Return of the superspreader

Who doesn’t want to live in a friendly community that is pretty, safe and has a successful school? That’s what the affluent parents of a US town dubbed “Poplar Grove” set out to create at the turn of the 21st century. But like most fairy tales, this story has a dark side.

In the decade up to 2016, students in the town who excelled in class and at sports began to take their own lives. Eighteen students in a school of about 2,000 committed suicide in 10 years — compared to a “normal” suicide rate of one or two students in a school of that size over that time — writes best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell in his new book Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering.

“People moved to Poplar Grove because they thought it was safe — a refuge from the kind of violence and uncertainty that hangs over so many American communities. That’s why the suicide epidemic was so surprising,” writes Gladwell.

This escalation in suicides is one of the mysteries Gladwell unravels in the book, a compelling mix of social analysis underscored by vivid storytelling. Reframing and even questioning concepts from his international bestseller The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, which shot up the charts in 2000 and stayed there, Revenge of the Tipping Point also looks at what fuels negative epidemics.

Once again Gladwell unearths clues about the forces — increasingly engineered and often subterranean — that drive social epidemics. When they converge at a certain moment, society experiences contagious shifts in ideas and behaviour — or “tipping points”. Understanding and being alert to the forces shaping social trends equips us better to create a more just world, he argues.

In a Zoom interview, Gladwell said: “We’re used to thinking about changes in opinion being driven by political forces and, for some reason, think of the stories being told [in popular culture] as being peripheral to those processes. They are not.

“Overarching stories are absolutely central, a crucial part of the process that we often overlook. They influence our behaviour in ways that we may not be aware of,” he said from his office in the Hudson Valley, New York.

In the new book, Gladwell explores how these “overstories” or shared cultural beliefs and norms, influential individuals (superspreaders) and group proportions (the magic third) precipitate change in communities when they align with conditions on the ground.

Overarching stories are absolutely central ... they influence our behaviour in ways that we may not be aware of

—  Malcolm Gladwell

In isolation, overstories are not enough to create dramatic shifts, but they are powerful when they resonate with people’s experiences and longings, Gladwell said. Even though his case studies are North American, his themes are universal.

Asked if the almost mythical stature of the Springboks under Siya Kolisi is an overstory with potential to unite South Africans, Gladwell said: “It’s a good example, in that it tells you about the longing in human communities for collective stories, not just in South Africa but around the world. Sport is taking an outsize role because there aren't collective stories elsewhere in the culture.

“If you look at the size of the audiences for live sporting events in England or in America in recent years, it has skyrocketed ... people will seek out reasons to feel a sense of belonging [even though] we tend to dwell on stories of our divisions.”

The risks of monocultures vs the ‘magic third’

Back then to Poplar Grove (the name two researchers gave the town to protect the community's privacy). Its spike in suicides exposes the risks of monocultures — a danger not only to humans, it turns out, but also to cheetahs and panthers — warns Gladwell.

Poplar Grove parents thought they were acting in their children’s best interests but instead put them at risk by collectively creating a high-pressure environment with no room for self-expression, he said.

“We’ve gone from an ethic which said that the privileged would participate with everyone else, at least in some institutions, to an ethic that says the privileged will wall themselves off whenever possible. This is self-selection run amok.”

But surprisingly, given the penetrating impact of social media and its potential for contagion, Gladwell does not write about social media. If overstories cast a shadow on the environment in which people live, arguably cyberspace creates its own long shadow, which has disrupted the world in the 25 years since he wrote The Tipping Point.

“I just couldn’t. There’s plenty that has been said about platforms [such as Tik Tok and X] and their effect on society, and I didn’t feel I had anything meaningful to add,” he said of his decision, questioning the social authority of the echo chambers which dominate social media.

“It's not just that the reach of the platforms [such as TV] have changed, the message has changed,” he said. Given its balkanised nature, social media cannot compare to television in its heyday in terms of impact is his view. Arguably, though, it is a force for social engineering — just look at the meddling of Russia in the 2016 US election.

The rise of social engineering in perpetuating privilege can also be glimpsed across domains, for instance the admission processes of  the elite academic institutions such as Harvard University. From 2006 to 2013, the ratio of white students at the Ivy League college remained high (60.6% to 53.5%), unlike meritocratic schools such as the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), writes Gladwell.

So how do institutions like Harvard achieve this? Harvard and other colleges use country club-type sports like rowing, sailing and women’s rugby to manipulate their admissions process in favour of the privileged, he found.

There is far too much of this “hidden kind of manipulation going on”, he writes. “If we are to protect the integrity of our institutions, we need to be made aware of the games being played below the surface ... [which] is, of course, also affirmative action.

“Except that instead of admitting underprivileged students with lower academic credentials, athletic affirmative action admits privileged students with lower academic credentials ... If you don’t think that social engineering has quietly become one of the central activities of the American establishment, you haven’t been paying attention,” he writes.

