Social change rarely happens by accident. When it does occur deliberately, it’s called social engineering—and it’s far more powerful (and dangerous) than most people realize. Malcolm Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point reveals how small groups can reshape entire societies by manipulating narratives and population dynamics.
Read on to learn three real-world examples of social engineering that show both the promise and perils of intentional social manipulation.
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3 Examples of Social Engineering
Not every social change is deliberate. But when it is—when people manipulate society at large to enact a specific agenda—we refer to this process as social engineering. Regardless of the intent behind deliberate social manipulation, whether for good or bad, Gladwell urges extreme caution regarding its use. In addition to abating or entrenching systemic problems, social engineering always carries the danger of unintended consequences. We’ll look at three examples of social engineering, each of which was deliberate to some degree.
(Shortform note: Many books on social manipulation portray it in a negative light. For example, in Influence, Robert B. Cialdini characterizes the people who practice manipulation tactics as professional persuaders whose job is to make you say “yes” to whatever they’re offering by using your cognitive biases against you, clouding your judgment and pushing you to act against your own best interests. However, in Nudge, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein suggest that in the guise of framing the choices people make, social manipulation tactics can influence people to make good decisions that their natural biases might otherwise prevent.)
Example #1: Good Intentions Gone Wrong
In the first case study of social engineering we’ll examine, Gladwell describes an attempt to engineer a positive social outcome, which instead created a recipe for tragedy. The medical analogy for this is iatrogenesis—a situation in which the cure for a problem ends up causing even greater harm. In this case, Gladwell shows how all three factors of societal illness—a narrative, superspreaders, and an imbalance in population proportions—turned a seemingly ideal community for raising children into a hotspot for teen suicide.
(Shortform note: An example of iatrogenesis in the medical field is that of negative drug interactions. For instance, if you regularly take a blood thinner such as warfarin to reduce your risk of stroke or heart attack and are later prescribed the antibiotic Bactrim to treat an unrelated infection, the two drugs may work in tandem to increase your risk of bleeding, bruising, and other health problems. Your doctor would have prescribed each of these drugs with the intent of improving your health, but as Gladwell suggests with social engineering, the unintended consequences could leave you worse than you were before.)
The sociologists who studied this case of social engineering anonymized the town in their research, but Gladwell refers to it as “Poplar Grove.” The town’s parents prided themselves on their community’s level of academic achievement, giving the town a reputation that attracted even more parents who wished their children to excel. According to Gladwell, the parents created a narrative for their town: Poplar Grove was a place where academic achievement was more important than anything else. The children of Poplar Grove got the message and focused all their energy on outdoing one another at school. This, of course, made Poplar Grove shine by every metric of educational success, but this excellence came at a price: conformity.
(Shortform note: Even without Poplar Grove’s social narrative, psychologists have long suspected the negative impact of pushing students to be high achievers, particularly children labeled as “gifted.” In The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in 1979, Alice Miller pointed to depression in adulthood as a result of linking students’ self-worth to their capacity for achievement. More recent studies show that so-called gifted children feel emotions more intensely than their peers, an experience that can be misconstrued as emotional immaturity and manifest as behavioral problems in response to isolation and perfectionistic expectations.)
Priming a School for Disaster
Previously, Gladwell explained that, when a significant fraction of a population represents a different culture from the norm, the whole community becomes more accepting of diverse perspectives. However, the reverse also holds true—if diversity dips below the tipping point, society becomes more uniform. This was Poplar Grove’s problem—the normal diversity of campus cultures (nerds, punks, preps, and so on) didn’t exist. Since every child was an academic achiever, Poplar Grove’s schools developed a monoculture where expectations were high and individuality was suppressed.
In biology, monocultures are vulnerable to contagion—if one member is susceptible to a disease, so is every other member of the group due to their lack of variation. Gladwell argues that this applies to societal problems too, as we shall see.
