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yuti — October 3, 2007 / 5:05 pm
Everyone has probably already met a stranger, only to discover one or mutual acquaintances and sigh “Gee, what a small world!” Some sociologists have gone on to wonder how this actually works out in the field. The first studies date back to the 1960s, when Stanley Milgram design and apply a sort of interviewing tool to count to what degree does every member of a given group know every other member.
The procedure is as follows, an arbitrary ‘target person’ and a group of ‘starting persons’ were selected, and an attempt was made to generate an acquaintance chain from each starter to the target. Each started was provided with a document and asked to begin moving it toward the target. From the research which conducted with Jeffrey Tracers, Milgram point out that the proportion of incomplete chains diminished with the number of intermediaries.
The main chain length—the number of intermediaries needed to connect a starter in a random sample to target—was 5.2. With due regard for the dangers of generalizing, the Milgram and Travers study demonstrates it only takes an average of five people to connect any two people in a country of over 250 million inhabitants.
Credit: Introducing Social Network by Alain Degenne and Michel Forse
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