Shriya Rathi

The Tipping Point

The reading in this section was bit different, but still interesting.  It goes into the psychology of what happens when there is an emergency.  They did a study and when there were more people it was less likely that people would call 911 when they witnessed an emergency.  It comes down to the idea that people assume someone else will make that call, or that because no one else is calling it is not an emergency.  When they are less people however, it more likely someone will try to help.  I think this is interesting because often times you feel safer when you are in bigger crowds, but in reality people are less likely to come to you aid.  This has to do with the fact that when people are in a group they lose some sense of responsibility. Gladwell uses this interesting example to prove a bigger point about getting people to change their behavior. How can you make the person care about the person in need of help? ( according to the example).  Getting people to change their behavior lies with the small details in their immediate attention.  Gladwell calls this concept the power of context.  The power of context is the idea that human being are significantly more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.  What i took away from this is that people’s behaviors are  correlated with the environment they are in.  In order to make a certain type of impact you have to aware of this.

Shriya Rathi

The Tipping Point

I really liked the reading for this section.  It was about something he calls the “Stickiness Factor”.   The stickiness factor deals with the idea of contagious messages, and how there are specific ways of making them memorable.  They are small changes in the presentation of something that can make a big difference oh how much an impact it makes.  I thought this was interesting because earlier this year we focused a lot on making our powerpoints much more appealing and clear.  Although Gladwell is not talking about powerpoints specifically it is a similar idea.   The small changes we made to our presentation in terms of color, formatting, and spacing made everything seem much ore professional.  The presentations we did this year really pushed us away from the way we have been taught to do them most of our high school life, and I am glad for that.  These small things truly do have the ability to make a big impact.  Gladwell talk about this factor in the realm of the media.  He digs deeper into why things became so popular so fast, and ho some commercials do so well, while others fail miserably.  It is all in the small tiny changes that we have the ability to make an impact on someone. There is one line he used that i really like in particular about companies, “Unless i remember what i tell I tell you, why would you ever change your behavior or buy my product or go to see my movie?”  I like this because it reminds me of how sometimes simple can better in anything, whether its a powerpoint or a commercial.  It just has to stick.