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