The Tipping Point

The first kid I knew who smoked was Billy G. We became friends in fifth grade, when the major distinctions ill our suburban N.J. town-jocks, heads, brains — were begi

The first person who I remember smoking was a girl named Pam P. I met her when we were both in the 10th grade. We rode the school bus together in Great Neck, L.I., and I remember thinking she was the coolest because she lived in an apartment. (Great Neck didn't have many apartments.) Pam seemed so much older than her 15 years. We used to sit in the back of the bus and blow smoke out the window. She taught me how to inhale, how to tie a man-tailored shirt at the waist to look cool, and how to wear lipstick. She had a leather jacket. Her father was rarely home.

There is actually considerable support for this idea that there is a common personality to hard-core smokers. Hans Eysenck, the influential British psychologist, has argued that serious smokers can be separated from nonsmokers along very simple personality lines. The quintessential hard-core smoker, according to Eysenck, is an extrovert, the kind of person who

is sociable, likes parties, has many friends, needs to have people to talk to… He craves excitement, takes chances, acts on the spur of the moment and is generally an impulsive individual… He prefers to keep moving and doing things, tends to be aggressive and loses his temper quickly; his feelings are not kept under tight control and he is not always a reliable person.

In countless studies since Eysenck's groundbreaking work, this picture of the smoking "type" has been filled out. Heavy smokers have been shown to have a much greater sex drive than nonsmokers. They are more sexually precocious; they have a greater "need" for sex, and greater attraction to the opposite sex. At age nineteen, for example, 15 percent of nonsmoking white women attending college have had sex. The same number for white female college students who do smoke is 55 percent. The statistics for men are about the same according to Eysenck. They rank much higher on what psychologists call "anti-social" indexes: they tend to have greater levels of misconduct, and be more rebellious and defiant. They make snap judgments. They take more risks. The average smoking household spends 73 percent more on coffee and two to three times as much on beer as the average nonsmoking household. Interestingly, smokers also seem to be more honest about themselves than nonsmokers. As David Krogh describes it in his treatise Smoking: TheArtificial Passion, psychologists have what they call "lie" tests in which they insert inarguable statements — "I do not always tell the truth" or "I am sometimes cold to my spouse" — and if test-takers consistently deny these statements, it is taken as evidence that they are not generally truthful. Smokers are much more truthful on these tests. "One theory," Krogh writes, "has it that their lack of deference and their surfeit of defiance combine to make them relatively indifferent to what people think of them."

These measures don't apply to all smokers, of course. But as general predictors of smoking behavior they are quite accurate, and the more someone smokes, the higher the likelihood that he or she fits this profile. "In the scientific spirit," Krogh writes, "I would invite readers to demonstrate [the smoking personality co

Here is another of the responses to my questio

My grandfather was the only person around me when I was very little who smoked. He was a great Runyonesque figure, a trickster hero, who immigrated from Poland when he was a boy and who worked most of his life as a glazier. My mother used to like to say that when she was first brought to di

The significance of the smoking personality, I think, ca

The teen smoking epidemic does not simply illustrate the Law of the Few. However it is also a very good illustration of the Stickiness Factor. After all, the fact that overwhelming numbers of teenagers experiment with cigarettes as a result of their contacts with other teenagers is not, in and of itself, all that scary. The problem — the fact that has turned smoking into public health enemy number one — is that many of those teenagers end up continuing their cigarette experiment until they get hooked. The smoking experience is so memorable and powerful for some people that they ca

It is important to keep these two concepts — contagiousness and stickiness — separate, because they follow very different patterns and suggest very different strategies. Lois Weisberg is a contagious person. She knows so many people and belongs to so many worlds that she is able to spread a piece of information or an idea a thousand different ways, all at once. Lester Wunderman and the creators of Blue's Clues, on the other hand, are specialists in stickiness: they have a genius for creating messages that are memorable and that change people's behavior. Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.