Yahoo and Facebook test ‘six degrees of separation’ theory
A 21st century reworking of social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s famous 1967 small world experiment is to be conducted by Yahoo and Facebook.
The theory holds that every individual can trace a path of social connections to any other individual with a mere six steps.
To see if this holds any water a group of Facebook volunteers will be given the details of a “target” user whom they do not know.
Each user must attempt to send a message to that target by forwarding it to one of their own friends deemed most likely to be familiar with that specific individual.
Facebook’s chief data scientist Cameron Marlowe, said: “Facebook depends on its connectedness, and the fact that users are connected to each other and users are connected to brands, enables the diffusion of important messages, a big part of which is our advertising platform.”
Milgram’s original 1960s study, conducted with letters, found that US citizens were connected via an average of 5.5 fellow citizens.