Looking for the Guardians of Truth: An Interview with Malcolm Gladwell About Social Norms

Malcolm Gladwell's best selling book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, is a compelling examination of how and why social change happens so rapidly. Mr. Gladwell presented the keynote address at the National Conference on the Social Norms Model that was held this past July in Philadelphia. After his address, he sat down with Michael Haines and Rich Rice of the National Social Norms Resource Center to discuss the implications of his concept of "social epidemics" for the field of social norms. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

In your book and in your talk today you discussed the important role that two kinds of people have in affecting social change: mavens, who are repositories of specialized knowledge, and connectors, who are "people specialists" and circulate in many different worlds. How does one identify the mavens and connectors in a community?

Malcolm Gladwell: Well, for people on the local level, like teachers in schools, I think they know, because they know the kids and they can watch the interactions. It's harder to identify mavens and connectors in a larger context. I've been very impressed recently with some tools that have been developed for use in the corporate world by anthropologists, where they survey a group, asking about its communication patterns, and then construct social maps of those institutions. It can be a very easy and an extremely useful way of getting a handle on how communication is flowing in a particular community.

A fundamental tenet of the social norms approach is that the essential wellness and goodness of people is under-appreciated and underestimated. This gives rise to a false norm, particularly among young people. One comment that you made near the end of your talk-that young people are "looking for truth"-suggests that you share this notion that young people are essentially good folks…

Malcolm Gladwell: One of the reasons that I'm enthusiastic about the application of some of the ideas I describe in my book to the social norms movement is that I think there's a very good fit. I'm particularly interested in the roles that mavens play because, as I see it, they're the guardians of truth. We rely on them because they know more and they have more expertise, and they are closer to the truth than we are. In my talk I used the example of how people use mavens as specialized information resources when they want to buy laptops, say, or choose a restaurant in Manhattan to go to…But it's really no different when you're a kid and you're trying to figure out much more global questions, like: How ought I live my life? I don't think that teens are predisposed toward negative behaviors; rather, I think they engage in them because they lack someone in their life who is in a position to give them a more accurate answer to that question. And that's where mavens can really come in.

In your talk you also discussed the issue of "immunity to information," and not just among young people, where it's perhaps more pronounced, but in the larger community as well. This "immunity" is especially troubling for a social norm campaign that, in a sense, is trying to "inoculate" a population with a message that's intended to protect it…

Malcolm Gladwell: Well, this immunity question is something that has consumed me a great deal, because I don't think you can endlessly multiply the amount of information that you throw at people without there being some kind of consequence. You know, at a certain point the sponge becomes saturated, and I think the sponge is saturated now. We're all searching for ways around this particular problem. It is the first and most serious impediment to anyone who is trying to spread a corrective message. The window for new messages is a lot smaller now than it was, because the cost of competing for attention is so much greater now. And that's why I think it's so critical for people who are interested in this movement to learn more sophisticated social strategies of reaching kids.

But there's a second part to this, which is that immunity is striking the more traditional sources of information. I don't think that mass media is nearly as important, as powerful today as it was ten or fifteen years ago. That is, we're also becoming immune to the messages on the television. When you have 200 channels, the notion that television as a medium is a trustworthy source begins to be undercut, because right in front of you is evidence of how extraordinarily, almost absurdly diverse it is. There's no way that you can grant the medium some kind of special status because the medium is preposterous: it's kids doing stupid stunts on MTV, it's not just Walter Cronkite. So that process will also effect those who are purveying the orthodoxy.

One of the things that is central to the social norms approach stems from marketing, and that is: going to the target population and asking them questions about where they're getting information, how they're getting it, who they're getting it from, and who they deem to be credible sources. What you seemed to be suggesting in your comments today is that we need to redouble those efforts and ask those questions again and again in order to determine if there are shifts in where people are getting information…

Malcolm Gladwell: You're absolutely right. One of the things that marketers are realizing is that you need to have a constant, almost real-time sense of the direction in which communities are moving and people and ideas are flowing.

Couple that with your observation about the isolation of adolescents from the moderating influence of beneficial adults in the culture, and how the cell phone, among other electronic media, just increases that isolation. If you could comment on that…

Malcolm Gladwell: I talk about immunity to information, and isolation, to me, is the second profound social change that is affecting our community and our world at the moment. What I mean is, our kids are replacing more and more adult time with peer time, and they're using all the things we would expect them to use: the internet, cell phones in particular-cell phones to me are the really big issue here. They effectively crowd out alternate, mature voices from their world. I mean, kids construct their reality from all kinds of different sources, and what we're doing is just narrowing the range of sources that they're using, and that's problematic. It's not terminal, and it doesn't mean that they're all going to go off and do crazy things, but it just means that we have to find another way to bring moderating voices into their lives.

Your general comments and impressions of the social norms field now that you've looked into it…

Malcolm Gladwell: Actually, when The Tipping Point was published there was a review of it in The New Republic by Cass Sunstein, and he talked extensively about social norms. That was my first exposure to it. He pointed out how sympathetic a lot of what I was writing was to this very, very powerful social idea. I think you guys are right. I mean, this is an extremely powerful social tool. And this larger perspective that there's not something terribly wrong with kids, but that they just need to have better access to information to form their perspective on who they are and how they ought to behave is something that I'm fundamentally in sympathy with.

This interview was conducted on July 10, 2002 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the fifth annual National Conference on the Social Norms Model.