The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (35 page)

None of those arrests resulted in boycotts or protests, however. “There weren’t many real activists in Montgomery at the time,” Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize–winning civil rights historian, told me. “People didn’t mount protests or marches. Activism was something that happened in courts. It wasn’t something average people did.”

When a young Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Montgomery in 1954, for instance, a year before Parks’s arrest, he found a majority of the city’s blacks accepted segregation “without apparent protest. Not only did they seem resigned to segregation per se; they also accepted the abuses and
indignities which came with it.”
^8.8

So why, when Parks was arrested, did things change?

One explanation is that the political climate was shifting. The previous year, the U.S. Supreme Court had handed down
Brown v. Board of Education,
ruling that segregation was illegal within public schools; six months before Parks’s arrest, the Court had issued what came to be known as
Brown II—
a decision ordering that school integration must proceed with “all deliberate speed.” There was a powerful sense across the nation that change was in the air.

But that isn’t sufficient to explain why Montgomery became
ground zero for the civil rights struggle. Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith had been arrested in the wake of
Brown v. Board,
and yet they didn’t spark a protest.
Brown,
for many Montgomery residents, was an abstraction from a far-off courthouse, and it was unclear how—or if—its impact would be felt locally. Montgomery wasn’t Atlanta or Austin or other cities where progress seemed possible. “Montgomery was a pretty nasty place,” Branch said. “Racism was set in its ways there.”

When Parks was arrested, however, it sparked something unusual within the city. Rosa Parks, unlike other people who had been jailed for violating the bus segregation law, was deeply respected and embedded within her community. So when she was arrested, it triggered a series of social habits—the habits of friendship—that ignited an initial protest. Parks’s membership in dozens of social networks across Montgomery allowed her friends to muster a response before the community’s normal apathy could take hold.

Montgomery’s civil life, at the time, was dominated by hundreds of small groups that created the city’s social fabric. The city’s
Directory of Civil and Social Organizations
was almost as thick as its phone book. Every adult, it seemed—particularly every black adult—belonged to some kind of club, church, social group, community center, or neighborhood organization, and often more than one. And within these social networks, Rosa Parks was particularly well known and liked. “Rosa Parks was one of those rare people of whom everyone agreed that she gave more than she got,” Branch wrote in his history of the civil rights movement,
Parting the Waters
. “Her character represented one of the isolated high blips on the graph of human nature, offsetting
a dozen or so sociopaths.”
^8.9
Parks’s many friendships and affiliations cut across the city’s racial and economic lines. She was the secretary of the local NAACP chapter, attended the Methodist church, and helped oversee a youth organization at the Lutheran church near her home. She spent some weekends volunteering at a shelter, others with a botanical club, and on Wednesday
nights often joined a group of women who knit blankets for a local hospital. She volunteered dressmaking services to poor families and provided last-minute gown alterations for wealthy white debutantes. She was so deeply enmeshed in the community, in fact, that her husband complained that she ate more often at potlucks than at home.

In general, sociologists say, most of us have friends who are like us. We might have a few close acquaintances who are richer, a few who are poorer, and a few of different races—but, on the whole, our deepest relationships tend to be with people who look like us, earn about the same amount of money, and come from similar backgrounds.

Parks’s friends, in contrast, spanned Montgomery’s social and economic hierarchies. She had what sociologists call “strong ties”—firsthand relationships—with dozens of groups throughout Montgomery that didn’t usually come into contact with one another. “This was absolutely key,” Branch said. “Rosa Parks transcended the social stratifications of the black community and Montgomery as a whole. She was friends with field hands and college professors.”

And the power of those friendships became apparent as soon as Parks landed in jail.

Rosa Parks called her parents’ home from the police station. She was panicked, and her mother—who had no idea what to do—started going through a mental Rolodex of Parks’s friends, trying to think of someone who might be able to help. She called the wife of E. D. Nixon, the former head of the Montgomery NAACP, who in turn called her husband and told him that Parks needed to be bailed out of jail. He immediately agreed to help, and called a prominent white lawyer named Clifford Durr who knew Parks because she had hemmed dresses for his three daughters.

Nixon and Durr went to the jailhouse, posted bail for Parks, and took her home. They’d been looking for the perfect case to challenge Montgomery’s bus segregation laws, and sensing an opportunity, they asked Parks if she would be willing to let them fight her arrest in court. Parks’s husband was opposed to the idea. “The
white folks will kill you, Rosa,” he told her.
^8.10

But Parks had spent years working with Nixon at the NAACP. She had been in Durr’s house and had helped his daughters prepare for cotillions. Her friends were now asking her for a favor.

“If you think it will mean something to Montgomery and do some good,” she told them, “I’ll be
happy to go along with it.”
^8.11

That night—just a few hours after the arrest—news of Parks’s jailing began to filter through the black community. Jo Ann Robinson, the president of a powerful group of schoolteachers involved in politics and a friend of Parks’s from numerous organizations, heard about it. So did many of the schoolteachers in Robinson’s group, and many of the parents of their students. Close to midnight, Robinson called an impromptu meeting and suggested that everyone boycott the city’s buses on Monday, four days hence, when Parks was to appear in court.

