An Aside: The Origin of Six Degrees of Separation

Whenever you talk about networking, the phrase six degrees of separation always comes up. Have you ever wondered where it comes from? Wonder no more, as Jhemon Lee gives you the scoop.

Whenever you talk about networking, the phrase six degrees of separation always comes up. Have you ever wondered where it comes from? Why six? Why not four, or 20?

The general assumption is that six degrees of separation means that if you drew a line connecting each person to every other person that he or she knows, everyone in the world is linked to everyone else in the world by six degrees of separation. So my personal friends are one degree away from me, and my friends friends are two degrees from me, and my friends friends friends are three degrees away. You get the ideabut is it true?

Six Degrees of Separation perhaps received its biggest publicity boost by being the title of a Broadway play (and the movie based on the play, starring Will Smith, Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing). Spinoffs of the phrase, like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon word game, have further embedded the phrase into public consciousness. But if you look all the way back, it originates from a famous sociology study by Dr. Stanley Milgram.

Stanley Milgram was a professor of social psychology at Harvard, Yale and the City University of New York. In his best known experiment, he tested how average people respond to authority. Ordinary citizens of New Haven, Connecticut were brought individually into a room with the researchers. In another room was another person seated in an electric chair-type device, visible through a glass window. The experimenters instructed each test subject to press a button on command, which would deliver electric shocks to the person in the other room. Despite the person in the other room demonstrating pain from each shock, the test subjects were reassured by the researchers that the shocks were harmless, and 65% of the test subjects continued to press the button administering the shocks. Fortunately, the person in the other room was a trained actor who merely feigned the appearance of pain, but this study demonstrated the willingness of average people to inflict harm on others solely in response to authority. But it was one of Dr. Milgrams other experiments that leads to todays column topic.

In the first ever issue of Psychology Today in May 1967, Milgram published an article called The Small World Problem. He was intrigued by anecdotes of total strangers surprisingly having friends or colleagues in common.

Approximately 150 people each were chosen from Omaha, Nebraska, and Wichita, Kansas, and sent a document with the name and address of a specific target person in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If the recipient didnt know the target person on a first name basis, he or she was asked to forward the document on to a friend (known on a first name basis) that he or she felt would be most likely to know the target, and for that friend to do the same, until the document actually reached someone that knew the target (and was thus only one degree away from the target). Each persons name was kept on a roster in the document so that they wouldnt inadvertently forward the document to someone earlier in the chain (thereby forming a loop).

Of the documents that actually made it to the target person, the number of intermediate friends needed to deliver the document ranged from 2 to 10, with a median of 5. Five intermediate friends equals six links/degrees between the start and the finish, and thats where the phrase six degrees of separation comes from. Now you know!

However, less than 30 percent of the documents actually made it to the target person; the rest never made it through, likely due to a combination of participant apathy and dead ends (e.g. you dont know anyone that might have a chance of knowing the target). Followup studies that have tried to replicate the Small World study have had a similar failure rate, especially when trying to cross class and race boundaries.

Whats interesting then is that the study doesnt actually conclude that were all connected by six degrees. If anything, the study suggests that if were lucky, we may be connected to another person by an average of six degrees.

Does this mean that the world is a lot bigger than we thought it was? Maybe, but maybe not. The study was performed in 1967. Since then, the worlds population has grown 80%, from 3.5 billion to 6.3 billion. On the other hand, we live in a much more mobile society, a society thats more open to globalization and the crossing of social, racial and national boundaries. And the Internet has certainly made the world smaller by allowing us to meet seemingly random people from around the world, and to do a better job of keeping in touch with long distance acquaintances.

So we dont know for sure if were all connected by six degrees of separation we probably werent in 1967, but who knows? Maybe we are today?

Next Time: Do I Know You? Remembering Names

AsianConnections Team columnist Dr. Jhemon Lee is a past Chairman of the National Association of Asian American Professionals (NAAAP), and remains an active officer. Dr. Lee is actively involved in many community organizations and is a practising radiologist in Southern California. He received his undergraduate degree at Harvard and his medical degree from the University of Maryland. To contact Jhemon, please send email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..