Try to recall a time when you were in a crowded intersection or a busy airport far from home. It’s possible that the person sitting next to you was a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend.
Have you ever heard the six degrees of separation? It’s the idea that everyone is on average six steps away from any other person on Earth. Friend of a friend statements can be used to connect any two people through six steps. The original six degrees of separation finding, published in 1967 by psychologist Stanley Milgram, was determined from a sample size of 296 volunteers who were asked to send postcards to a specific person in a Boston suburb.
New research from scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan has found that the average number of acquaintances separating any two individuals in the world is now 4.74. This new finding used a slightly larger cohort: 721 million Facebook users (more than one-tenth of the world’s population). The researchers used a set of rules to calculate the average distance between two people by computing a vast number of sample paths among Facebook users.
The power of social networks has undeniably grown in the past decade. This recent experiment reveals that the average number of links from one randomly selected person to another is 4.74. In the United States, where more than half of people over the age of 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37.
A question we must consider is the definition of a friend. Consider you list of friends on Facebook. How many of them do you actually count as your close friends? The weak ties between individuals might be what is making the world so small. In 2008, a study conducted by Microsoft used a more conservative definition of friend, and found an average chain of 6.6 people within a group of 240 million.
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