Most people have heard of “Six Degrees of Separation” – the concept that any two people are only separated by a maximum of six connections. That is to say, a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can beg made to connect any two people in six steps or fewer. Games like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon – based on the assumption that any individual can be linked through film roles to actor Kevin Bacon in six steps – are modeled after this idea.
The concept is backed up by science, too. One such example of scientific backing is the study done by American psychologist Stanley Milgram. It’s described here, by Malcolm Gladwell:
In the late nineteen-sixties, a Harvard social psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in an effort to find an answer to what is known as the small-world problem: How are human beings connected? Do we belong to separate worlds, operating simultaneously but autonomously, so that the links between any two people, anywhere in the world, are few and distant? Or are we all bound up together in a grand, interlocking web?
Milgram’s idea was to test this question with a chain letter. For one experiment, he got the names of a hundred and sixty people, at random, who lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and he mailed each of them a packet. In the packet was the name and address of a stockbroker who worked in Boston and lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. Each person was instructed to write his name on a roster in the packet and send it on to a friend or acquaintance who he thought would get it closer to the stockbroker.
The idea was that when the letters finally arrived at the stockbroker’s house Milgram could look at the roster of names and establish how closely connected someone chosen at random from one part of the country was to another person chosen at random in another part. Milgram found that most of the letters reached the stockbroker in five or six steps. It is from this experiment that we got the concept of six degrees of separation.
You might have landed on this page because you received a similar letter. I’m conducting an informal follow-up study, mainly out of curiosity, to see if this theory still holds. Throughout the week of February 21st, I’ll be disseminating letters to people in my corner of the world – Mountain View, California – and having letter recipients try to contact someone in Boston.
This someone is a friend of a friend of mine, so I realize this doesn’t make the study completely legitimate. But, to the best of my knowledge, none of the people to whom I’m giving a letter will know this person.
Using resources like Google, Facebook, or the Internet aren’t allowed, but I’m guessing letter recipients will use them anyway.
I’m mainly curious to see if this “six degrees” has shrunk at all since 1967, since Milgram completed his study. I’m also curious to see how many of these actually get to the final recipient, since nobody uses snail mail anymore. Six Degrees 3.0 will be the social media component, and should show up on the blog in a couple of months.
Want to participate? Leave a comment and I’ll send you a letter!