Afterward, Robinson snuck into her office’s mimeograph room and made copies of a flyer.

“Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down,” it read. “This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday
in protest of the arrest and trial.”
^8.12

Early the next morning, Robinson gave stacks of the flyers to schoolteachers and asked them to distribute it to parents and coworkers. Within twenty-four hours of Parks’s arrest, word of her jailing and the boycott had spread to some of the city’s most influential communities—the local NAACP, a large political group, a number of black schoolteachers, and the parents of their students. Many
of the people who received a flyer knew Rosa Parks personally—they had sat next to her in church or at a volunteer meeting and considered her a friend. There’s a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly. Studies show that people have no problem ignoring strangers’ injuries, but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to overcome the inertia that usually makes protests hard to organize. When Parks’s friends learned about her arrest and the boycott, the social habits of friendship—the natural inclination to help someone we respect—kicked in.

The first mass movement of the modern civil rights era could have been sparked by any number of earlier arrests. But it began with Rosa Parks because she had a large, diverse, and connected set of friends—who, when she was arrested, reacted as friends naturally respond, by following the social habits of friendship and agreeing to show their support.

Still, many expected the protest would be nothing more than a one-day event. Small protests pop up every day around the world, and almost all of them quickly fizzle out. No one has enough friends to change the world.

Which is why the second aspect of the social habits of movements is so important. The Montgomery bus boycott became a society-wide action because the sense of obligation that held the black community together was activated soon after Parks’s friends started spreading the word. People who hardly knew Rosa Parks decided to participate because of a social peer pressure—an influence known as “the power of weak ties”—that made it difficult to avoid joining in.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an established midlevel executive at a prosperous company. You’re successful and well liked. You’ve spent years building a reputation inside your firm and cultivating
a network of friends that you can tap for clients, advice, and industry gossip. You belong to a church, a gym, and a country club, as well as the local chapter of your college alumni association. You’re respected and often asked to join various committees. When people within your community hear of a business opportunity, they often pass it your way.

Now imagine you get a phone call. It’s a midlevel executive at another company looking for a new job. Will you help him by putting in a good word with your boss, he asks?

If the person on the telephone is a total stranger, it’s an easy decision. Why risk your standing inside your firm helping someone you don’t know?

If the person on the phone is a close friend, on the other hand, it’s also an easy choice. Of course you’ll help. That’s what friends do.

However, what if the person on the phone isn’t a good friend or a stranger, but something in between? What if you have friends in common, but don’t know each other very well? Do you vouch for the caller when your boss asks if he’s worth an interview? How much of your own reputation and energy, in other words, are you willing to expend to help a friend of a friend get a job?

In the late 1960s, a Harvard PhD student named Mark Granovetter set out to answer that question by studying
how 282 men had found their current employment.
^8.13
He tracked how they had learned about open positions, whom they had called for referrals, the methods they used to land interviews, and most important, who had provided a helping hand. As expected, he found that when job hunters approached strangers for assistance, they were rejected. When they appealed to friends, help was provided.

More surprising, however, was how often job hunters also received help from casual acquaintances—friends of friends—people who were neither strangers nor close pals. Granovetter called those connections “weak ties,” because they represented the links that connect people who have acquaintances in common, who share
membership in social networks, but aren’t directly connected by the strong ties of friendship themselves.

In fact, in landing a job, Granovetter discovered, weak-tie acquaintances were often
more
important than strong-tie friends because weak ties give us access to social networks where we don’t otherwise belong. Many of the people Granovetter studied had learned about new job opportunities through weak ties, rather than from close friends, which makes sense because we talk to our closest friends all the time, or work alongside them or read the same blogs. By the time they have heard about a new opportunity, we probably know about it, as well. On the other hand, our weak-tie acquaintances—the people we bump into every six months—are the ones who tell us about jobs
we would otherwise never hear about.
^8.14

When sociologists have examined how opinions move through communities, how gossip spreads or political movements start, they’ve discovered a common pattern: Our weak-tie acquaintances are often as influential—if not more—than our close-tie friends. As Granovetter wrote, “Individuals with few weak ties will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends. This deprivation will not only insulate them from the latest ideas and fashions but may put them in a disadvantaged position in the labor market, where advancement can depend … on knowing about appropriate job openings at just the right time.

“Furthermore, such individuals may be difficult to organize or integrate into political movements of any kind.… While members of one or two cliques may be efficiently recruited, the problem is that, without weak ties, any momentum generated in this way does not spread
beyond
the clique. As a result,
most of the population will be untouched.”
^8.15

The power of weak ties helps explain how a protest can expand from a group of friends into a broad social movement. Convincing thousands of people to pursue the same goal—especially when that
pursuit entails real hardship, such as walking to work rather than taking the bus, or going to jail, or even skipping a morning cup of coffee because the company that sells it doesn’t support organic farming—is hard. Most people don’t care enough about the latest outrage to give up their bus ride or caffeine unless it’s a close friend that has been insulted or jailed. So there is a tool that activists have long relied upon to compel protest, even when a group of people don’t necessarily
want
to participate. It’s a form of persuasion that has been remarkably effective over hundreds of years. It’s the sense of obligation that neighborhoods or communities place upon themselves.