The majority of Milgram's letters didn't make it to the Boston stockbroker. She found instead that Milgram's conclusions rested on a shaky foundation, and that class and race divided Americans more than his original paper admitted. Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, studied Milgram's unpublished archives in 2002, planning to try to create a new version of the experiment using email.
2 DEGREES OF SEPARATION SERIES
Class and race mean we might be more separate than we think We might not be one endless chain, but a series of circles that don't touch. It's a small world after all, Milgram concluded. That person was then supposed to send it to someone, and so on, until the document arrived.Ībout one-third of the documents eventually reached the stockbroker, after a chain of, on average, six people - the six degrees of separation.
Volunteers were given an impressive-looking document that was supposed to reach the stockbroker, and were instructed to send it to someone they knew on a first-name basis who they thought could get them closer to the stockbroker. They were also told the name and hometown of the stockbroker's wife, and that he worked in Boston proper. The volunteers got the stockbroker's name, occupation, address, college and year of graduation, and dates of service in the military. Milgram picked a stockbroker in Sharon, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, as his target, and three groups of volunteers, two in Nebraska and one in Boston, as a starting point. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in 1967 around the "small world problem": How are two randomly selected people within the United States connected? The original "six degrees of separation" experiment required people to know each other fairly well: They had to be on a first-name basis, at a time when society was slightly more formal, in order for the connection to count. Thirty-five percent of people have Facebook friends they've never met in person. The typical Facebook user has 155 friends, but only describes 50 of them as friends in real life, according to a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center. How people define a Facebook "friend" varies widely, so how connected you are presumably depends in part on how generous you are with your Facebook friendship. The 1967 experiment that proved "six degrees of separation" "Another one of these?" the stockbroker must have thought as the letters began to arrive. Mark Zuckerberg is 3.17 degrees of separation from all Facebook users. The average Facebook user is three and a half degrees of separation away from every other user, and the social network's post tells you your own distance from everyone else on the site. The researchers found that the world is connected enough that six degrees of separation might be too many. But Facebook, because its users give it access to possibly the richest data set ever on how 1.6 billion people know and interact with each other, set out to prove it with a statistical algorithm. The idea of "six degrees of separation" rests on a scientific foundation that's dubious at best. Pick a random stranger anywhere in the country, the theory goes, and chances are you can build a chain of acquaintances between the two of you in no more than six hops.
Chances are you're a friend of a friend of a friend of Mark Zuckerberg - at least according to Facebook.Ī well-known theory holds that most people, at least in the US and perhaps in the world, are six degrees of separation away from each other.
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