The Tipping Point

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The Tipping Point

In The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, the author explains how objects and products “tip”. He also gives ideas and suggestions on how things can tip. Gladwell introduces three main ideas, or rules: the law of the few, the stickiness factor, and the power of context. The main points of the Tipping Point can be proven through the social experiments of the broken window theory, a class divided, and the stanford prison experiment.

One of the main points throughout the book is how influential your environment can be. This is proven by the broken window theory where the environment of bad neighborhood usually consists of buildings or homes with broken windows. The authors of the theory, James Q. Wilson and George L. …show more content…
To introduce discrimination, Elliott concluded that blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people saying “The brown-eyed people do not get to use the drinking fountain. You'll have to use the paper cups. You brown-eyed people are not to play with the blue-eyed people on the playground, because you are not as good as blue-eyed people. The brown-eyed people in this room today are going to wear collars. So that we can tell from a distance what color your eyes are.” At first, kids were reluctant, even some of the blue-eyed kids. That day at lunch, a fight broke out among the children- this was the tipping point, “Jane Elliott: Did you call him brown eyes? John: They always call us that...” Just from the morning to lunch, two ex-friends were calling eachother names- an equivalent to ethnic slurs. The brown-eyed children were obviously offended by saying, “Jane Elliott: What's wrong with being called brown eyes? Roy: It means that we're stupider and--well, not that...” Jane Elliot observed that, “ I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating, little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes.” The next day, jane Elliot switched the roles saying that brown-eyed people were superior to see how the children would react. Not only did the environment affect their attitude and
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