Six Degrees of Urban Myth
Everyone is connected by six degrees of separation.
I like the sound of that. The phrase it’s a small world after all has been seared into my mind by singing robots at Disneyland. (Do you have that song stuck in your head now? Sorry.)
Six Degrees became a popular phrase after a play from John Guare called “Six Degrees of Separation” became a hit, but the idea has been floating around since 1967, when a social psychologist named Stanley Milgram wrote it up in the first issue of Psychology Today:
“Fred Jones of Peoria, sitting in a sidewalk cafe in Tunisia, and needing a light for his cigarette, asks the man at the next table for a match. They fall into conversation; the stranger is an Englishman who, it turns out, spent several months in Detroit. ‘I know it’s a foolish question; says Jones, ‘but do you by any chance know a fellow named Ben Arkadian? He’s an old friend of mine, manages a chain of supermarkets in Detroit…’”
Milgram never used the phrase six degrees of separation, but he believed his research proved that anyone in the United States was connected to everyone else by about 5.5 personal links. Kevin Bacon, an actor often believed to be connected to all other actors by six degrees, liked the idea and started a foundation to connect people to worthy causes.
“You’ve probably heard of the Six Degrees concept. Any one person (including me, Kevin Bacon) is connected to any other person through six or fewer relationships, because it’s a small world.”
-www.sixdegrees.org
Milgram did his experiment using the US Postal Service. He mailed folders to people he called “starters” and asked them to help him get the folder to a target person in a distant city. They would do this by mailing the folder to someone they knew who might in turn know the target person. Milgram reported that it took six jumps to get the folder to the right person. Amazing!
Amazing that is, until subsequent researchers like Judith Kleinfeld checked Milgram’s original notes and discovered that some of his other studies didn’t go so well.
Very few of his folders reached their targets. In his first, unpublished study, only three of 60 letters—5 percent—made it.
- Psychology Today
That hasn’t stopped Six Degrees. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an essay called Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg. Yahoo! scientist Duncan Watts is also working on Six Degrees with computer models. Watts did a version of the Milgrim experiments using emails instead of letters. As Fast Company reported, Watts used a Web site to recruit 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. It took six links to get the message to the target. That would seem to validate Milgram’s work, but not all researchers are convinced.
There is a powerful network linking us all, and maybe Milgram had the right idea – even though his research was flawed. I hope he did get the idea right – because eight degrees from Kevin Bacon just doesn’t sound as good.
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Lee,
Time for some cynicism: I think this concept is popular because it’s a reflection of the current New Age warm and fuzzy feelings that we are all interconnected (Eastern concepts one can only truly appreciate after spending years in a monastery meditating–I suspect). I doubt it will hold up to unbiased testing.
Bob
You’re right about the East-West differences, of course. Lynn McTaggart, in her blog, recently wrote about the work of psychologist Richard E. Nisbett, author of “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerns See Things Differently and Why.”
Discussing Nisbett, she says “We Westerners see the world as a big collection of individual things jostling around in empty space. We judge things only in relationship to themselves – their properties and the categories to which they belong. Eastern Asians, on the other hand, learn to understand things only in relation to other things. They see life only in relationship within a field of forces. They understand matter in the universe, not as discrete objects but as protean — continuous and interpenetrating… An East Asian is brought up with such a strong sense of connection to others that he can only understand himself in terms of his relation to the whole.”
Thanks for commenting!
Hmmm. I can accept that perhaps the original research was flawed but I’m personally convinced of the concept of how tightly we really are all linked. Actually, I’d argue we’re becoming more connected due to the growth of social networking tools. I’ve been amazed at the people that have found me that I haven’t spoken to in over 30 years, in just a few clicks on linked in or facebook. Linked-in itself provides some empirical evidence of the closenesss of the connections. Search for anyone and you find you’re only 3-4 connections away. Well, not anyone… but, it’s pretty impressive.
My experience in Asia would corroborate the view that most Asian folks would see this all differently, as you’ve described. I see that in the way business relationships are developed. I’d generalize and say the Asian sees more of a web of relationships all connected rather than a point to point view from the west.
Hey, cool banner photo too!
Thanks for commenting! I was going to mention LinkedIn, so thanks for bringing it up. Three or four connections away from anyone pretty much tells you about how connected we all are, at least in the business world and often socially, too.