Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point

is sociable, likes parties, has many friends, needs to have people to talk to… He craves excitement, takes chances, acts on the spur of the moment and is generally an impulsive individual… He prefers to keep moving and doing things, tends to be aggressive and loses his temper quickly; his feelings are not kept under tight control and he is not always a reliable person.

In countless studies since Eysenck's groundbreaking work, this picture of the smoking "type" has been filled out. Heavy smokers have been shown to have a much greater sex drive than nonsmokers. They are more sexually precocious; they have a greater "need" for sex, and greater attraction to the opposite sex. At age nineteen, for example, 15 percent of nonsmoking white women attending college have had sex. The same number for white female college students who do smoke is 55 percent. The statistics for men are about the same according to Eysenck. They rank much higher on what psychologists call "anti-social" indexes: they tend to have greater levels of misconduct, and be more rebellious and defiant. They make snap judgments. They take more risks. The average smoking household spends 73 percent more on coffee and two to three times as much on beer as the average nonsmoking household. Interestingly, smokers also seem to be more honest about themselves than nonsmokers. As David Krogh describes it in his treatise Smoking: The Artificial Passion , psychologists have what they call "lie" tests in which they insert inarguable statements — "I do not always tell the truth" or "I am sometimes cold to my spouse" — and if test-takers consistently deny these statements, it is taken as evidence that they are not generally truthful. Smokers are much more truthful on these tests. "One theory," Krogh writes, "has it that their lack of deference and their surfeit of defiance combine to make them relatively indifferent to what people think of them."

These measures don't apply to all smokers, of course. But as general predictors of smoking behavior they are quite accurate, and the more someone smokes, the higher the likelihood that he or she fits this profile. "In the scientific spirit," Krogh writes, "I would invite readers to demonstrate [the smoking personality connection] to themselves by performing the following experiment. Arrange to go to a relaxed gathering of actors, rock musicians, or hairdressers on the one hand, or civil engineers, electricians, or computer programmers on the other, and observe how much smoking is going on. If your experience is anything like mine, the differences should be dramatic."

Here is another of the responses to my questionnaire. Can the extroverted personality be any clearer?

My grandfather was the only person around me when I was very little who smoked. He was a great Runyonesque figure, a trickster hero, who immigrated from Poland when he was a boy and who worked most of his life as a glazier. My mother used to like to say that when she was first brought to dinner with him she thought he might at any moment whisk the tablecloth off the table, leaving the settings there, just to amuse the crowd.

The significance of the smoking personality, I think, cannot be overstated. If you bundle all of these extroverts' traits together — defiance, sexual precocity, honesty, impulsiveness, indifference to the opinion of others, sensation seeking — you come up with an almost perfect definition of the kind of person many adolescents are drawn to. Maggie the au pair and Pam P. on the school bus and Billy G. with his Grateful Dead records were all deeply cool people. But they weren't cool because they smoked. They smoked because they were cool. The very same character traits of rebelliousness and impulsivity and risk-taking and indifference to the opinion of others and precocity that made them so compelling to their adolescent peers also make it almost inevitable that they would also be drawn to the ultimate expression of adolescent rebellion, risk-taking, impulsivity, indifference to others, and precocity: the cigarette. This may seem like a simple point. But it is absolutely essential in understanding why the war on smoking has stumbled so badly. Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking isn't cool. But that's not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. Smoking epidemics begin in precisely the same way that the suicide epidemic in Micronesia began or word-of-mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic began, because of the extraordinary influence of Pam P. and Billy G. and Maggie and their equivalents — the smoking versions of R. and Tom Gau and Gaetan Dugas. In this epidemic, as in all others, a very small group — a select few — are responsible for driving the epidemic forward.

The teen smoking epidemic does not simply illustrate the Law of the Few. However it is also a very good illustration of the Stickiness Factor. After all, the fact that overwhelming numbers of teenagers experiment with cigarettes as a result of their contacts with other teenagers is not, in and of itself, all that scary. The problem — the fact that has turned smoking into public health enemy number one — is that many of those teenagers end up continuing their cigarette experiment until they get hooked. The smoking experience is so memorable and powerful for some people that they cannot stop smoking. The habit sticks.

It is important to keep these two concepts — contagiousness and stickiness — separate, because they follow very different patterns and suggest very different strategies. Lois Weisberg is a contagious person. She knows so many people and belongs to so many worlds that she is able to spread a piece of information or an idea a thousand different ways, all at once. Lester Wunderman and the creators of Blue's Clues , on the other hand, are specialists in stickiness: they have a genius for creating messages that are memorable and that change people's behavior. Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.

Smoking is no different whether a teenager picks up the habit depends on whether he or she has contact with one of those Salesmen who give teenagers "permission" to engage in deviant acts. But whether a teenager likes cigarettes enough to keep using them depends on a very different set of criteria. In a recent University of Michigan study, for example, a large group of people were polled about how they felt when they smoked their first cigarette. "What we found is that for almost everyone their initial experience with tobacco was somewhat aversive," said Ovide Pomerleau, one of the researchers on the project. "But what sorted out the smokers-to-be from the never again smokers is that the smokers-to-be derived some overall pleasure from the experience — like the feeling of a buzz or a heady pleasurable feeling." The numbers are striking. Of the people who experimented with cigarettes a few times and then never smoked again, only about a quarter got any sort of pleasant "high" from their first cigarette. Of the ex-smokers — people who smoked for a while but later managed to quit — about a third got a pleasurable buzz. Of people who were light smokers, about half remembered their first cigarette well. Of the heavy smokers, though, 78 percent remembered getting a good buzz from their first few puffs. The questions of how sticky smoking ends up being to any single person, in other words, depends a great deal on his or her own particular initial reaction to nicotine.

This is a critical point, and one that is often lost in the heated rhetoric of the war on smoking. The tobacco industry, for instance, has been pilloried for years for denying that nicotine is addictive. That position, of course, is ridiculous. But the opposite notion often put forth by antismoking advocates — that nicotine is a deadly taskmaster that enslaves all who come in contact with it — is equally ridiculous. Of all the teenagers who experiment with cigarettes, only about a third ever goes on to smoke regularly. Nicotine may be highly addictive, but it is only addictive in some people, some of the time. More important, it turns out that even among those who smoke regularly, there are enormous differences in the stickiness of their habit. Smoking experts used to think that 90 to 95 percent of all those who smoked were regular smokers. But several years ago, the smoking questions on the federal government's national health survey were made more specific, and researchers discovered, to their astonishment, that a fifth of all smokers don't smoke every day. There are millions of Americans, in other words, who manage to smoke regularly and not be hooked — people for whom smoking is contagious but not sticky. In the past few years, these "chippers" — as they have been dubbed — have been exhaustively studied, with the bulk of the work being done by University of Pittsburgh psychologist Saul Shiftman.