mobilizing the tipping point

Brayden

One of the classic puzzles of social science is the collective action problem. People want to create public goods (e.g., someone needs to fill that &%@! pothole), but there is little incentive for any given individual to bear the costs of participating in collective action. One of the hurdles of engaging in collective action is guaranteeing that a threshold of effort is reached to make individual actions at least minimally effective.

A new website has been set up to facilitate the leaping of this hurdle. The Point was created with the intent to make it easier for people to “do something as a group, but only when you have the numbers to make it worthwhile.” The site is also a play on Malcolm Gladwell’s popularized notion of the tipping point. Thus, it is a good example of theory trying to become practice.

The idea is simple. You have some sort of collective action that needs to take place. The website allows you to create campaigns that you can circulate to fellow users of The Point. You not only stipulate what sort of action will be taken, but you also specify how many people need to be on board to make it worthwhile enough to pursue. For example, looking down today’s list of campaigns, a user pledged a boycott of Southwest Airlines demanding that they change their policy to allow families with children to pre-board first. The boycott will officially take place if 2,000 people sign up. Thus, in the true spirit of collective action, the user recognizes that the effort to boycott Southwest would likely be wasted unless enough people were dedicated to the cause.

The website is a great idea, but getting it off the ground will require its own kind of collective action. From what I can tell, most of the campaigns are dead in the water. Those that get even close to reaching the tipping point are those campaigns that have a very low threshold. The other problem is that the website has the potential for turning into a dumping ground of really bad ideas. Anyone can litter the site with their campaign ideas. Presumably, the tipping point mechanism will filter the good ideas from the bad, but dedicated users will have to sort through dozens of bad campaign ideas before finding one that they actually support.