Despite flagging issues such as these, Gladwell is upbeat about the potential for transformation and revisits an idea from The Tipping Point with more emphasis and specificity in his new book: if you are a closed group, how many outsiders do you have to let in for your group to change?

“It’s not one, right? If you were trying to maintain your group culture, your group can withstand the presence of one outsider and the lone outsider who's invited in doesn't get to be themselves ...” he writes. For example, a single female executive on a company board.

“But there is a point when outsiders reach sufficient numbers that they start to have an effect on the composition and the characteristics of the group: looking at a variety of different sources the idea I pursue is that it's somewhere around a third, the magic third threshold,” Gladwell writes.

In the interview, he said that if there are “certain cultural institutions, norms and ideas you want to shift, you don't need a majority ... For a country like South Africa, that could be an incredibly hopeful thing”.

An ironic poster of Mao Zedong on the wall behind Gladwell, who is wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with Canada (his home country), is a reminder that this London-born author is a global citizen whose intellectual curiosity extends way beyond the US.

Missing piece of the puzzle

He gets excited about ideas and telling their stories, and working on the Holocaust chapter titled "The LA Survivors’ Club : 'And I didn’t talk about the Holocaust, not even to my own child'” for his new book reawakened his fascination with sudden change.

“What I found most surprising is the idea that nobody was talking about the Holocaust, the books were silent on it, there were no Holocaust museums and then, almost overnight in the late '70s, the world wakes up to the reality, the memory of it,” he said.

“A whole series of things were happening in the 1970s that had to do with the reawakening of Jewish identity around the world: the Yom Kippur War, the emigration of Jews out of the Soviet Union to the US and other parts of the world, and rising neo-Nazism.

“Then comes this dramatic cultural event that invigorates the things that are happening on the ground,” he said, referring to the decision by two NBC TV executives in 1977 to do a show which came to be called The Holocaust. Nearly half the American public, 120-million people, watched it over four consecutive nights.

“The pop culture piece is the piece that we somehow don’t enter into the equation and it should be taken seriously,” Gladwell said of the profound impact prime-time TV shows like this had on society back then. Another example was the TV sitcom Will and Grace, which broke the stereotyped roles of gay characters — amplifying a shift in the zeitgeist towards accepting gay relationships.

On the significance of pop culture, Gladwell quotes Scottish writer and politician Andrew Fletcher: “If I can write the songs of a nation, I don’t care who writes their laws.” We should pay more attention to the songs people sing, he said.

“It seems like an inadequate prescription to say we should just be more aware of the forces I’m describing, but almost all of them are overlooked or, when we are aware of them, we’re kind of dismissive of them.”

Superspreaders have huge impact 

Revenge of The Tipping Point comes on the 25th birthday of his first book and the Covid-19 pandemic has been another seismic disrupter across the world during this time. One of the ideas he explores in the new book is how our initial ideas of transmission were wrong and some individuals were “superspreaders” of the virus.

Identifying the “high virus emitters” and taking timely action to deal with the threat they pose is likely to inform how the next pandemic is handled, averting more lockdowns, Gladwell said. At times his well-researched points are so neatly packaged that layers of complexity appear to have been trimmed away.

In the new book's final chapter, Gladwell circles back to the opioid epidemic that has devastated certain states in the US, while others have been relatively unscathed. Superspreaders — like the 1% of doctors who wrote 49% of all doses of OxyContin— played a critical role in driving addiction in the affected states, which also had laxer regulations.

Manipulating them was pharmaceutical company Purdue, supported by McKinsey consultants. “Purdue fuelled an epidemic that would end up consuming the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans based on the seduction of no more than a few thousand doctors concentrated in a handful of states,” Gladwell writes, searching for accountability and barely finding it.

Identifying those responsible for stoking harmful epidemics is one step towards stopping them, said Gladwell, who hosts the popular podcast Revisionist History. “In the podcast, I was talking to a man who studies homicide in Chicago, which is one of the most dangerous cities in America on the West Side.

“There are 50,000 people living on Chicago's West Side, and when you understand where the epidemic of violence is, it involves 400 people. There’s a case that’s incredibly hopeful: if you think an area of 50,000 is engulfed in a generations-long epidemic of violence, you throw up your hands in despair. But if you understand that the epidemic is being driven and sustained by a group of 400 people, who can be found, then you can do something,” he said.

In the book he writes: “The story that we tell ourselves [is[ that we bear no responsibility for the epidemics that surround us — that they come out of nowhere, that they should always surprise us. Epidemics have rules. They have boundaries. They are subject to overstories — and we are the ones who create overstories ...

“They are driven by a number of people, and those people can be identified. The tools necessary to control an epidemic are sitting on the table, right in front of us.

“So I do think there is as much opportunity as there is peril in understanding the laws of epidemics,” he said.