Summary Of Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point

In Malcom Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, he dissects the nature of the epidemic. There are three factors which affect an epidemic’s ability to “tip”: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. The most significant portion of the book for me was the explanation of the Power of Context as told through the story of Kitty Genovese. Genovese was a young woman living in Queens, New York in 1964. One night, she was chased by an assailant and assaulted three times over the course of a half hour. She eventually died of stab wounds on her own street after her attacker had fled. The anomaly that occurred in her case was not the crime itself, but the lack of response. Kitty Genovese was murdered on the street that she lived

Latane and J. Darley after extensive research inspired by Kitty’s story. They ran experiments that staged emergencies in order to test the probability of a bystander coming to the rescue. For example, in one experiment, 75% of lone bystanders would report smoke coming from an empty room, whereas only 38% of subjects in groups reported it. Through this and similar experiments, they determined that the most important factor in predicting behavior was the number of witnesses to an event. Therefore, as the number of witnesses increases, the weight of personal responsibility is diffused, and bystanders become less likely to step into a

As Gladwell says in his conclusion, “The key to getting people to change their behavior, in other words, to care about their neighbor in distress, sometimes lies with the smallest details of their immediate situation. The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.” Many of Gladwell’s stories are suspenseful and his conclusions are surprising, but the story of Kitty Genovese is the only one that was truly intimidating. It made me consider the Power of Context as a real force that applies to my daily life. It also made me put myself into Kitty’s shoes; it is strange to think that it could have been me, or my best friend, or even my mother in that street in Queens, trapped in a dangerous position with plenty of people who could have helped, but simply did not. This part of the book resonated with me not only because it forced me to recognize a prominent psychological phenomenon, but also because I realized how relevant it is to my