Connectors

What it is

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell argues that social epidemics depend on three kinds of exceptional people, which he calls Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. Connectors are the first of these. They are defined by reach: they know a great many people, and they know them across different subcultures, not just inside one.

Two illustrations carry the book's case. Roger Horchow keeps a roster of 1,600 names, with notes on how he met each one, and sends birthday cards. Lois Weisberg belonged to eight or ten separate worlds. Gladwell also reports that Paul Revere was one of only two men, among 255 in Boston's seven Whig groups, who belonged to as many as five of them. In each case the point is the same: such a person sits where several circles overlap, so an idea that reaches them can reach several circles.

The link to Granovetter is explicit in the book's treatment. Gladwell presents Granovetter's job-finding result, that acquaintances are more often the source of a job lead than close friends, as a general rule that Connectors exploit. The step from Granovetter's claim to Gladwell's is worth separating. Granovetter's claim concerns the information that reaches one person through a bridging tie. Gladwell's claim concerns the role of a particular kind of person in spreading ideas through a population. The second does not follow from the first, and the later experimental work on weak ties tests the first.

In effect

Research: a randomised test of the tie, not the person

Rajkumar and colleagues (2022) ran randomised experiments on LinkedIn's People You May Know suggestions across more than 20 million members. The unit of the experiment was the tie. Moderately weak ties, with around ten mutual connections, raised job transmission the most. The result says which kinds of connection help a job seeker. It does not identify a type of person who carries news for others.

Everyday life: the person with the large address book

Most people know someone who keeps in touch with far more people than they do and introduces them to each other. That is the Connector in everyday form. The experimental evidence on weak ties neither confirms nor refutes the idea that such people matter for spreading anything, because it measured ties between pairs, not the standing of individuals in a population.

Commerce: Gladwell's surname test

Gladwell proposed a simple way to see that Connectors exist: score a point for each of about 250 surnames from a Manhattan phone book that matches someone you know. Scores varied enormously within every group, and Roger Horchow scored 98 in a few minutes. Gladwell ran the exercise informally on about 400 people. It is an informal exercise, not a validated instrument, and it should be cited as an anecdote, not a finding. Marketers who draw on the book to find influential people are using the label as a heuristic, and the book gives them no measured effect to rely on.

What it does not say

The idea does not say that a few Connectors are required for ideas to spread. That is the wider Law of the Few, and the book states it more firmly than the later record supports. The vault's audit of the book marks the use of Granovetter's result as firmer than a mixed record allows, and the job-finding percentages the book prints were not rechecked.

It does not rest on a measured effect. The examples are individuals chosen because they fit, and the surname test is Gladwell's own informal exercise. Nor does the concept follow from the experimental results on weak ties, which concern single ties, not people.

It is also worth keeping apart from the claim that more acquaintances are good for a person's job search. That is a claim about ties, tested by Gee, Jones and Burke (2017) on Facebook and by Rajkumar and colleagues (2022) on LinkedIn, and the evidence is more qualified than the book's confidence suggests.

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