Is our world really that small or the theory of six degrees of separation really exists?

We are all probably familiar with the theory of six degrees of separation which suggests that each person living in this world can be connected with other person through the chain of acquaintances that has no more than six intermediaries.

The theory of six degrees of separation was first explored by Stanley Milgram, an American sociologist, in 1967. He randomly selected 300 people who were instructed to send a letter to a stockbroker living in Boston. No one was familiar with the target person and knew his address. They were asked to send the letter to someone they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, among all their friends, to know the target personally and that friend in his turn was instructed to do the same, and the procedure continued until the letter was personally delivered to the target person.

In fact, very few of his letters (only 64) reached the target. Form the very beginning, participants thought that it would take at least a hundred intermediaries to accomplish the task, but on average it took only 5, 2 intermediaries to get each letter delivered to its destination. With the help of his study Milgram proved that we do live in a small world!

Milgram’s experiment increased the desire to learn more about the probability that two randomly selected people would know each other and since then there have been various studies which have tried to validate or on the contrary refuse the theory.

In 2011, the Facebook’s data team and the researchers of the University of Milan announced that 92% of people living in this world are connected with each other by only 5 intermediaries. Today, this number is 4.74 and this is closely connected with the increasing number of people using social networks. Let me explain.

Nowadays, there is hardly anyone who does not use Facebook and we all have at least one mutual friend with most Facebook users, which means that instead of 6 people, we can easily get in touch with any person via fewer intermediaries.

So, it possible to connect with any person living on this planet in case you use your connections properly and turn to right people for help.