Malcolm Gladwell The Tipping Points

Scientists and healthcare professionals have conducted un-ending researches to understand how a trend or outbreak becomes an epidemic or reaches a tipping point. Malcolm Gladwell tries to rationalize this phenomenon in his book “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” Gladwell, a staff writer for the New Yorker, was formerly a business and science reporter at the Washington Post whose interest in writing focused on trends and the nature of things. The author forms several theories and outlined key laws which contributes to his thesis that ideas, products, messages, trends and behaviors spread like viruses. He starts off with the ideology of the infamous brand of footwear called Hush Puppies. In Gladwell’s observation all it took was one person to spread the word as he calls it the “word-of-mouth” epidemic. The writer also includes three rules of the Tipping Point, they are: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness factor, and the Power of Context which helps provides directions as to how Tipping Points are reached. …show more content…
Some viruses can be spread faster than it can be controlled. It all depends on how fast it is replicated, the immunity of the individual, the community in which they live, or access to medical intervention. However, according to Gladwell he believes it takes three kinds of people to spread a social and behavioral epidemic; Mavens are people who have information on a lot of different things, Connectors are the persons who know a lot of people, and Salesmen are the people with specific skills to persuade others to create a tipping point. Gladwell did make reference to the Syphilis outbreak in Baltimore in the early 1990s and illustrated the key elements of what makes a trend or a virus tip into an epidemic. For example, an individual who has the flu, it just takes for that person to sneeze in a crowded area which can start an