(Shortform note: The monoculture Gladwell describes was driven by and limited to the people of a specific town, but critics of modern education reform suggest that some of today’s well-meant practices are encouraging an educational monoculture across the United States. In particular, critics allege that big-money donors and policymakers have invested a great deal of power and resources in search of a “one size fits all” way to improve schools in the form of standardized curricula and testing that fails to expose students to a diversity of perspectives, teaching practices, and educational styles. If true, then instead of the bottom-up monoculture of Poplar Grove, the US might develop a top-down monoculture of imposed educational conformity.)
The trouble at Poplar Grove started when a student tried (and failed) to end her life. At first, this seemed like an isolated case, but later that year, two students did take their lives, one in the same manner as the first attempt. Years passed until the next wave started, and several students died by suicide within weeks of each other. Gladwell argues these deaths had two effects—they normalized teen suicide as a fact of life in Poplar Grove, and the teens became superspreaders of suicide as an escape from academic pressure. As of Gladwell’s writing, Poplar Grove’s suicide rate was still far above the national average, and no attempts had been made to address the town’s narrative or the monoculture that enabled the problem to flourish.
(Shortform note: As prevalent as it was in Poplar Grove, academic pressure is far from the only trigger of teen suicide. Many contributing factors are specific to individual teens, such as mental health issues, family instability, and disruptive life events. Others are universal, such as the high levels of stress that teens normally experience. However, some drivers of teen depression and suicide are environmental, such as exposure to gun violence and various types of bullying. It stands to reason that if a community’s social narrative allowed any of these factors to become normalized, it might see a similar rise in student deaths as the one in Gladwell’s example.)
Example #2: Enforcing the Status Quo
In the next case study of social engineering, some schools manipulate group proportions to prevent social change instead of creating it. In particular, Gladwell alleges that Harvard University and other Ivy League schools have covertly skewed their admissions practices to keep minority representation in their student bodies below the tipping point where those students might challenge the controlling narrative of the schools’ privileged elite.
A century ago, universities learned about the power of group proportions to change their character and public perception. Gladwell writes that at first, their fear of social change was rooted in anti-Semitism—by the 1920s, enough Jewish students had enrolled at Columbia University that even though they constituted a minority, people viewed Columbia as a “Jewish school.” In the eyes of the US’s upper and middle classes, this change diminished Columbia’s reputation, and other prestigious universities reacted by establishing strict ethnic quotas on how many Jewish students could be enrolled. As other underrepresented groups followed, the quota system expanded to include women, African Americans, and students of Asian descent.
| The Character of Higher Education The “Ivy League” that Harvard belongs to is a group of eight private universities in the northeastern US that—by their own social narrative—are counted as the top schools in the country. While other universities offer a comparable level of education, Ivy League schools are also known for their powerful alumni networks and bankable reputations—Ivy League graduates tend to land higher-paying jobs due to contacts made through the university and the clout of having an Ivy League degree. As Gladwell suggests, these schools work hard to maintain their reputations by setting standards of academic excellence and being extremely selective about which students they admit—and therein lies the problem. The key challenge to the racial quota system Gladwell describes didn’t occur at an Ivy League school at all, but at the University of California. In the 1978 lawsuit Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the US Supreme Court ruled that while affirmative action practices to increase admissions of minority students are acceptable, strict racial quotas are not. In the court’s formal opinion, Justice Lewis Powell cited Harvard’s admissions process as a positive example of recruiting for diversity without using quotas, though it had done so previously. |
Once the Supreme Court declared racial quotas unconstitutional, Gladwell argues that Harvard and other Ivy League schools didn’t stop working to engineer their racial makeup. Instead, he accuses them of changing tactics—rather than yielding to societal trends, university leaders and those in charge of admissions worked to inoculate their schools against change, acting as the reverse of social superspreaders. Instead of openly excluding students who might shift the universities’ overall composition, they gave preferential treatment to applicants who fit the “right” demographics to preserve their institutional narratives. They did this by creating special admissions paths for wealthy students and children of alumni.
