Of those letter chains that were complete, the average number of degrees of separation was 6.2. Only 64 of the letters reached the stockbroker. In a 1969 study, researchers Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers asked 296 people in Nebraska and Boston to send a letter through acquaintances to a Boston stockbroker. But it's a concept that has sort of hung around in the zeitgeist.'Īttempts to prove the theory stretch back further and keep coming up with six or thereabouts. He said: 'I thought it was definitely going to go the way of eight-track cassettes and pet rocks. Bacon thought the joke would die out, but when it didn't he launched a website,, bringing together people interested in helping good causes. Then in 1994 students at Pennsylvania's Albright College invented the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which the challenge was to connect every film actor to Bacon in six cast lists or fewer. I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.' I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close.
The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. One of the characters says: 'I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. The concept was popularised by John Guare's 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation, which was turned into a film starring Will Smith, Stockard Channing, Donald Sutherland and Ian McKellen. You are one degree away from everyone you know, two degrees away from everyone they know, and so on. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore.'Ī 'degree of separation' is a measure of social distance between people. People have had this suspicion that we are really close. What we're seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity. Horvitz told the Post: 'To me, it was pretty shocking.
The researchers wrote: 'Via the lens provided on the world by Messenger, we find that there are about "seven degrees of separation" among people.' But some were separated by as many as 29 steps. They found that the average length was 6.6 hops, and that 78 per cent of the pairs could be connected in seven steps or fewer. They looked at the minimum chain lengths it would take to connect 180 billion different pairs of users in the database. The database covered all the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, equivalent to roughly half the world's instant-messaging traffic at that time.Įric Horvitz and fellow researcher Jure Leskovec considered two people to be acquaintances if they had sent one another a message. This was 'the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available,' they observed. Researchers at Microsoft studied records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people in various countries, according to the Washington Post. The news will come as no surprise to film buffs who for years have been playing the parlour game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which they link other actors to Bacon in six films or fewer. In other words, putting fractions to one side, you are linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances to Madonna, the Dalai Lama and the Queen. By studying billions of electronic messages, they worked out that any two strangers are, on average, distanced by precisely 6.6 degrees of separation. The theory of six degrees of separation contends that, because we are all linked by chains of acquaintance, you are just six introductions away from any other person on the planet.īut yesterday researchers announced the theory was right - nearly.
In a world of 6.6 billion people, it does seem hard to believe.