This is the typical ‘cocktail party’ creative conversation. You find yourself alone at a reception; and another ‘alone’ person is next to you. You two do not know each other; but, being stuck together in the same space creates an obligation to chat. One way in which two strangers make conversation is – via a series of polite but exploratory questions – to scope, probe and tease out a ‘third person’ that they both know.
This behaviour can happen anywhere. However, in a small-scale environment, with a limited population, one can be assured of two things: (1) most people will know each other directly; and (2) for those who do not know each other directly, they are confident that they will have various ‘third persons’ that will be known to both of them. And it is easy and quick to find out who these are. It is just a matter of time, usually a few seconds, before a sequence of questions between A and B – what is your name; where are you from; which school did you attend; where do you work – leads naturally to the suggestion: ‘do you know C?’ and which is met by a favourable reply. The choice of ‘C’ is critical because it is illustrative of the social standing of both A and B.
These insights, and the judgements that people make about each other via third persons, lead to a better understanding of social networks.
For those who know each other directly, they benefit from zero degrees of separation. For those who do not, but hail from small social systems, then the likelihood is that they are just one degree of separation away, with at least one (probably more) acquaintance known to both of them.
These observations are self-evident to citizens of small-scale (often island) societies; not so much to those from larger settings, where the concept of a complete stranger is real and possible. Additionally, given the intense personalisation and the need for the “management of intimacy” (Lowenthal, 1987) in small state settings, it is to be expected that most individuals in such societies will seek to build direct relationships with ‘those who matter’, including those in the highest office: nothing but ‘zero degrees of separation’ would suffice. Such relationships, leading potentially to cosy liaisons, would be expected by the politico-economic elites and their lobby groups in large countries; in small (including island) democratic societies, they can materialise amongst a significant segment of the broad population.
Hence the realisation that people in small-scale societies are, at best, zero degrees of separation away from each other; and, at most, one degree of separation away from each other. In plainer language: everyone would ideally know everyone else; but, where this is not the case, everyone may yet know someone who does know everyone else. This is documented in the work of anthropologist Joseph Barnes and his fieldwork on the island of Bremnes, Norway, in the 1950s (Barnes, 1954). At the time of his research, the population of Bremnes was 4,600.
It has been argued that all the living people on planet Earth are separated from each other by six degrees of separation, at most (Smith, 2008). With the arrival of social media platforms in recent years, social distance on average has fallen to less than four degrees of separation: a mean of 3.74 for Facebook users (Backstrom et al., 2012); and a mean of 3.43 for Twitterati (Bakhshandeh, et al., 2011).
The “small world problem” is described by Milgram (1967, p. 61) in the following episode:
Fred Jones of Peoria, sitting in a sidewalk cafe in Tunis, and needing a light for his cigarette, asks the man at the next table for a match. They fall into conversation; the stranger is an Englishman who, it turns out, spent several months in Detroit studying the operation of an interchangeable-bottlecap-factory. “I know it’s a foolish question,” says Jones, “but did you ever by any chance run into a fellow named Ben Arkadian? He’s an old friend of mine, manages a chain of supermarkets in Detroit…”
“Arkadian, Arkadian,” the Englishman mutters. “Why, upon my soul, I believe I do! Small chap, very energetic, raised merry hell with the factory over a shipment of defective bottlecaps.”
“No kidding!” Jones exclaims in amazement.
“Good lord, it’s a small world, isn’t it?”.
Milgram (1967, p. 65) went on to report that, from his research, “chains varied from two to ten intermediate acquaintances, with the median at five”. Any person appeared to be able to reach another person with an average of six jumps: the empirical basis for the phrase ‘six degrees of separation’. The frequency, nature and likelihood of knowing others and reaching out, however, are impacted an compromised by aspects of social and economic capital, such as education, wealth and social class (Kleinfeld, 2002).
Early evidence of the idea behind the notion of degrees of separation is a game recorded in a 1929 short story by a Hungarian author (Karinthy, 1929). A play (Guare, 1990) explores the existential premise that every person in the world is connected to every other person by a chain of no more than six acquaintances. Thus: ‘six degrees of separation’. An American comedy-drama film with the same name, directed by Fred Schepisi, and inspired by the same play, was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1993.
Backstrom, L., Boldi, P., Rosa, M., Ugander, J., & Vigna, S. (2012, June). Four degrees of separation. In Proceedings of the fourth Annual ACM Web Science Conference (pp. 33-42). Retrieved from: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2380718.2380723
Bakhshandeh, R., Samadi, M., Azimifar, Z., & Schaeffer, J. (2011, July). Degrees of separation in social networks. In Fourth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search (pp. 18-23). Retrieved from: https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SOCS/SOCS11/paper/download/4031/4352
Barnes, J. A. (1954). Class and committees in a Norwegian island parish. Human Relations, 7(1), 39-58.
Guare, J. (1990). Six degrees of separation: A play. New York: Vintage.
Karinthy, F. (1929). Chain Links. In: Everything is different. Retrieved from: http://vadeker.net/articles/Karinthy-Chain-Links_1929.pdf
Kleinfeld, J. (2002). Could it be a big world after all? The six degrees of separation myth. Society, 12, 5-2. Retrieved from: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/courses/BIB/big-world.htm
Lowenthal, D. (1987). Social features. In C. Clarke & T. Payne (Eds.), Politics, security and development in small states (pp. 26-49). London: Allen & Unwin.
Milgram, S. (1967). The small-world problem. Psychology Today, 1(1), 61-67.
Smith, D. (2008, August 3). Proof! Just six degrees of separation between us. The Guardian (UK). Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/aug/03/internet.email
Filmography
Six Degrees of Separation (1993). Produced by Fred Schepisi. Trailer at: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi3416524057?playlistId=tt0108149&ref_=tt_pr_ov_vi and at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBO1Sr14eQQ
.