Clive Thompson has been getting some well-deserved attention for his recent Fast Company piece, in which Columbia University sociologist Duncan Watts explodes the hierarchical theory of social influence and trend propagation popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in the bestselling book The Tipping Point. Gladwell's model, which has itself become something of a cultural epidemic, posits that a few hyperconnected "influentials" are the key to the runaway viral spread of fads, fashions, ideas, and behaviors.

These pivotal individuals, according to Gladwell, determine which trends will wither on the vine and which will "tip," becoming mass phenomena. But Watts, a pioneer in the mathematical modeling of social networks, has tested the "tipping point" hypothesis, both empirically and in computer simulations. As it turns out, according to Watts, it's just not true. There are exceptionally well-connected folks out there, but they're so swamped by ordinary individuals that they can't account for genuine cultural cascades, which result not primarily from the activity of social "hubs" kick-starting trends and broadcasting them to the masses, but average Joes and Janes passing them on to other average Joes and Janes.

In a way, the best vindication of Watts' critique is that, despite being "precisely the type of person you'd peg as an Influential," his objections have taken so long to gain traction. He has, after all, been raising them for quite some time. When I interviewed Watts back in 2004, he dismissed Gladwell's theory: "We knew 50 years ago that this model was wrong. After the fact, and this is why Gladwell's book is so beguiling, you see that crime rates dropped or Hush Puppies took off and then you can always find the people with whom it started," he told me. "But if it's something about them, why aren't they driving all the other trends? What turns out to be the deciding factor is not the 'influentials' but the people who are easily influenced. You might have someone who influences five times as many people as the average, but the total numbers relative to a population are still very small. Almost all of the action is away from the center."

And indeed, our hardwired dispositions to be easily influenced in certain ways may provide a better explanation of the popularity of the "tipping point" thesis than Gladwell's own status as an Influential. For example, researchers like anthropologist Pascal Boyer, who studies the psychology of religion, argue that our brains have evolved with an overactive agency-recognition system: We look for—and find—individual intention and design behind any pattern, even when none exists. After a bad harvest, we wonder how we have angered the gods; after a trend goes viral, we wonder what special person could have made it happen. This model also has the virtue of simplicity and, perhaps most importantly, that of flattering its target audience.

How tempting, if you're a marketer, an activist, or just the sort of person who tends to pick up books by New Yorker columnists, to imagine that you have it in your power to launch a runaway cultural phenomenon just by targeting a few key people. Why, you may even be one yourself! Alas, with catchy memes no less than biological viruses, infectiousness is a poor metric of value.