Science. It is often said that the world is getting smaller and smaller thanks to new technologies and that it will be possible to communicate with anyone, with just a few mediums. Is the thing right, I wonder rumor detector.
The origin of the rumor
The idea that anyone on the planet could be reached in just a few steps was first hinted at in 1929 in the short story chains Hungarian writer Frigis Karinthe. The narrator announces that the Earth is getting smaller and smaller, and then a character bets that he can create a bond between two randomly selected people using no more than five mediums. The concept was still popular 60 years later, to the point that it inspired the play Six degrees of separation John Gower, who was Brought to the screen in 1993.
Can it be mathematically proven??
Many scientists have tried to prove this concept, including Stanley Milgram, the famous American psychologist Experience of subjugation. In an article published in 1967 in the popular magazine Psychology Todaysummarize the question as: If two people do not know each other personally, how many intermediaries would be necessary to establish contact?
Since the end of the fifties, Researchers from MIT and IBM Try to solve this question with a mathematical approach. Assuming the average individual has about 500 acquaintances, they estimated that there is only a 1 in 200,000 chance that both Americans will know each other. However, according to the odds, there will be a chance in two that we will be able to connect them thanks to only two mediums.
However, this model is not perfect. for example, milligram He noted that most of a person’s friend’s 500 acquaintances are likely already among that person’s acquaintances. In addition, the mathematical model does not take into account the social barriers that could exist, he adds in a second Article published in 1970.
What about real life?
Milgram and his assistant Jeffrey Travers Try to solve the problem In trials conducted in Kansas, Nebraska and Los Angeles. The principle is always the same. A person is randomly selected from another city in the country and a group of people is asked to submit a document to him. If they don’t know him personally, they should send it to psychics who are part of their acquaintance.
Thus Milgram and Travers measured the number of mediators necessary to succeed in the challenge. The length of the chains that reached their destination ranged from 2 to 10 brokers. However, on average, 5 to 6 people were enough to communicate with 2 people.
What about the emergence of electronic communications? in 2003, Duncan WattsAn American sociologist hired by Microsoft conducted a similar experiment, this time using emails. More than 98,000 participants had to email one of 18 target people selected in 13 different countries. He estimated that it was possible to reach the target person in 5 to 7 steps. The experiment was repeated in 2007 with more than 85,000 people from 163 countries.
social barriers
However, these results have been criticized, in particular by Judith S. Kleinfeld, Professor of Psychology at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. She notes that little is said about the very low success rate of these trials.
In fact, in one carried out in Kansas, only 3 out of 60 documents reached the target person. In the Nebraska study, only 64 of the 217 series reached the recipient: only a 29% success rate. In the case of the trial conducted in Los Angeles, this rate drops to 22%. In Watts’ experiment with emails, the success rate was even lower, ranging from 0.1% to 0.5%.
According to Milgram, the main reasons for these failures were that some brokers were not interested in the project or did not know who to send the document to. However, already in 1967, he recognized that social structures constitute a great obstacle to the principle of the six degrees of separation. There will be barriers that mean the two-person communication networks will never cross. In addition to the fact that it will be difficult to reach people who live in very isolated communities.
As Watts wrote in 2003, although some people have managed to find strategies for establishing contacts with strangers, in most cases there is no simple path: This is evidenced by the break in chains.
The effect of social networks
Therefore, the experiments conducted by Milgram and Watts do not make it possible to determine the true connections between people, because the outcome depends in part on the motivation and resourcefulness of the participants. Researchers have overcome this obstacle thanks to social networks.
In 2008, scientists used Microsoft instant messaging system To study communications between users. They analyzed a sample of 1,000 people from a community of 240 million users for a period of one month. They calculated that the average distance between two users was 6.6 jumps, or 5.6 medians.
However, this calculation was made from users who communicated with other users during the duration of the trial. So links between inactive users during this period were not considered.
The Facebook team deemed it appropriate to do so Similar experience In 2011 its users, who numbered 721 million people, or 10% of the world’s population. They calculated that in 92% of the cases, the individuals were within 5 or fewer medians of each other. The average distance between users was 4.74 jumps, which is an intermediate 3.74.
Rule
It is indeed possible to connect two people who do not know each other, thanks to a limited number of mediums. Social networks may have reduced the number of people separating us. However, many personal or social factors make these pathways difficult to detect or predict.
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