Six degrees of separation
Frigyes Karinthy, Hungarian writer proposed the theory named as Six degrees of separation. The degree of separation stands for “measure of social distance” between people. According to the theory, “every person in the world is separated by six links from every other person” although it’s hard to believe.
To prove this theory many experiments were conducted out of which an experiment is quoted here. In this experiment, participants were assigned random people to whom they have to send packages but certain conditions were kept that these participants cannot send packages directly to the end person they have to send packages to someone they know also they must be connected by creating a human chain. Now you may think that the chain would include hundreds of intermediaries but the outcome was totally different i.e. the average number of intermediaries was six, proving six degrees of separation theory.
Even to check the feasibility of the theory we conducted an experiment amongst the students of National Institute of Agricultural Marketing Jaipur, Rajasthan wherein they were asked: “how many people do they require in order to reach out the President of USA.”. Different linkages were told by the students such as one of the student said that he will contact BDO who can contact MLA and MLA can approach CM of state who further can contact PM of India ultimately who can directly contact President of USA. So, hereby we could conclude that only five intermediaries were enough to reach out the President of USA.
This theory can also be applied in today’s social media platforms in form of suggestions i.e. “Connections” and “People You May Know”. Studies conducted using Twitter and Facebook conducted to prove that average human connection is even less than six degrees of separation. In 2011, a new technique was introduced to provide the optimal solution by application of the algorithm, which gave an average degree of separation of 3.43 between two Twitter users.
According to the experiments conducted till now, it seems that the collective degree of separation is shrinking which gives us an inference that the world is more closely connected than we may think.
By
Aayushi Shivhare
