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The small world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. more...

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The research was groundbreaking in that it revealed that human society is a small world type network characterized by shorter-than-expected path lengths. The experiments are often associated with the phrase \"six degrees of separation\", although Milgram did not use this term himself.

Historical context of the small world problem

It is very likely that Guglielmo Marconi's conjectures based on his radio work in the early 20th century, articulated in his 1909 Nobel Prize address, inspired a Hungarian author, Frigyes Karinthy, to write, among many things, a challenge to find another person through which he could not be connected to by at most five people. This is perhaps the earliest reference to the concept of six degrees of separation, and the search for an answer to the small world problem.

Mathematician Manfred Kochen and political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool wrote a mathematical manuscript, Contacts and Influences, while working at the University of Paris in the early 1950s, during a time when Milgram visited and collaborated in their research. Their unpublished manuscript circulated among academics for over 20 years before publication in 1978. It formally articulated the mechanics of social networks, and explored the mathematical consequences of these (including the degree of connectedness). The manuscript left many significant questions about networks unresolved, and one of these was the number of degrees of separation in actual social networks.

Milgram took up the challenge on his return from Paris, leading to the experiments reported in \"The Small World Problem\" in the popular science journal Psychology Today, with a more rigorous version of the paper appearing in Sociometry two years later. The Psychology Today article generated enormous publicity for the experiments, which are well known today, long after much of the formative work has been forgotten.

Milgram's experiment was conceived in an era when a number of independent threads were converging on the idea that the world is becoming increasingly interconnected. Michael Gurevich had conducted seminal work in his empirical study of the structure of social networks in his MIT PhD dissertation under Ithiel de Sola Pool. Mathematician Manfred Kochen, an Austrian who had been involved in Statist urban design, extrapolated these empirical results in a mathematical manuscript, Contacts and Influences, concluding that in an American-sized population without social structure, that \"it is practically certain that any two individuals can contact one another by means of at least two intermediaries. In a structured population it is less likely but still seems probable. And perhaps for the whole world's population, probably only one more bridging individual should be needed.\" They subsequently constructed Monte Carlo simulations based on Gurevich's data, which recognized that both weak and strong acquaintance links are needed to model social structure. The simulations, running on the primitive computers of 1973, were limited, but still were able to predict that a more realistic three degrees of separation existed across the U.S. population, a value that foreshadowed the findings of Milgrim.