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Networking Through Time Book Excerpt: Part 2

Networking Through Time Book Excerpt: Part 2

Six Degrees of Separation

People have been networking with each other since the very beginning of time.  Before reading and writing was common, the only way to spread word about someone’s credibility was through personal references.  You would know the quality of someone’s work because of the network of people he or she had who would say they did a good job.

In the late 19th century and early 20th century, philosophers and mathematicians began to get more curious about the human network.  They noticed that, on average, any person on earth could be connected to another person anywhere else on earth by only five other people.  This is known as the Six Degrees of Separation, or the Human Web.

The idea originated from Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, although it did not become popular until a 1990 play by American writer John Guare titled Six Degrees of Separation, which later became a movie.

Scientific Experiments on the Six Degrees of Separation

The idea behind the six degrees of separation has been tried and tested numerous times.  Psychologist Stanley Milgram’s Small World Experiment highlighted just how few connections must be made in many cases, illustrating how most Americans in the late 20th century could be connected by just three degrees of separation.  The Small World Experiment is probably the most well-known experiment about the six degrees of separation.

In the experiment, Stanley Milgram led a team of researchers to look at how long most social networks were for people in the United States.  They wanted to find out how many connections it would take for any two people to meet.  The results of the Small World Problem were reported in the May 1967 issue of Psychology Today, so the research actually dates to almost 50 years after Carnegie’s death.  Milgram started his experiment because many mathematicians and thinkers were beginning to see that the world was becoming very interconnected.

Researchers selected people in either Omaha, Nebraska, or Wichita, Kansas to be the first people in the networks they looked at.  They then looked for connections with people in Boston, Massachusetts, half a country away.  Of course, comparing Nebraska and Kansas with Boston was like comparing apples to oranges.  People who live in Nebraska and Kansas are country-dwellers, while Boston is a large, bustling metropolis.  The odds that people living in Nebraska or Kansas, especially back when the experiment was conducted, seemed to be very slim because of how different the populations were and still are today.

People were randomly selected to participate in the study, and they received information in the mail explaining what it was all about.  The information given to the people in either Nebraska or Kansas came with information about someone in Boston.  If the person knew the person described in the information on a first name basis, then the connection was made directly.  If not, which was more likely the case, then the person was told to forward the information to someone they knew who would be more likely to know the person in the information.

Participants signed their names on a sheet of paper to show that they had handled the information and taken part in the degrees of separation, which were then measured by the researchers to see how many connections it took to get from one seemingly unconnected person to another located somewhere else in the country.

While there were certainly some holes in this experiment, the results were still very interesting.  Many people refused to participate in the experiment by passing on the information and letters (sounds rather like the chain letters that were popular in the ‘80s and ‘90s, doesn’t it!).  But of those who did participate, the average number of people it took to connect a random person in Nebraska or Kansas with a random person in Boston was about 5 and a half.  They rounded that number up to six, giving us the six degrees of separation.

Of course, it should be noted that the average number was about six, and some connections took as many as nine or ten connections.  But what is also interesting about this experiment is that with one of the target people in the experiment, most of the connections included one particular person.  According to Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, Twenty-four of the 160 letters indicating a certain target person in Massachusetts reached him, and 16 of those 24 letters were given to him by the same person, a man identified in the study as Mr. Jacobs.  Whoever Mr. Jacobs was, he certainly knew a lot of people in order to connect all of them with the target subject.  This study shows that it really does take just one key person in your network to make connections with people around the world.

Later computer models also seemed to show how few connections are needed around the world.  A 2001 email study by Duncan Watts at Columbia University found that the average number of connections needed between any two people on earth was six, although some connections did require as many as 10 people.

One of the most popular uses of the Six Degrees theory involves the popular game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” in which players can connect any other actor or actress to Kevin Bacon in fewer than six other people.  A connection is made in this network by the actors or actresses appearing in a film together.

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