(Shortform note: To be clear, these two special paths to admission weren’t created in response to the Supreme Court ruling—they’d been used as a selection tool for much longer. At Harvard, “legacy” admissions of alumni’s children began in 1934 as a way to counter the growing Jewish enrollment that Gladwell discusses. Meanwhile, its preferential treatment of wealthy applicants can be traced all the way to its roots in the 1600s, when it was common practice for schools in the US and in England to admit students based solely on their socioeconomic status—and how much tuition their families could afford.)
Athletic Recruitment for the Rich
However, the admissions tool Gladwell finds most interesting is Harvard’s use of athletics to shape the student body. In many US colleges, sports is a revenue generator—thousands of fans, students, and alumni show up to every football, basketball, and baseball game. The strongest teams act as advertisements for the schools themselves, paying back universities’ investments with boosted enrollment and funding. However, Gladwell says Harvard recruits heavily for what might be called “less obvious sports” such as fencing, rugby, lacrosse, and field hockey. These sports don’t have the same popular draw as those that dominate weekend television, and yet Harvard makes an outsized effort to recruit top players and support them.
(Shortform note: In Don’t Trust Your Gut, data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz arrives at the same conclusion as Gladwell, though from a different angle. When analyzing the data on athletics’ effect on lifelong success, he discovered that students who enter nontraditional sports have a higher chance of earning athletic scholarships. These include gymnastics, fencing, and hockey for boys, and rowing, horseback riding, and rugby for girls. Unlike Gladwell, Stephens-Davidowitz doesn’t explore the ethical implications of his findings—he merely points out that the ratio of hopeful students to open positions in more popular sports is extremely high, so the average athlete’s chances for nabbing a scholarship in those are relatively low.)
Gladwell concludes that Ivy League schools invest in these sports to make enrolling rich white students easier. Athletes in these sports mainly come from white, affluent families who can afford to have their children participate. Harvard has argued—to the Supreme Court—that its athletic policies serve the same purpose as those of any other university. However, Gladwell finds it hard to believe that sports which few people follow or attend increase enrollment or even lift student morale. Instead, he observes that unlike popular sports that every child in the US can play at the local park, Harvard recruits for sports that have financial barriers to entry and are only available at elite private schools—revealing the dark side of social engineering.
(Shortform note: After the Supreme Court struck down Harvard’s admissions practices—not just the use of athletics that Gladwell criticizes, but all race-based measures—critics of the decision argued that it opened the door to striking down affirmative action policies that were put in place to ensure that nonwhite students had access to schools they were historically barred from. The implications range beyond academics—businesses that make hiring decisions guided in part by diversity requirements may now be vulnerable to charges of “reverse discrimination.” Likewise, organizations that invest in minority-owned businesses and communities may be open to similar legal challenges.)
Example #3: Changing Millions of Minds
Our final social engineering case study examines a social change in the form of an unprecedented TV miniseries with national reach that brought an almost-forgotten part of history—the Holocaust—back into public awareness. Though beneficial to many, the way the change happened demonstrates that, by consciously applying the tools of change, a small group of people can pull the levers of society.
(Shortform note: The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, refers to the systematic genocide of European Jews by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi government and its partners in other countries before and during World War II. Though Gladwell focuses on the Jewish experience, the Nazis also imprisoned and killed Black people, the Romani, gay people, the disabled, prisoners of war, and various others deemed “undesirable” by the Nazi regime. In the end, six million Jews died in Nazi camps as well as millions of others.)
One might ask why it would take an act of social engineering to get people to acknowledge a documented part of history. However, in the decades following World War II, the slaughter of Jews in Nazi concentration camps went largely undiscussed by the public and in histories written of the war. Gladwell explains that those who survived the camps were loath to talk about their experiences. And, because the camps’ horrors were so difficult for the general public to face, people slowly let the Holocaust fade into the shadows of history. The US’s guiding narrative of the war focused on the battles, victories, and sacrifices of the troops, but not on reliving the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Adolf Hitler’s regime.
