Six degrees of separation
The concept was originally set out in a 1929 short story by Frigyes Karinthy, in which a group of people play a game of trying to connect any person in the world to themselves by a chain of five others.
These[citation needed] conjectures were expanded in 1929 by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, who published a volume of short stories titled Everything Is Different.
The story investigated—in abstract, conceptual, and fictional terms—many of the problems that captivated future generations of mathematicians, sociologists, and physicists within the field of network theory.
[2][3] Technological advances in communications and travel enabled friendship networks to grow larger and span greater distances.
[citation needed] Michael Gurevich conducted seminal work in his empirical study of the structure of social networks in his 1961 Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD dissertation under Ithiel de Sola Pool.
They subsequently constructed Monte Carlo simulations based on Gurevich's data, which recognized that both weak and strong acquaintance links are needed to model social structure.
The simulations, carried out on the relatively limited computers of 1973, were nonetheless able to predict that a more realistic three degrees of separation existed across the U.S. population, foreshadowing the findings of American psychologist Stanley Milgram.
Kochen and de Sola Pool's manuscript, Contacts and Influences,[8] was conceived while both were working at the University of Paris in the early 1950s, during a time when Milgram visited and collaborated in their research.
Milgram took up the challenge on his return from Paris, leading to the experiments reported in The Small World Problem [9] in popular science journal Psychology Today, with a more rigorous version of the paper appearing in Sociometry two years later.
[10] Milgram's article made famous[9] his 1967 set of experiments to investigate de Sola Pool and Kochen's "small world problem."
Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, born in Warsaw, growing up in Poland then France, was aware of the Statist rule of thumb, and was also a colleague of de Sola Pool, Kochen and Milgram at the University of Paris during the early 1950s.
(Kochen brought Mandelbrot to work at the Institute for Advanced Study and later IBM in the U.S.) This circle of researchers was fascinated by the interconnectedness and "social capital" of human networks.
Milgram's study results showed that people in the United States seemed to be connected by approximately three friendship links, on average, without speculating on global linkages; he never actually used the term "six degrees of separation".
Their effort was named the Columbia Small World Project, and included 24,163 e-mail chains, aimed at 18 targets from 13 countries.
The authors cite "lack of interest" as the predominating factor in the high attrition rate,[Note 2] a finding consistent with earlier studies.
[14] However, detractors argue that Milgram's experiment did not demonstrate such a link,[15] and the "six degrees" claim has been decried as an "academic urban myth".
[13][16] In 2001, Duncan Watts, a professor at Columbia University, attempted to recreate Milgram's experiment on the Internet, using an e-mail message as the "package" that needed to be delivered, with 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries).
[17] A 2007 study by Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz examined a data set of instant messages composed of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people.
No longer limited strictly to academic or philosophical thinking, the notion of six degrees recently has become influential throughout popular culture.
"[citation needed] Following Guare's lead, many future television and film sources later incorporated the notion into their stories.
[32][33] The initial version of the application was built at a Facebook Developers Garage London hackathon with Mark Zuckerberg in attendance.
According to a 2010 study of 5.2 billion such relationships by social media monitoring firm Sysomos, the average distance on the service that year was 4.67.
Following six criteria, Scott Highhouse (Bowling Green State University professor and fellow of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology) was chosen as the target.
