The Big Six
By Victoria Miller-Browne, Biology, 2020
This article was originally posted as part of Issue 38: People.
Have you ever happened upon a random person’s profile on any social media platform only to be surprised to find out that you have a mutual friend? The idea of being connected by multiple degrees of separation is an old question that led social psychologist Stanley Milgram and colleagues to create an experiment to understand how small the world really is.
The six degrees of separation theory is based upon the notion the we’re are all connected in some sort of social network, only differing from an average of about six people or degrees of communication. The rules of the experiment, outlined in the 1969 paper An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem started with the instructions of mailing a parcel from a stranger in one state to a stranger in another state solely through passing it through acquaintances in order to get it to the specified person. The study had a series of about 300 volunteers, which consisted of two groups from Nebraska and one group from Boston. The remaining people involved in the study were about 450 intermediaries that aided in passing the package. In the end 64 packages made their way to the right person. The number of passes between intermediated people averaged to be about six per package.
The idea that two strangers could legitimately be connected to each other, especially when taking into account the only types of communication devices were mail, phone, radio and maybe television, was revolutionary in its time period. Yet in the present age, with social media being so much more readily accessible the degrees of separation between us become has only become smaller. As documented in the 2012 paper, Four Degrees of Separation in which an algorithm was curated for the entire network of active Facebook users that accounted for the linkages between each other, it resulted in about four degrees of separation. And as social media continues to obtain a larger part of our lives, as said by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, who wrote one of the first books about social linkages between human “Planet Earth has never been as tiny as it is now.”
Four Degrees of Separation (2012). DOI:10.1145/2380718.2380723
An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem (1969). DOI:0.2307/2786545