First, it may be true the majority of most people who participate in the Small World Project are of the same social class, and some say it's easy to connect the searcher with the target if both are college educated or middle class.
Of the hundreds of chains that have been completed, Watts says the average number of links has been six, supporting the six degrees of separation theory.īut Watts admits there are built-in biases to his work. Some 60,000 people from 170 countries have taken part in the experiment. The hope is to eventually send an e-mail to someone who knows the target personally, completing the chain. They ask that person to continue the links by e-mailing someone else they know. But there's a catch - they can't just send an e-mail directly to the target, they must connect by creating a human chain.įirst, the participant e-mails someone they know. Their job is to link to this person via e-mail. In the experiment, each participant, or "searcher," is assigned a random "target," one of 18 people around the world. The Small World Project is carried out online. Watts himself has led one of the most significant experiments, Columbia's Small World Project. Everyone is connected in some way or another."Īs widespread as the notion of six degrees has become since it was hatched in the 1960s and has since become the subject of a play and movie, there has been very little effort to try to prove whether the hypothesis is true. "You may think that you're sort of locked away in your little part of the world," Watts said. Network Theory covers many subjects, including how people interact socially, how diseases spread, how people find jobs, and even how aspects of the World Wide Web operate. It's a Small World After Allįor a number of years, Watts has studied Network Theory, the scientific field that examines how networks form and how they work in society. With the help of Columbia University professor Duncan Watts, "Primetime" created a test that pitted real people against each other in a race to see who could connect themselves to a random third individual the fastest, and do it in an unusual way. "Primetime" resolved to find out by conducting a groundbreaking social experiment. The blog closed in September of 2017.See how "Primetime's" experiment played out on "Basic Instincts: The Human Chain" Wednesday, Dec.
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. Not everyone is impressed with Facebook using its own numbers to make assumptions about the general population.Ī sarcastic post in Gizmodo reads in part, "Facebook’s comparing it to the popular theory of six degrees of separation - presenting its user base and the general population as two groups that, hell, may as well be considered one in the same!"īrooke Fox is a student at University of Colorado at Boulder and a USA TODAY College digital producer. "Now, with twice as many people using the site, we've grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world," said Facebook. The world is getting smaller, at least according to Facebook, which on Thursday announced that among the 1.59 billion active Facebook users, each person is connected to every other person by an average of 3.57 people.īack in 2011, Facebook and researchers at Cornell and the Università degli Studi di Milano said they had punched a hole in the "six degrees of separation" theory when they computed the average across the 721 million people then using the site then, and found that it was 3.74.Īnd that number, it claimed, had shattered the (questionable) theory that everyone is separated by six degrees of separation.
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