The original "six degrees of separation" experiment required people to know each other fairly well: They had to be on a first-name basis, at a time when society was slightly more formal, in order for the connection to count. Thirty-five percent of people have Facebook friends they've never met in person. The typical Facebook user has 155 friends, but only describes 50 of them as friends in real life, according to a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center. How people define a Facebook "friend" varies widely, so how connected you are presumably depends in part on how generous you are with your Facebook friendship. The 1967 experiment that proved "six degrees of separation" "Another one of these?" the stockbroker must have thought as the letters began to arrive.
Mark Zuckerberg is 3.17 degrees of separation from all Facebook users. The average Facebook user is three and a half degrees of separation away from every other user, and the social network's post tells you your own distance from everyone else on the site. The researchers found that the world is connected enough that six degrees of separation might be too many. But Facebook, because its users give it access to possibly the richest data set ever on how 1.6 billion people know and interact with each other, set out to prove it with a statistical algorithm.
The idea of "six degrees of separation" rests on a scientific foundation that's dubious at best. Pick a random stranger anywhere in the country, the theory goes, and chances are you can build a chain of acquaintances between the two of you in no more than six hops. Chances are you're a friend of a friend of a friend of Mark Zuckerberg - at least according to Facebook.Ī well-known theory holds that most people, at least in the US and perhaps in the world, are six degrees of separation away from each other.