The Magic of Predicting the Past

Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

Clear back in the year 2000, a New Yorker staff writer published his first book, an overview of recent behavioral science and sociology. The Tipping Point compiled insights from disciplines that frequently don’t communicate well, and distilled their insights into readable vernacular for generalist readers. Malcolm Gladwell introduced an epidemic-like analysis of human group behavior that continues to influence how Americans perceive group behavior and social movements.

A quarter century later, real life has field-tested Gladwell’s precepts, sometimes in direct response to his book. Several of his principles have proven reliable, while others have been OTBE’d: Overtaken By Events. Gladwell takes this, the anniversary of his career-making book, to revisit and update. As journalism of developing social science, it’s interesting reading, though it obviously rehashes the past. As science itself, sadly, it leaves something to be desired.

Gladwell’s dominant principle, that social movements develop like epidemics, seems especially timely because, in the intervening time, two epidemics have gripped American awareness: opioids and COVID-19. (He plays coy that he’s talking about opioids, because he wants his precepts to matter more than the details, but his target audience isn’t fooled.) We can revisit these two epidemics and determine whether Gladwell’s principles accurately describe how these outbreaks unfolded.

First, Gladwell describes the “overstory.” This term comes from ecology, describing the lush efflorescence of life which occupies the canopy of a rain forest, but Gladwell redefines it to fit the sweeping cultural context that humans occupy without conscious awareness. For example, he identifies Miami’s exceedingly high incidence of Medicare fraud with contexts like the Liberty City riots and the Mariel boatlift. My anti-racist spidey sense started tingling.

Then, Gladwell examines the necessity of diversity that protects against contagion. This means both literal diversity—cheetahs are so genetically homogenous that ordinary diseases can devastate communities—or metaphorical diversity, like the differences of backgrounds and goals that defend high schools against pathological groupthink. Nothing here should surprise anybody who got a B in high school biology class, but in today’s cultural milieu, definitely needs restated.

Finally, Gladwell unpacks why some individuals become “superspreaders,” a term most Americans probably first encountered during the pandemic. Some people prove contagious beyond the limits which the laws of chance would determine. Epidemiologists can usually determine fairly straightforwardly which individuals spread, and why, though usually only after they’ve infected others. Gladwell wants social science to have this same trend toward geometric absolutism.

Malcolm Gladwell

Sadly, while his principles seem plausible, they suffer because we only identify them retrospectively. He says, fairly late in the book, that the visible signs of tipping points, the big revolutions of public insight, exist in plain sight. The only reason we miss them, Gladwell asserts, is because we’re looking in the wrong direction. We persistently think change is years away, or longer, until the moment when change happens, usually quickly.

It probably reflects my prejudices, but one example persists in my memory: the sudden reversal of public opinion on gay marriage. The topic consistently failed at polls, most notably California’s Proposition 8. Then abruptly, public sentiment reversed itself, and suddenly most Americans, including a critical mass of conservatives, became accepting of gay marriage. The tipping point, according to Gladwell? The NBC sitcom Will & Grace.

Leave aside that the show’s initial run ended nine years before SCOTUS verified gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. Or that, at its ratings peak, it topped out at only 24 million viewers, considerably below M*A*S*H, which notably failed to turn American sentiment against war. The very idea that one TV sitcom could reverse most Americans’ moral precepts seems laughable. This is especially pointed for series with political points, like Mr. Birchum, which is a global laughingstock.

If the conditions which precipitate the turning point are plainly visible, as Gladwell writes, then seemingly, at least one tipping point should’ve been visible. But nobody predicted Will & Grace changing American politics, nor the McKinsey corporation successfully turning Oxycontin into a public pestilence. Gladwell identifies these consequences because they already happened. In other words, Gladwell congratulates himself for successfully predicting the past. The future remains opaque.

Duncan J. Watts calls this tendency “creeping determinism.” We see outcomes as inevitable, Watts contends, because they happened. That’s exactly what happens here: Gladwell spends no thought for alternate contingencies, and doesn’t consider any attempts which failed, only those that succeeded. Thus he creates an overstory that’s factually correct, but not useful. Models like this only matter if they predict outcomes in advance, a goal which remains tragically elusive.