The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

The Power of Context is the idea that “epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur” (139). Gladwell illustrates this concept through a series of disparate examples that include Bernard Goetz’s shooting of four Black men on a New York City subway in 1984 and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment.

Human beings are extremely sensitive to changes in their social and architectural contexts, and “the kinds of contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very different than we might ordinarily expect” (140). Gladwell examines the sudden drop in New York City crime in the 1990s through the broken windows theory of James Q. Wilson and George Kellig, who argue that “crime is the inevitable result of disorder” (141). This means that the inability of local law enforcement to stop graffiti or prevent people from aggressively asking strangers for money while roaming the streets leads to a general feeling of anarchy and makes people more likely to choose to commit crimes. Unintuitively, this suggests that the Tipping Point for a crime epidemic could be “something physical” instead of the specific efforts of individual people like Mavens or Connectors. Gladwell posits that applying broken windows theory to the New York subway and to policing efforts in the city appears to have contributed to a sharp reduction in crime.

Broken windows theory is a manifestation of the Power of Context that suggests that a criminal is “someone acutely sensitive to his environment, who is alert to all kinds of cues, and who is prompted to commit crimes based on his perception of the world around him” (150). This interpretation suggests that the graffiti on the subway and the fear awakened in Goetz by his immediate environment triggered his shooting of four Black teenagers on a subway train after one of them told him to give them five dollars. Context-specific explanations of this type are opposed to liberal views that crime stems from structural inequalities; rather than needing to correct generations of system-wide inequality to curb crime, the Power of Context suggests that “you don’t have to solve the big problems to solve crime” (151). Simply cleaning up the physical environment of a city could positively influence its crime statistics.

Even personality characteristics that people tend to think of as innate qualities, such as kindness and helpfulness, are often context-specific. John Darley and Daniel Batson’s Good Samaritan study at Princeton showed that people in seminary were consistently less likely to help people who were slumped over in their paths if the seminarians were in a rush. In Zimbardo’s prison experiment, regular Stanford students who were assigned roles as either jail guards or prisoners took on their assigned roles so completely that the experiment had to be cut short due to the cruelty of the "guards." Understanding the significant impact of context and environment on crime prompts a rejection of the old idea that “disposition is everything” and leads to embracing the idea that people have the power to change “environmental tipping points” (167).