Unless you've been holed up in your hut in Idaho for the last thirty years, slowly working your way through your stockpiles of canned goods and ammunition, you've undoubtedly heard of the famous 1967 experiment by Stanley Milgram in which he handed envelopes to a bunch of people with a name and address on them. The object was to get that envelope to the target by passing them on to someone they knew personally who seemed likely to be closer to that person, and asking them to do the same, attempting to advance the envelope with each connection. Milgram's finding that it took an average of six people to reach the target is the basis for the famous "Six degrees of separation" theory that later turned into an award-winning play and movie.
It seems, however, that the experiment was not quite as decisive as you might have thought:
When Kleinfeld began sifting through Milgram’s original data at Yale, she was surprised to find how much that data seemed to conflict with what Milgram had reported. Only 3 of the 60 envelopes in the original study had reached the divinity student’s wife—a completion rate of just 5 percent. The second study reported a completion rate of only 29 percent. Moreover, Milgram recruited subjects for two of his studies by buying mailing lists, which tend to be biased in favor of high-income people with high numbers of connections. Other sociological work has shown that low-income people are generally able to reach other individuals with low incomes, but not those with high incomes.
But how most of those chains failed may be even more interesting than how the minority succeeded:
In 2003 Watts published the results of an e-mail version he did of Milgram’s experiment. He set up a Web page and recruited 18 targets in 13 countries. In the end, 61,168 starters signed on, and 24,163 chains were begun. Of those, only 384 were completed. Those who finished their chains did so within slightly more than four links, on average. Watts, unlike Milgram, included a survey with his study, and one of the questions asked people who hadn’t finished to give the reason why. Less than one-half of 1 percent of respondents said they had failed to pass the e-mail on because they didn’t know who to send it to. Watts believes the majority failed because of other problems, such as e-mail spam blocks that diverted their requests. Other times, he suspects, chains failed because the people who received an e-mail weren’t as interested in continuing the chain as the people who’d started it.
Lack of interest, Watts says, points to the underlying complexity of networking. The question is not just whether we are closely connected, but how we navigate those connections—and whether we choose to do so at all. “People can find these paths as long as they’re motivated to do so and able to motivate people to help them,” he says. “But no matter how motivated you are, you have to be able to motivate the other person, who can put you in touch with the next person, and the next person has to do it too.”
Is one lesson here that we have become more resistant to chain letters since 1967? In which case, all I can say is "yay, people! Break those chains of love!"
Part of the problem with any experimentation on this is always going to be the method of communication. If we go solely by who we know and who would talk to us if we could reach them, I think that it's actually less than 6 degrees of separation. At least for me, and I don't think I'm a special case.
For instance, I think I am only 3 degrees away from President Bush. I know a Marine General (retired) who knows Marine General Peter Pace (also retired, but former Chairman of JCS) who obviously knows President Bush.
Low income people probably have to use up one degree of separation just to get to someone who has wider contacts, so if we postulate that there is an upper tier of people who have wide contacts, and that the folks in this upper tier are only 5 degrees of separation from anyone else, then even low income people are no more than 6 degrees of separation from anyone else.
I wonder how many degrees of separation there are between me and someone (anyone) in a foreign country? My guess is between 8 and 10.
The fact that the letters failed to reach their destination due mostly technical glitches or lack of interest seems obvious to me, not interesting.
I just signed up for LinkedIn and am finding it interesting how the connections go. I keep running into people who I knew from one place who end up being connected to me through contacts at another, entirely unrelated place.
And LinkedIn is like FaceBook for grownups... BTW, Megan, you need to update (and consolidate) your profile.
They just didn't design the experiment well.
I would suggest this change: A cash prize, say $100 to be divided evenly between each emailer who participates in a successful return.
The beauty of this is that people early in the chain will have a lot of incentive to try and pick wisely since that will help there to be fewer links and thus a larger share of the prize. Also, this will motivate people all along the chain.
dbp
The concept of degrees of separation is quite valid. It's a measure of interconnectedness between the members of set. There are well defined mathematical models that have been developed. Does it apply to people? You bet it does. The thing to realize is that there is not one magic number as Six degrees seems to imply. The number is an average and will depend on the group being studied and also the type of connections that are allowed. The number is also directly proportional to the size of the group. For instance it will be large if the group is the entire planet and smaller if the group is the member of a church or country club.
One well studied set is the group of actors and actresses in Hollywood. It turns out that the average degrees of separation between any two actors in Hollywood is less than 3 if we define a connection as a movie or a romantic relationship. The website http://www.ubulu.com shows the degrees of separation between any two actors in hollywood. After a few tries it becomes quite clear that it's difficult to find two actors who are not connected in at least 2 steps.