six degrees of separation fact or fiction
Six Degrees of Separation - Fact or Fiction?
Would you believe it if I said that you could discover a connection to just about any unrelated person on the face of the Earth? Or that your favorite movie star or a notorious gangster can be connected to you through a chain of merely six people. Stunned? Brush through this article to find out how...
- A person named A wants to find a connection with a person named G. To simplify the matter, A is placed in position '0' and G in position '6'. There is supposed to be a link of 5 people in between A and G.
- All the people in this chain become related to the first and last person because of their connection to each other, which means B, C, D, E and F are related to A and G directly or indirectly.
- Individuals in the chain have an immediate connection with only those people who are on either sides in the chain. In the above diagram, A has an immediate connection with only B, while G has an immediate connection with only F. However, B is connected to A and C. The same applies to other individuals in the chain.
- The chain of links should pass from A to G.
- As part of the experiment, Milgram randomly selected two individuals, a woman and a stock broker from Sharon, a suburb in the city of Boston, Massachusetts. These two individuals were the targets or the destination points for the chain links.
- The starting points of the experiment were randomly selected people residing in Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas.
- Milgram distributed approximately 296 packets bound for one target and about 160 letters bound for the other. These packets and letters contained details of the theory, the nature of Milgram's experiment and details about the target persons. Additionally, they contained a log sheet and pre-addressed postcards to be sent to Milgram in Harvard by each recipient of the packets.
- The residents of Omaha and Wichita, who received the packets, were first asked whether they directly knew the target residing in Boston. If not, they were then asked to forward the packet or letter to any person of their choice, who according to them might know the target.
- Before forwarding the packets, recipients were asked to make a note of their own names on the log sheet and put it back inside the packet. They also needed to send one pre-addressed postcard with their own details to Milgram.
- This cycle of forwarding the packet was supposed to go on from one recipient to the next, until the packets reached the hands of the targets.
- Milgram observed that several participants of this experiment showed a reluctance to forward their letters or parcels to the next person. Out of the 296 parcels bound for Boston, only 64 reached the target. Similarly, out of the 160 letters that were originally mailed, merely 24 letters made it to their destination.
- Milgram's observations are therefore, based only on a small fraction of the total parcels originally distributed.
- The participants in this experiment gave tremendous importance to geographical proximity of the target persons. Which means, the parcels reached Boston very fast but moved at a slow pace within the city until they reached the targets.
- The log sheet and postcards received by Milgram showed that the number of links in a chain were anything ranging from nine to a meager two or three.
- As per Milgram, even though the original six degrees theory states a total of six links, it actually refers to maximum number of links expected to form a chain. One may come across a chain that has lesser than six links.
- Milgram concluded that the average degrees of separation between two unknown people staying the US was just 3 to 3.5 and not 6 as stated in the original theory. This is because Milgram narrowed his research within boundaries of United States and did not mention the degrees of separation between two people residing in other nations.
- In the year 2003 and 2004, Watts randomly selected 18 target people from about 13 nations around the globe.
- The starting points in Columbia's Small World Project were volunteers that were ready to send emails to their respective friends.
- Participants were asked to send a pre-drafted email to all people known to them.
- Subsequent recipients were also asked to forward the email to every person in their contact list. Thus, several email chains for the project started running on parallel basis.
- A particular email chain would stop as soon as one of 18 target recipients received the email.
- According to Watts, the project received huge response with approximately 60,000 email users from about 170 nations around the world taking part in the project.
- Although a chain of 24,000 emails got created during the project, just about 400 emails reached the targets. As per Watts, this might have happened due to the unwillingness of subsequent recipients to forward the emails.
- The successfully completed chains comprised an average of four links by the time they reached their targets.
- Watts factored the number of participants who quit the email chains and calculated the median length of an email chain to be approximately 5 and 7 persons.
- In the end, Watts did support the original theory by stating the average number of links to be 6.
- Facebook analyzed its membership and the size of friendships between its members. Reports show that Facebook's 721 million active users have approximately 69 billion friendship links between them. This makes Facebook the largest relationship/ friendship related database in the whole world.
- Facebook's analysis team feels that people of a certain age tend to have friends of the same age range. Similarly, members of the website generally have 84% friends residing in the same country as theirs.
- As per Facebook, approximately 10% of their members have lesser than 10 friends. Another 20% have up to 25 friends only. However, 50% of Facebook users have more than 100 people on their friends list.
- The degrees of separation between two people residing in far off countries seems to reduce if the chain of links passes through multicultural and cosmopolitan countries like the US or the UK.
- According to Facebook's research, 92% of its members have only 4 degrees of separation.
- About 99.6% of other people have 5 degrees of separation.
- The degrees of separation seem to shrink if you are searching for a link between two people residing in the same country. At such times, just 3 degrees of separation might exist.
- The average degrees of separation between Facebook's worldwide users is just 4.74. This number is expected to reduce in the coming years, due to a consistent rise in Facebook users. This is because connections between people broaden with new friendships.