Busted....

Ok , so the Times of India has tried to put a damper on one of my more favored fancies , Oh well!! I agree with the quality of links argument made in the article , but the fact that 95% of the letters weren’t sent out could be attributed to the fact that some people in the network were just too plain lazy to send them out!!!

Publication:Times Of India Mumbai; Date:Jul 18, 2006; Section:International; Page Number:13


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Can everyone in the world be connected in six steps?

One of the most famous claims is that anyone can reach anyone else through a chain of acquaintances no more than six people long. This idea, known as “six degrees of separation”, is a measure of our social networks.

The phrase was coined by an American academic, Stanley Milgram, after experiments in which he asked people to pass a letter only to others they knew by name. The aim was to get it, eventually, to a named person they did not know living in another city. The average number of times it was passed on, he said, was six. Hence, the six degrees of separation.

It is a seductive idea. Films have been made about it and mathematics has begun to propose theories for why it should be true. But is it?

Judith Kleinfeld, a professor psychology at Alaska Fairbanks University, went back to Milgram’s original research notes and found something surprising. It turned out, she told us, that 95% of the letters sent out had failed to reach the target. Not only did they fail to get there in six steps, they failed to get there at all. Milgram was a giant figure in his world of research, but here was evidence the claim he was famously associated with was not supported by his experiments. “I was shocked,” she said.

And when she looked for other studies, none of those matched up to the claim either. In the most recent, two years ago, only 3% of letters reached their target. “If 95 or 97 letters out of 100 never reached their target, would you say it was proof of six degrees of separation? So why do we want to believe this? The pleasing idea that we live in a ‘small world’ where people are connected by ‘six degrees of separation’ may be the academic equivalent of an urban myth,” she says.

Kleinfeld argues that what is more important is not the number of links, but the quality. Even if you were able to say you could get to the Queen in three steps, it would tell you little about how well you are really connected with her. We like the idea of six degrees of separation, she says, because it makes the world feel more intimate. THE BOTTOM LINE: The belief that it has been proved that we live in a world of six degrees of separation does not seem to be true.

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