Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point

Shiftman's definition of a chipper is someone who smokes no more than five cigarettes a day but who smokes at least four days a week. As Shiftman writes:

Chippers' smoking varies considerably from day to day, and their smoking patterns often include days of complete abstinence. Chippers reported little difficulty maintaining such casual abstinence and reportedly experienced almost no withdrawal symptoms when abstaining from smoking… Unlike regular smokers who smoke soon on waking to replenish the nicotine that has cleared overnight, chippers go several hours before smoking their first cigarette of the day. In short, every indicator examined suggests that chippers are not addicted to nicotine and that their smoking is not driven by withdrawal relief or withdrawal avoidance.

Shiftman calls chippers the equivalent of social drinkers. They are people in control of their habit. He says:

Most of these people had never been heavy smokers. I think of them as developmentally retarded. Every smoker starts out as a chipper, in the early period, but then graduates more heavily into more dependent smoking. When we collected data about the early period of smoking, the chippers look like everyone else when they start out. The difference is that over time, the heavy smokers escalated whereas the chippers stayed where they were.

What distinguishes chippers from hard-core smokers? Probably genetic factors. Allan Collins of the University of Colorado, for example, recently took several groups of different strains of mice and injected each with steadily increasing amounts of nicotine. When nicotine reaches toxic levels in a mouse (nicotine is, after all, a poison) it has a seizure — its tail goes rigid; it begins running wildly around its cage; its head starts to jerk and snap; and eventually it flips over on its back. Collins wanted to see whether different strains of mice could handle different amounts of nicotine. Sure enough, they could. The strain of mice most tolerant of nicotine could handle about two to three times as much of the drug as the strain that had seizures at the lowest dose. "That's about in the same range as alcohol," Collins says. Then he put all the mice into cages and gave them two bottles to drink from: one filled with a simple saccharin solution, one filled with a saccharin solution laced with nicotine. This time he wanted to see whether there was any relationship between each strain's genetic tolerance to nicotine and the amount of nicotine they would voluntarily consume. Once again, there was. In fact, the correlation was almost perfect. The greater a mouse's genetic tolerance for nicotine, the more of the nicotine bottle it would drink. Collins thinks that there are genes in the brains of mice that govern how nicotine is processed — how quickly it causes toxicity, how much pleasure it gives, what kind of buzz it leaves — and that some strains of mice have genes that handle nicotine really well and extract the most pleasure from it and some have genes that treat nicotine like a poison.

Humans, obviously, aren't mice, and drinking nicotine from a bottle in a cage isn't the same as lighting up a Marlboro. But even if there is only a modest correlation between what goes on in mice brains and ours, these findings do seem to square with Pomerleau's study. The people who didn't get a buzz from their first cigarette and who found the whole experience so awful that they never smoked again are probably people whose bodies are acutely sensitive to nicotine, incapable of handling it in even the smallest doses. Chippers may be people who have the genes to derive pleasure from nicotine, but not the genes to handle it in large doses. Heavy smokers, meanwhile, may be people with the genes to do both. This is not to say that genes provide a total explanation for how much people smoke. Since nicotine is known to relieve boredom and stress, for example, people who are in boring or stressful situations are always going to smoke more than people who are not. It is simply to say that what makes smoking sticky is completely different from the kinds of things that make it contagious. If we are looking for Tipping Points in the war on smoking, then, we need to decide which of those sides of the epidemic we will have the most success attacking. Should we try to make smoking less contagious, to stop the Salesmen who spread the smoking virus? Or are we better off trying to make it less sticky, to look for ways to turn all smokers into chippers?

Let's deal with the issue of contagion first. There are two possible strategies for stopping the spread of smoking. The first is to prevent the permission-givers — the Maggies and Billy G.'s — from smoking in the first place. This is; clearly the most difficult path of all: the most independent, precocious, rebellious teens are hardly likely to be the most susceptible to rational health advice. The second possibility is to convince all those who look to people like Maggie and Billy G. for permission that they should look elsewhere, to get their cues as to what is cool, in this instance, from adults.

But this too is not easy. In fact, it may well be an even more difficult strategy than the first, for the simple reason that parents simply don't wield that kind of influence over children.

This is a hard fact to believe, of course. Parents are powerfully invested in the idea that they can shape their children's personalities and behavior. But, as Judith Harris brilliantly argued in her 1998 book The Nurture Assumption , the evidence for this belief is sorely lacking. Consider, for example, the results of efforts undertaken by psychologists over the years to try and measure this very question — the effect parents have on their children. Obviously, they pass on genes to their offspring, and genes play a big role in which we are. Parents provide love and affection in the early years of childhood; deprived of early emotional sustenance, children will be irreparably harmed. Parents provide food and a home and protection and the basics of everyday life that children need to be safe and healthy and happy. This much is easy. But does it make a lasting difference to the personality of your child if you are an anxious and inexperienced parent, as opposed to being authoritative and competent? Are you more likely to create intellectually curious children by filling your house with books? Does it affect your child's personality if you see him or her two hours a day, as opposed to eight hours a day? In other words, does the specific social environment that we create in our homes make a real difference in the way our children end up as adults? In a series of large and well-designed studies of twins — particularly twins separated at birth and reared apart — geneticists have shown that most of the character traits that make us who we are — friendliness, extroversion, nervousness, openness, and so on — are about half determined by our genes and hall determined by our environment, and the assumption has always been that this environment that makes such a big difference in our lives is the environment of the home. The problem is, however, that whenever psychologists have set out to look for this nurture effect, they can't find it.

One of the largest and most rigorous studies of this kind, for example, is known as the Colorado Adoption Project. In the mid-1970s, a group of researchers at the University of Colorado led by Robert Plomin, one of the worlds leading behavioral geneticists, recruited 245 pregnant women from the Denver area who were about to give up their children for adoption. They then followed the children into their new homes, giving them a battery of personality and intelligence tests at regular intervals throughout their childhood and giving the same sets of tests to their adoptive parents. For the sake of comparison, the group also ran the same set of tests on a similar group of 245 parents and their biological children. For this comparison group, the results came out pretty much as one might expect. On things like measures of intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the biological children are fairly similar to their parents. For the adopted kids, however, the results are downright strange. Their scores have nothing whatsoever in common with their adoptive parents: these children are no more similar in their personality or intellectual skills to the people who raised them, fed them, clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them for sixteen years than they are to any two adults taken at random off the street.