Six Degrees of Separation- Small World Problem

Six degrees of separation is the name given by psychological scientist Stanley Milgram to a finding that people who do not know each other are linked by six or less people whose friends overlap. Milgram published the results in the first issue of a popular magazine, Psychology Today.

Milgram wanted to identify the number of links in a chain of people between the sender of a package to a target person unknown to the sender. He reported an example of a Kansas farmer whose package reached the target person in Cambridge, MA in only 4 days. There were only two people in between the sender and receiver. However, not all packages were received.

There were other studies. A Nebraska study revealed 44 completed chains out of 160. Kleinfeld (2000) observed that the participants were not randomly selected from the general population. Given the limited evidence, Kleinfeld did not find support in Milgram's work for either a small world or a big world. That is, in some cases, people are connected with a few links and in other cases, people seem to be isolated. And of course, not all chains were completed.

Since Milgram's work, others have looked at links in social networks. Goel and Watts (2009) found some support for chains having about 6-7 steps thus close to the Milgram report and supportive of a small world.

A study of people on Facebook (Edunov et al., 2016) found an average connection of only 3.74.

Note

The Six Degrees of Separation concept is related to the Social Dimension of functioning in the SCOPES model.




References

Edunov, S., Bhagat, S., Burke, M., Diuk, C, & Filiz, I.O. (2016, February 4).
Three and a half degrees of separation. Retrieved from https://research.facebook.com/blog/2016/2/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation/



Goel, S., Muhamad, R., & Watts, D.J. (2009). Social search in "Small-World" experiments. WWW '09.

Kleinfeld, J. (2000, October 2). Could It Be a Big World After All? What the Milgram Papers in the Yale Archives Reveal About the Original Small World Study. Retrieved from http://www.columbia.edu/itc/sociology/watts/w3233/client_edit/big_world.html

Milgram, S. (1967). The small-world problem. Psychology Today 1: 61-67.

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