In social physics, Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) was an American social psychologist noted for his 1967 “letter mailing” experiment, otherwise known as the small-world experiment, as part of his dissertation work at Harvard, wherein he found that people are connected socially on average by about six links distally from one another, hence the phrase ‘six degrees of separation’, aka seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. [1]
Facebook degrees of separation
In 2011, in followup to Milgram’s six degrees study, to assess the nature of the degrees of separation in the modern Internet/email connected era, the University of Milan assessed the relationships between 721 million active Facebook users, accounting for more than 10 percent of the world’s population, and found that people are connected by only “five hops”, or four degrees of separation: (Ѻ)
Quotes
The following are noted quotes:
“Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist.”
— Stanley Milgram (1974) (Ѻ)
“It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action.”
experimentalist.”
— Stanley Milgram (c.1970) (Ѻ)
References
1. (a) Gladwell, Malcom. (2000). The Tipping Point (pgs. 34-36). Little, Brown, and Co.
(b) Greene, Joshua. (2013). Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (pg. 37). Penguin.
(c) Small-world experiment – Wikipedia.
(d) Six degrees of separation – Wikipedia.
External links
● Stanley Milgram – Wikipedia.
