by Jean Sumner

Created on: February 20, 2008

The well-known phrase "six degrees of separation" refers to the idea that it takes, on average, six steps or fewer to bridge the gap between any two people on earth (1). But can each of us really be connected by only six other people to our first-grade crush, a sherpa in the Himalayas, or our favorite celebrity? Is the notion of six degrees' a pop-culture myth, or the real deal?

THE BIRTH OF "SIX DEGREES"
"Six degrees of separation" is a common household phrase that has spread like wildfire over the past twenty years (1). The concept has been repeatedly used in recent television shows (ABC's and Lonely Planet's Six Degrees', Lost') movies (Babel', the L-Word', My Date with Drew') games (Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Game'), and the Internet (eg. Facebook).

The concept as we know it today was born In 1967, with Psychologist Stanley Milgram (2). In Milgram's research, he devised a method for studying the "small world" effect inspired by the work of social scientists de Sola Pool and Kochen, who dedicated much of their research (unsuccessfully) in the 50's to finding an equation to represent the interconnectedness of society (2). By tasking participants in one U.S. city to sending a packet to a particular stranger in a different part of the country using only acquaintances they knew on a first-name basis, he reported that "chains varied from two to 10 intermediate acquaintances, with the median at five" (3, p. 65). Thus, it took an average of six people to reach the target stranger, the empirical basis for the famous phrase "six degrees of separation." (3). The first popular use of Milgram's study didn't occur until the 1993 play Six Degrees of Separation' by John Guare, followed by a popularity explosion with the 1993 movie starring Will Smith, Stockyard Channing, and Donald Sutherland (1).

WHY DOES IT SEEM SO REAL?
Most of us have experienced just how real the phenomenon of six degrees' can be. Many of us have been surprised to find that when playing the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Game" connecting actors to another actor by no more than six other people is usually quite effortless. A Facebook platform application named "Six Degrees" recently developed by Londoner Karl Bunyan calculates the degrees of separation between different people. As of January 2008, it had almost 12 million people in the database with an average separation for all users of 6.38 degrees (5).

But delving further into such evidence ultimately shows the data to be lacking. While it is true that we

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