(Shortform note: Even within the Jewish community, Holocaust education was as sparse as Gladwell describes. Jewish educators mainly focused on acts of resistance and escape from the Nazis. Both Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, which recounted her years spent in hiding from the Nazis, and Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, describing life in the concentration camps, struggled to find publishers. Though Frank’s diary found its audience after successful stage and screen adaptations, Wiesel’s memoir took decades to become a staple of Holocaust literature. The first major public reminder of the Nazi’s crimes was the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of deporting Jews to the camps, which was televised to a global audience.)
It wasn’t until 1978 that TV executives Paul Klein and Irwin Segelstein decided to retell the story of the genocide. By dramatizing the Nazi’s atrocities in the four-part miniseries Holocaust, Klein and Segelstein reached an audience far above the percentage of the US population required to shift the national narrative. Gladwell highlights that they achieved this through the popular media, not through public policy or formal education. In the ’70s, people still had a limited number of viewing options, so TV programs had a much bigger reach than any individual show does today. By every measure, the horrors the Jewish people endured returned to public awareness overnight and have remained there ever since.
(Shortform note: Prior to the Holocaust miniseries Gladwell writes about, depictions of the Holocaust in film were limited to a handful of German and French filmmakers. After the miniseries, the next major work on the Holocaust was Claude Lanzmann’s lengthy documentary Shoah, which featured the words of actual Holocaust survivors. In the 1990s, two films on the Holocaust opened to wide acclaim and won multiple awards: 1993’s Schindler’s List and 1997’s Life Is Beautiful, though the latter faced criticism for its use of humor in dealing with its subject matter. Nevertheless, thanks to filmmakers who periodically revisit the Holocaust’s horrors, it’s remained fresh in the public consciousness for decades.)
Power for Good or Bad
Throughout Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell comes back to the idea that by shaping a community’s governing narrative and the proportion of different viewpoints that make it up, a relatively small group of people can have an oversized impact on society. While this power can be used for good, as in the case of Klein and Segelstein, Gladwell attaches two warnings to these ideas.
1. The temptation to practice social engineering is strong—strong enough, he says, to often override the ethical questions one should always ask before taking actions that affect large swaths of society. For instance, anyone engaged in social change might ask who might be harmed if the changes are successful, as well as what unintended side effects might happen as a result.
2. Any power that can be used to do good can also be used to harm. While Gladwell believes it’s possible to use his ideas for positive social change, in the wrong hands, those same mechanisms can lead to harmful shifts in society. Therefore, he concludes that we have to be mindful of the factors that lead to the spread of destructive ideas and behaviors so that they don’t take us unaware and might even be prevented.
| The Battle of the Social Engineers Despite the inherent dangers Gladwell warns about, politicians and political organizations practice social engineering on a regular basis—it is, in a sense, part of their job. In the same way that mechanical engineers apply principles from physics and chemistry to develop real-world practical applications, social engineers use the lessons of social science to guide political policies and develop social programs to achieve specific societal goals. Though difficulties arise when these policies go wrong, the more obvious conflicts created by social engineering occur when two or more diametrically opposed groups, such as major political parties, try to engineer society in different directions at the same time. In Why We’re Polarized, journalist Ezra Klein remarks that, by the 21st century, nearly all US voters have sorted themselves into one political party or the other and have learned to strongly identify with their chosen party’s ideology. Klein suggests that the two parties’ mutual antagonism is rooted in their constituents’ sense of identity more strongly than in any set of policy positions, and yet each party’s policies are designed to engineer society in a way that one group favors and the other group fears. For example, in polls taken before the US’s 2024 election, voters on both sides were fearful of the future they felt the other party was trying to create. Conservative voters fear a future in which hard work, mental toughness, and traditional institutions are no longer valued, whereas liberal voters report concerns about the breakdown of equality and the rise of extremist views. While each group has a vision of the future they want to create, their stronger emotions are directed at the harm they believe their opposition’s victory would lead to. However, if they were to adopt Gladwell’s perspective, each party might flip this perspective and ask, “What unintended consequences might result from the world we’re trying to engineer?” |
Learn More About Social Engineering
To gain a deeper understanding of these examples of social engineering in their broader context, check out our guide to Revenge of the Tipping Point.
