The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

There seems to be some limitation built into us either by learning or by the design of our nervous systems, a limit that keeps our channel capacities in this general range,” the psychologist George Miller concluded in his famous essay “The Magical Number Seven.”

call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context.

Suppose I give you four cards labeled with the letters A and D and the numerals 3 and 6. The rule of the game is that a card with a vowel on it always has an even number on the other side. Which of the cards would you have to turn over to prove this rule to be true? The answer is two: the A card and the three card. The overwhelming majority of people given this test, though, don’t get it right. They tend to answer just the A card, or the A and the six. It’s a hard question. But now let me pose another question. Suppose four people are drinking in a bar. One is drinking Coke. One is sixteen. One is drinking beer and one is twenty five. Given the rule that no one under twenty one is allowed to drink beer, which of those people’s IDs do we have to check to make sure the law is being observed? Now the answer is easy. In fact, I’m sure that almost everyone will get it right: the beer drinker and the sixteen year old.