how many people do people know?

[zub]

this is really an interesting thought
how many people, on an average, does a person know?
lets include relatives, friends and others (such as tv personalities etc)

any answers??

[August West]

This question is cross-posted in IMHO. If you want factual or statistical answers, leave it here. If you want 150 people guessing at how many people they know, have this one closed.

[August West]

I see that you're new, so I'll elaborate a little.

First, Welcome to the SDMB,zub!
Secondly, posting the same question in more than one forum is frowned upon. I will stand by my characterizations of GQ and IMHO so, depending on the answers you seek, ask a moderator to close one of the two threads.

Hope you have fun fighting ignorance with us.

[Chronos]

I think that the question is better suited to GQ (presuming that someone, somewhere knows the answer), so I'll leave this one open and give the IMHO mods a heads-up.

Meanwhile, zub, it might help if you clarify your question a bit. What do you mean by "know"? Since you're including celebrities there, it looks like you mean "people that a given person would recognize on sight", even if it's not mutual. What about people with whom you're acquainted, but have never seen? I might say, for instance, that I know TubaDiva, but I haven't a clue what she looks like. Do you count fictional characters? I can certainly identify a picture of Mickey Mouse.

[ScoobyTX]

If you take as axiomatic the old saw that any given person in the world is at most 6 degrees of separation from any other, then the number of persons the average person directly knows is the sixth root of the population.

This comes out to about 43 persons.