomous creatures. We're not. We are exquisitely sensitive to the pressures and influences of the world around us.

What are the laws of epidemics that can be applied to the social sphere?

First, there is the Law of the Few; with epidemics, a core group does all the damage, all the work, all the spreading. This is true in social epidemics as well.Certain personality types are responsible for playing that critical role. There are "Connectors"—a small number of people who know a lot more people than the rest of us do. "Mavens" specialize in knowledge accumulation, and we appeal to them for insight or expertise. "Salesmen," those with a gift for persuading others, are the third type.These personality types have an extraordinary amount of social influence. But it's not the influence of power, money, or physical attractiveness; it's personality. The people who are ultimately influential in your life are not the ones with status or money but those who inspire trust, credibility, and love.

But just because something is contagious doesn't make it an epidemic.

Exactly, which moves us to the second law, the Stickiness Factor. The common cold is the most contagious virus we know, but we never talk about epidemics of a cold because the cold doesn't stay around. We do talk about flu epidemics, and the difference is that the flu is sticky. You're on your back, it stays with you for two weeks, and you remember it. It changes the way you live your life.The same is true of ideas. For an idea to take off, it must be more than simply infectious. It also has to make a lasting impact on everybody it infects, which is that additional quality of stickiness.Sesame Street is a show that deliberately engineered stickiness; the producers figured out not just how to capture a kid's attention but also how to create something that would stick in their brains. We're often too concerned about the initial grabbing of the attention. But an idea takes off not just because it grabs your attention but because it stays with you. And the things that make something stay with you are often not obvious but quite small.In a famous study at Yale University, researchers tried to influence students to get tetanus shots. They played with all kinds of variables: Should we make them take a two-week course, or a one-week course? Read a 10-page paper, or a 15-page paper? It turns out the only thing that made a difference was the little packet they gave students: it included a campus map to show them how to get to the place that administered the shots. That's what made it sticky. They didn't need to be warned about the dangers; they didn't need a two-week course on the medical history of tetanus. All they needed was a map.

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August 7 2000, Vol. 44, No. 9