Confirmed - The Six Degrees Of Separation Theory Works
Back in 1969, when Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers wanted to confirm their theory of “6 degrees of separation” they asked nearly 300 people in the US state of Nebraska to send a letter to someone in Boston through acquaintances. People were considered one degree apart from a friend, two degrees away from a friend’s friend and so on.
While most of the letters didn’t make it to the designated recipient, those that did arrived with an average of 6.2 degrees of separation from senders.
More recently, a research team at Microsoft studied 30 billion instant messages sent by 240 million people in June of 2006 and determined that, on average, any two could be linked in 6.6 steps.
In short, all that separates one person from another totally unknown person would be about 6.6 degrees.
As Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz puts it, “We’ve been able to put our finger on the social pulse of human connectivity - on a planetary scale - and we’ve confirmed that it’s indeed a small world. Over the next few decades, new kinds of computing applications, from smart networks to automated translation systems, will help make the world even smaller, with closer social connections and deeper understanding among people.”
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