Just saw this article which reports on some researcher’s efforts to see how “far” we all are from anyone else on the planet. You know, the I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows you thing. It’s been a pop culture meme that it takes six steps but it was never tested and really more a guess.
These researchers studied instant messaging patterns and found we are in fact, on average, 6.6 degrees separated from anyone else.
Thought that was kind of cool.
'Six degrees of separation" was not an “unproven pop culture meme.” It was the result of research conducted in the 1960s, known collectively as the Small World Experiment.
Stanley Milgram was a social psychologist who also did the famous “obedience to authority experiement” that everyone finds so very disturbing.
Seems unproven to me given the below. Not that it was pulled out of their ass either but I would not call the initial study conclusive.
From my link above:
Let’s be precise about what the experiments done so far show. The first experiment (in 1969) asked 296 people in Nebraska to send letters to someone who could connect them to a person in Boston. Each successive letter had to go to someone known to the person sending the letter. (So this experiment at most showed something about the connections between two Americans, not about people around the world.) Only 64 of the 296 attempts got through, and the number of letters necessary for a connection in those 64 successful attempts averaged 6.2. This doesn’t prove much of anything. It’s hard to tell how many letters it would have taken to reach the target person for the 232 cases where the letter writers gave up. It’s hard to tell in the successful cases if they went through the most efficient chain of people.
The next experiment (in 2003) asked more than 24,163 people in 13 countries to try to reach a particular person by a chain of E-mail. Again, they had to E-mail only a person known to the sender of the E-mail. Only 384 of those people managed to reach their target by E-mail, and it took an average of 4 E-mails. The researchers think for some reason that if the chains had all been completed, they would have averaged 5 to 7 E-mails in length. Note that this is probably not close to an average sample of people around the world. This is probably people who E-mail more than usual and know more people in other countries.
The last experiment used a database of 30 billion Microsoft IM messages sent between 180 million people in June 2006. It found that the maximum length of a connection between two people in this group was 29 and that 78% of the lengths were 7 or less. Again, this isn’t everyone in the world. These are people who IM other people. Furthermore, having once IM-ed someone doesn’t really make them an acquaintance of yours. I know that there are many people whom I’ve E-mailed over the years that I know nothing about anymore, including why I ever E-mailed them.
I’ve read a little bit about it and it isn’t hard for me to imagine that I could establish a connection with almost anyone in the US. I think there have to be more than 6.6 steps between me and someone living in remote rural areas of other countries.
I dunno. How far are you separated from someone in the Peace Corps?
Speaking for myself, I dated a girl who went to Costa Rica with the PC. She married a guy from San Jose. They moved back to The States, but still live in San Jose.
The number is an average and not a hard limit (near as I understand it). Someone might take 10 jumps…another might take 2.
As I said above, I don’t think these experiments prove anything about the number of connections between any two people in the world. The 1969 letter experiment at most showed that a quarter of Americans could connect to a random American in a number of steps that averaged less than 7. The 2003 E-mail experiment at most showed that people around the world who use E-mail regularly can connect to other people in about 7 steps, although that conclusion took some extrapolation from a small group of those who were able to finish the experiment. The 2006 IM experiment at most showed that people around the world who regularly use IM can be connected in a number of steps that average less than 7. This last experiment (unlike the first two) said nothing about acquaintanceship at all, since having once IM someone doesn’t mean that you’re acquainted with them.
All of these experiments say nothing about the connections between the clear majority of people in the world who never used E-mail or IM and who aren’t acquainted with anyone outside their own country. (Indeed, often they aren’t acquainted with anyone outside their own neighborhood.) Those of us whose networks of acquaintances reach outside the own country mistakenly think that this obviously holds for everyone in the world. There’s no proof in these experiments that this is true.
I think 6 degrees makes a kind of intuitive sense. Say there’s a reclusive old lady on your street who talks to nobody but the mailman, and the mailman happens to know a university professor in your city. The professor meets another professor in his field from across the country, who knows a mailman in that city, who knows a reclusive old man on some street over there.
IOW, there are the two target individuals, two people they know with city-wide connections, and the two people they know who have nationwide connections. Which gives us six individuals in total. Does that make sense?
I just read this cracked.com article last night, thought it oddly appropriate.
Link is marginally NSFW. If your employer’s firewall records URL, then the URL is even more NSFW. So I broke the link. Fix the “http:” part if you really want to.
To be fair each experiment, more refined than the last, continue to show the same pattern. Further, they are not saying it is six steps between you and anyone else, just on average there are 6-7 steps between you and another person. Some people might take 15 steps to get to while others can take zero (your mom for instance would be zero steps in your claiming to know her).
The first experiment was a rather flimsy thing to hang your hat on evidence wise. While we may still lack “proof” here I think these experiments, taken together, are suggestive enough to be comfortable making a “six degrees of separation” claim in polite conversation over a beer.
My point is that you should look at the groups that each of these experiments used. The first experiment only used Americans, and most of the attempts at connections failed before they reached their targets. The second experiment only used people who have access to E-mail, and the vast majority of the attempts failed before reaching their target. The third group used only people who have Microsoft IM. Even though the sample was huge, it’s only 3% of the world’s population.
It’s hard for us on the SDMB to remember this, but we’re not a random sample of the world’s population. We’re noticeably richer than the average in the world, and we’re clearly more “cosmopolitan” than average, in the sense of making an attempt to expose ourself to people from other countries. Even the last experiment only says that if you take the 3% of the world’s population that’s most clearly tied into electronic communication with the rest of the world, the average number of acquaintanceship connections between them is probably about 7. (It could conceivably be somewhat more or less. Having once IM-ed someone doesn’t necessarily make you an acquaintance of them, so the average could be more. Being an acquaintance of someone doesn’t mean that you’ve IM-ed them at some point, so it could be less.)
I think we should be going for something more than a statement that you could make over drinks when the person you’re talking to isn’t listening very well because they’re a little drunk. We fighting ignorance here. The six degrees of separation story is mostly a myth. It’s not a particularly harmful myth or a hugely inaccurate one, but it’s still a myth.