Playwright John Guare popularized the phrase when he chose it as the title for his 1990 play. Milgram's findings were published in Psychology Today, and his findings inspired the phrase six degrees of separation. Almost all the chains were less than six steps. That person would do the same, and so on, until it was delivered to the target himself/herself.Īlthough the participants expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, 80% of the successfully delivered packages were delivered after four or fewer steps. They were instructed to send the card to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. The senders knew the recipient's name, occupation, and general location. He randomly selected people from various places in the United States to send postcards to one of two targets: one in Massachusetts and one in the American Midwest. In 1967, American social psychologist Stanley Milgram (see Small world phenomenon) devised a new way to test the hypothesis, which he called 'the small-world problem'.

links?), after twenty years they were still unable to solve the problem to their own satisfaction. Although they were able to phrase the question (given a set of people, what is the probability that each member of is connected to another member via. In the 1950s, Ithiel de Sola Pool ( MIT) and Manfred Kochen ( IBM) set out to prove the theory mathematically. In this special case of a dictionary, it is sometimes called the six links rule. For example, 'see also' links in a dictionary entry may point the reader to other entries in the same dictionary after following only six such links, the reader could potentially get to any word in the dictionary that has a link to it. The concept is based on the idea that the number of acquaintances grows exponentially with the number of links in the chain, and so only a small number of links is required for the set of acquaintances to become the whole human population.īy extension, the same term is often used to describe any other setting in which some form of link exists between individual entities in a large set. The hypothesis was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Karinthy Frigyes in a short story called Chains. Six degrees of separation is the hypothesis that anyone on Earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances with no more than five intermediaries.

Kevin bacon degrees of separation