The Tipping Point Review

The Tipping Point By Malcolm Gladwell

                             ... Fundamental Attribution Blunder

As much as I'd like to compliment the efforts of the author Malcolm Gladwell in Tipping Point, it ends up being just one of the oversimplified Self-help books in my list.

Malcolm Gladwell has classified the influential people in three categories.Connectors,mavens and salesman.The irony of the book is that it classifies people into different personalities with conscious knowledge that attributing characteristics to people is impossible for human beings due to Fundamental Attribution error (FAE).

Premise 1: Connectors form what is called “weak ties” with people (according to author).

Premise 2: It is impossible for human beings to attribute absolute personalities to people.

Conclusion: Author is not a human being!

This might look a bit trivial at first sight but author constantly forgets that psychologically human mind is so obscure that it is difficult to give a list of possible answers to a questions, let alone a definitive answer. For example he might collect data to show how many people are born after a rain and treat rain as a cause and birth as an effect.

This book is just another cascade of conclusions drawn from experiments like stanford prison experiment ,Good samaritan etc. The author fails to understand that some of the data might have random patterns and bases a complete thesis on his perspective of things without making the user aware of discrepancies.Alas he uses his innate tendencies of looking for “cause-effect” patterns in everything.

Hence I strongly recommend NOT going for this book and looking elsewhere for correct psychological literature. One of my favorite recommendations is Elliot Aronson's “the social animal”.It is not completely free of the cause-effect error but author clearly states his doubts at all critical points.