The Tipping Point: Chapter Four Summary & Analysis

In 1984, a man named Bernhard Goetz was walking to the subway in New York City. On the subway, a group of four young black men approached Goetz and asked him for five dollars. In response, Goetz revealed his gun and shot the four black men, killing three of them and paralyzing the fourth. In the aftermath of the shooting, Goetz became something of a hero: at a time when crime rates in New York City were skyrocketing, Goetz was perceived as a brave man who “stood up” to dangerous criminals.

Goetz’s shooting (for which he was ultimately exonerated) occurred in the 1980s, when New York City had a tremendous problem with crime. Yet after 1990, the crime rate went down in New York at a surprising rate. In 1996, Goetz went to trial in civil court. By then, many had forgotten how dangerous New York once was—Goetz had once been a symbol for vigilante heroism, but now, people “seemed to remember precisely what it was that Goetz had once symbolized.” Goetz was widely considered a murderer and a racist.

It’s hard to pinpoint what, precisely caused the decline in crime in New York between the 80s and the 90s. Gladwell proposes that we can understand the decline in crime by citing the Power of Context: the importance of environmental factors in determining the Tipping Point.

One reason why the decline in New York City crime is such a mystery is that is happened so quickly. At a time when crime in the U.S. as a whole was declining slowly and steadily, crime in New York declined rapidly and decisively. Some sociologists have attributed the decline in crime to new policing techniques, based in a theory called the “Broken Window Hypothesis”—the idea that major crimes (murder, rape, robbery) are encouraged by seemingly trivial crimes (graffiti, public urination, and broken windows), meaning that cities can reduce serious crimes by clamping down in minor crimes. In the mid-1990s, two important New York City leaders, Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor, and William Bratton, the head of the New York City Police Department, worked together to apply the Broken Window Hypothesis to their city. They clamped down on minor crimes like graffiti, turnstile-jumping, and public urination. Within a few years, crime in New York City—including serious crimes like rape and murder—had plummeted.

The Broken Window Hypothesis and the Power of Context are two versions of the same argument: small environmental details can have major effects on public behavior. In the 80s, Goetz had a reputation among his friends as a short-tempered, often explicitly racist man: he would say that the city needed to “get rid of the spics and niggers.” Three months before he murdered the men on the subway, Goetz had been mugged by three black youths. So in retrospect, it seems easy to “predict” that Goetz would have shot the four black men on the subway. And yet, according to the Broken Window theory, it wasn’t just Goetz’s psychology that led him to shoot; it was the environment he was in at the time. The graffiti on the subway and the general decay of the train put Goetz on edge and made him more likely to “snap” by shooting. This idea, Gladwell argues, is actually politically Liberal (since it presents human beings as the product of their environment), not Conservative, as it’s often said to be.

As we saw in the discussion of “word-of-mouth,” small, almost imperceptible actions and gestures can have a strong influence on people’s behaviors. The same is true of environment: small, almost unnoticeable stimuli can lead to major effects. During the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of the 1970s, volunteers were divided into prisoners and guards in a mock-prison. Disturbingly quickly, the fake “guards” began to treat their fake prisoners cruelly, seemingly forgetting that the experiment was an experiment at all. The experiment became so violent and sadistic that it had to be called off after only six days, though it was originally supposed to go on for two weeks. One of the major conclusions of the experiment was that physical environment can have an almost overpowering influence on human behavior—the prison environment changed the subjects’ behavior very quickly.

Another important experiment for understanding the role of environment on behavior is the Hartshorne/May experiment from the 1920s. In this experiment, students were given a difficult test: half the students were graded objectively, while the other half of the students were instructed to grade their own papers (it was assumed that this second group would cheat on the grading). The goal of the experiment was to measure how students cheat. The results of the experiment were surprising: students would cheat under certain circumstances (the presence of an adult in the room, the subject being tested, the size of the classroom), but not others. There were almost no students who were honest all of the time, or who cheated all of the time—whether or not the students cheated depended on environmental factors.

Humans have a bad habit of attributing human behavior to innate causes (i.e., personality, intelligence, free will, etc.). In fact, environment plays an enormous role in human behavior. Similarly, humans tend to think of one another in terms of sweeping categories like “smart,” “honest,” “hardworking,” etc. In reality, there’s no such thing as a person who’s honest at all times, or a person who’s intelligent in all the many possible senses of intelligence. Different environmental stimuli will reveal different aspects of a person’s honesty, intelligence, etc. Psychologists call this mistake the “Fundamental Attribution Error”; the tendency to “overestimate the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.”

There was an experiment conducted at Princeton University in which Princeton theological students were asked to make a brief presentation on a biblical parable. The students were given some time to prepare their presentations, and then a lab assistant escorted them across the campus to a new building. During this walk, the assistant made sure to lead the students past a groaning, coughing man crawling on the ground (in reality, just an actor). One might assume that almost all the theological students stopped to help the man, especially since the situation was based on one of the most famous biblical parables, the parable of the Good Samaritan. But in fact, the students’ behavior changed greatly, depending on how they were escorted to the other building. When the assistant told the students they were pressed for time, the students almost never stopped to help the man; on the other hand, when the assistant mentioned that there was plenty of the time, the students were much more likely help the man. The point of the experiment is that conviction, personality, and other “fundamental” qualities are often less important than environmental factors (i.e., what the assistant told them about how much time was left) in determining behavior. The simple words “Oh, you’re late,” had the effect of changing otherwise compassionate theological students into oblivious, callous-seeming people.

Gladwell is not saying that personality and psychology are unimportant in determining behavior. However, measures of psychological health and personality measure a person’s inclination to behave a certain way. In the real world, whether or not a person in fact does behave a certain way is subject to environmental stimuli. The distinction between inclination and action is at the heart of the Power of Context, and the Broken Window Hypothesis. Even if criminal psychology cannot be cured, society can reduce crime by controlling the environments and spaces that often encourage crime.

To return to Goetz one more time—it’s important to remember how Goetz described his own crime. He said that, in the ugly, graffiti-ridden subway, it was difficult to be sane, and added that he behaved “like a rat.” Gladwell notes, “Of course he did. He was in a rat hole.”