The Tipping Point

What's interesting about this story is that by every normal expectation McCa

If you look closely at epidemic ideas or messages, as often as not the elements that make those sticky turn out to be as small and as seemingly trivial as Wunderman's gold box. Consider, for example, the so-called fear experiments conducted by the social psychologist Howard Levanthal in the 1960s. Levanthal wanted to see if he could persuade a group of college seniors at Yale University to get a tetanus shot. He divided them up into several groups, and gave all of them a seven-page booklet explaining the dangers of tetanus, the importance of inoculation, and the fact that the university was offering free tetanus shots at the campus health center to all interested students. The booklets came in several versions. Some of the students were given a "high fear" version, which described tetanus in dramatic terms and included color photographs of a child having a tetanus seizure and other tetanus victims with urinary catheters, tracheotomy wounds, and nasal tubes. In the "low fear" version, the language describing the risks of tetanus was toned down, and the photographs were omitted. Levanthal wanted to see what impact the different booklets had on the students' attitudes toward tetanus and their likelihood of getting a shot.

The results were, in part, quite predictable. When they were given a questio

If we didn't know about the Stickiness Factor, we probably would conclude that something was wrong with the way the booklet explained tetanus to the students. We might wonder whether trying to scare them was the appropriate direction to take, whether there was a social stigma surrounding tetanus that inhibited students from admitting that they were at risk, or perhaps that medical care itself was intimidating to students. In any case, that only 1 percent of students responded suggested that there was a long way to go to reach the goal. But the Stickiness Factor suggests something quite different. It suggests that the problem probably wasn't with the overall conception of the message at all, and that maybe all the campaign needed was a little gold box. Sure enough, when Levanthal redid the experiment, one small change was sufficient to tip the vaccination rate up to 28 percent. It was simply including a map of the campus, with the university health building circled and the times that shots were available clearly listed.

There are two interesting results of this study. The first is that of the 28 percent who got inoculated, an equal number were from the high-fear and the low-fear group. Whatever extra persuasive muscle was found in the high-fear booklet was clearly irrelevant. The students knew, without seeing gory pictures, what the dangers of tetanus were, and what they ought to be doing. The second interesting thing is that, of course, as seniors they must have already known where the health center was, and doubtless had visited it several times already. It is doubtful that any of them would ever actually have used the map. In other words, what the tetanus intervention needed in order to tip was not an avalanche of new or additional information. What it needed was a subtle but significant change in presentation. The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and the times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk — a lesson no different from the countless other academic lessons they had received over their academic career — to a practical and personal piece of medical advice. And once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable.

There are enormous implications in Levanthal's fear experiments and Wunderman's work for Columbia Records for the question of how to start and tip social epidemics. We have become, in our society, overwhelmed by people clamoring for our attention. In just the past decade, the time devoted to advertisements in a typical hour of network television has grown from six minutes to nine minutes, and it continues to climb every year. The New York-based firm Media Dynamics estimates that the average American is now exposed to 254 different commercial messages in a day, up nearly 25 percent since the mid-1970s. There are now millions of web sites on the Internet, cable systems routinely carry over 50 cha

Sesame Street is best known for the creative geniuses it attracted, people like Jim Henson and Joe Raposo and Frank Oz, who intuitively grasped what it takes to get through to children. They were television's answer to Beatrix Potter or L. Frank Baum or Dr. Seuss. But it is a mistake to think of Sesame Street as a project conceived in a flash of insight. What made the show unusual, in fact, was the extent to which it was exactly the opposite of that — the extent to which the final product was deliberately and painstakingly engineered. Sesame Street was built about a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them.