loren Eric Swanson: Malcom Gladwell Might be Wrong

Friday, February 02, 2007

Malcom Gladwell Might be Wrong

Harvard Business Review this month (February 2007) has an interesting article by Duncan J Watts, Professor of Sociology at Columbi University in New York and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (2003).

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell posits that "social epidemics" are the result of a minority of of "influentials" who are especially informed, connected and persuasive. The idea is that these influentials cause the ripples of change.

Instead Watts and his colleague, Peter Dodds, actually did some research. Here's what they found:

"Our work shows that the principle requirement for what we call "global cascades"--the widespread propagation of influence through neworks--is the presence not of a few influentials, but rather, of a critical mass of easily influenced people, each of whom adopts, say, a look or a brand after being exposed to a single adoptin neighbor. Regardless of how influential an individual is locally, he or she can exert global influence only if this critical mass is available to propagate a chain reaction.

Mostly...cascade size and frequency depend on the availability and connectedness of easily influenced people, not on the characteristics of the initiators--just as the size of a forest fire often has little to do with the spark that started it and lots to do with the state of the forest. If the network permits global cascades because it it has the right concentration and configuration of adopters, virtually anyone can start one. If it doesn't permit cascades, nobody can. What seems in retrospect to be the special influential quality of a particular person (or group) is, therefore, mostly an accident of location and timing.

Understanding that trends in public opinion are driven not by a few influential influencing everyone else but by by many eaasily inflenced people influencing one another should change how many companies incorporate social influence into their marketing campaigns."

I like the phrase, just as the size of a forest fire often has little to do with the spark that started it and lots to do with the state of the forest. Isn't that what movements are about? The ideas are always bigger than the people who expound them. And people are the tinder on which the ideas fall.

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