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Tipping Point

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Malcolm Gladwell's the Tipping Point, primarily because its content significantly resonated with me. There is a great deal of veracity in the concepts that Gladwell explores in this manuscript, which is centrally featured on epidemics and crowd behavior. As a counselor, I found a number of the ideas germane to my profession and somewhat explanatory for trends in terms of the behavior that I or my colleagues frequently encounter.

The tipping point is that moment when an idea, fad, or product 'catches on' and increasingly gains in popularity with a wide number of people. To Gladwell's credit, he has elucidated some of the major factors involved in creating a tipping point. His methodology in doing so is fairly solid -- he analyzes a number of disparate fads from retail sales to trends within college dorms. The central premise of the book is that there is an actual science to cultivating group behavior and for why people tend to follow trends and do as others do. The correlation between this concept and that of the profession of a counselor is that if one were able to determine the causes of certain forms of behavior, one could ideally have a much more significant idea about how to either counteract negative actions or to possibly even spur positive ones.

One of the author's most salient principles related to the inner workings of cultivated crowd behavior is termed the 80/20 principle, which is succinctly summed up in the subsequent quotation. "In most societies, 20% of criminals commit 80% of crimes. Twenty percent of motorists cause 8- percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80% of all beer" (Gladwell, 2002, p. 13). This concept is extremely useful for studying patterns of behavior that counselors encounter. It attests to the fact that delinquency, for example, may be easily curbed by simply reaching the target population that is actually responsible for such behavior. Thus, counselors have a better idea of where to pinpoint there work within a population setting, if they can identify who exactly is doing what.

The example that Gladwell provided of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's work in New York City in the mid-1990's also easily lends itself to working as a counselor. It may surprise those that visit the city now, but in the early 1990's New York was fairly filthy and littered with street vendors and sexual content. Giuliani was able to significantly change the image of the city in a short period of time by effectively changing the context of the city. This point of Gladwell's, that an alteration in context can also change context or change behavior (Wolfe, 2000), is well elucidated by the fact that after simply cleaning the city and ridding it of some of its more seedy elements, Giuliani was able to reduce crime. In all fairness, Gladwell does not devote enough attention to the fact that Giuliani also egregiously increased the police force and the level of citations these officers issued to root out the criminals, which also coincided with the movement towards ridding the city of its poorer citizens. But the author's main point about changing the context and altering the behavior is well taken. In terms of counseling, the notion that individuals are a product of their environment certainly applies to this idea, and also provides more possibilities for assisting certain types of individuals in counseling.