The Tipping Point: Chapter Seven Summary & Analysis

In the South Pacific islands of Micronesia, there was a teenager named Sima. Sima’s father woke up him one morning and ordered him to find a pole knife in town. Sima was unable to find such a knife, and his father was so furious that he kicked Sima out of the house and told him to never come back. Shortly afterwards, Sima hanged himself. At the time, suicide was almost unheard of in Micronesia. But within the intervening four decades, suicide has become hugely common in Micronesia—roughly eight times the suicide rate of the United States. The prevalence of suicide in Micronesia is particularly unusual because almost all of the suicide cases are teenaged boys who experience arguments with their families or lovers. Anthropologists have even argued that suicide is a established part of Micronesian culture, expressed and even celebrated in music, literature, and film.

Suicide in Micronesia is strikingly similar to the teenage smoking epidemic in the United States. Teenagers smoke in the U.S. despite being fairly aware of the health risks of doing so. Furthermore, the large anti-smoking movement in the U.S. in the 90s seemingly had little effect on teen smoking—in fact, smoking among students and teenagers increased during the 90s. Gladwell proposes that teen smoking, like Micronesian suicide, can’t be combatted with education or any other methods of rational persuasion. Instead, teen smoking is a form of “complex ritual,” governed by irrational psychological factors.

It is a well-established fact that suicide can inspire other suicides. When a prominent person commits suicide, there is usually a wave of copycat suicides soon afterwards (for example, after Marilyn Monroe killed herself, the national suicide rate increased by 12 percent). Indeed, it’s possible to interpret a suicide wave as a form of social epidemic. In Micronesia, there was a suicide epidemic that began when R., the son of a famous family, hanged himself because he couldn’t decide between his two lovers. In Gladwell’s terminology, the son who hanged himself is a Salesman, persuading other Micronesian people to kill themselves in the same way.

In order to test his hypothesis that teen smoking is a social epidemic that follows the characteristics he’s discussed in his book, Gladwell conducted a survey in which he asked people to describe their earliest experiences with cigarettes. The vast majority of the responders gave a version of the same answer: their earliest memories associate smoking with maturity and sophistication, usually embodied by a “cool friend” or older sibling. Smoking, one could say, becomes an epidemic when Salesmen (friends, older siblings, or movie stars) persuade people to try smoking. Gladwell posits that there is a “smoking personality”—the kind of person who is charismatic, sexually precocious, confident, and extroverted, and who smokes. People with a smoking personality will be likely to inspire many others to smoke, beginning an epidemic. In all, the key similarity between smoking and suicide is that in both cases, a small but influential group inspires a wave of copycats.

As we have seen, the teen smoking epidemic is a good example of the Law of the Few—the few charismatic smoking personalities who inspire a lot of other smokers. But the smoking epidemic also an interesting case of the Stickiness Factor. Smoking itself can be an addictive habit. But it’s not equally addictive for everyone. There are people who smoke, but not regularly—indeed, 20% of all American smokers do not smoke every day. This suggests that for some smokers, smoking is contagious (i.e., it’s a glamorous behavior that people want to imitate) but not sticky (i.e., it’s not addictive). Studies show that mammals can ingest nicotine periodically without developing a chemical addiction to it; these studies might suggest how certain human beings can smoke occasionally without becoming addicted to nicotine.

A question then arises: how best to fight the teen smoking epidemic? Should officials concentrate on limiting the contagiousness of smoking, or reducing the stickiness of smoking?

Beginning with contagion, Gladwell considers the possibility of convincing teenagers to ignore smoking personalities and “look elsewhere, to get their cues as to what is cool, in this instance, from adults.” The problem with such a strategy is that parents don’t wield much influence over their children’s personalities, or the kinds of role models that children respect. In general, scientific studies have called into question whether parents ultimately play much role in shaping their children’s personalities at all. Examining adopted children over time, numerous studies suggest that an adopted child’s personality barely correlates with the personality of the child’s adopted parents. This would suggest that genetics play a far greater role in shaping a child’s behavior than nurture, contrary to what almost all parents believe. The point of these studies isn’t that environment plays no role in children’s development; it’s that parents are a surprisingly minor part of a child’s environment.

Gladwell acknowledges that the idea that parents are a relatively unimportant part of a child’s environment is controversial. Nevertheless, the idea can be applied to the teen smoking epidemic very easily. Children of smokers are more likely to become smokers than children of nonsmokers. But this is largely genetic, not environmental. Teenagers imitate other people—but they’re most likely to imitate their peers, not their parents.

Following the social epidemic terminology, one way to fight the teen smoking epidemic would be to limit the power of Salesmen—the people who persuade teens to smoke. But unfortunately, attempts to do so often end up strengthening the Salesmen’s power by making their product seem more glamorous and alluring.

Is there any way to reduce the stickiness of smoking? In a perfect world, it would be possible to give people pills to reduce their tolerances to nicotine, meaning that people would smoke less. Some ways of reducing the stickiness of cigarettes have been attempted, such as the nicotine patch. The nicotine patch reduces the “comparative stickiness” of cigarettes by providing an alternative to a cigarette. However, it’s clear that smokers prefer cigarettes because of the high intensity of nicotine in a single puff.

Gladwell proposes two possibilities for fighting the teen smoking epidemic through stickiness. First, he notes the correlation between smoking and depression—smokers are much more likely to report depression than the average American. There are many possible explanations for this correlation. It could be that the social factors that push people to become smokers—susceptibility to contagion—also push people to become depressed. It’s also possible that depression and addictiveness have the same genetic root; in other words, nicotine is more addictive when the smoker is depressed. Thus, it’s possible that one could improve the smoking epidemic by treating depression more carefully. Indeed, there is a drug called Zyban that increases dopamine levels in the brain in order to fight depression. The drug has been shown to be effective in fighting nicotine addiction since, in increasing dopamine levels in the brain, it provides a substitute for the “rush” of a cigarette.

Another potential way to fight the teen smoking epidemic would be to mandate that tobacco companies have to reduce the quantity of nicotine in a cigarette. In this way, smoking a cigarette wouldn’t be as sticky as it is now (though it would still be somewhat sticky). Teens would continue smoking cigarettes, since smoking is a contagious habit. But they wouldn’t develop a chemical addiction, or at least they wouldn’t be as likely to develop such an addiction.

For the most part, the war on teen smoking has focused on fighting the contagiousness of the habit—the government has tried to reduce tobacco companies’ broadcasting time and replace pro-smoking messages with anti-smoking messages. The problem is that contagiousness is difficult, if not impossible, to fight—Salesmen are too powerful and persuasive. A better strategy for those who would seek to curb teen smoking might be to focus on the stickiness of smoking itself.

One advantage of the focus on stickiness is that it would allow for a more reasonable approach to teenagers experimenting with cigarettes. Often, opponents of teen smoking speak as if trying one cigarette is the same as becoming addicted to nicotine. This isn’t remotely close to the truth, either with cigarettes or with hard drugs. Teenagers will inevitably experiment with smoking cigarettes or other comparably rebellious behaviors—and perhaps they shouldn’t be punished too harshly for doing so. Experimentation is not addiction.

To return to the Micronesian suicide epidemic: many of the teenagers who killed themselves first found out about suicide as younger children. They thought of suicide as a game to play, not a life-ending experience. The danger with this behavior, of course, is that suicide shouldn't be experimented with. In the case of cigarettes, however, it might make more sense to allow teenagers to experiment with tobacco and concentrate instead on controlling the Tipping Points of the addiction process, reducing the stickiness of nicotine.