And between them, there are six degrees!Įven Hollywood has its own version called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. We discovered I was a link between actresses Angelina Jolie and Elisha Cuthbert. Ok, admittedly I’m not a scientist, but we here at the show conducted our own investigation to test the six degrees of separation theory. However, researchers did find that the successful e-mails took an average of just five to seven steps to reach their targets. Over 60,000 participants created 24,000 e-mail chains, but less than 400 messages reached their marks. They asked participants across the globe to try to reach 18 people they had never met by sending e-mails through acquaintances. That’s when Columbia University researchers released the results of their "Small World Research Project” – an Internet version of Milgram’s experiment. One of the more recent attempts to prove we are closely connected was in 2003. He found that people, who successfully completed the task, did so with a chain of six or fewer connections. Milgram asked initial participants to mail a letter through friends, and then friends of friends, to a designated stranger living in Massachusetts. In the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s small world experiment confirmed that two strangers could be connected in six degrees.
Over the years, many attempts have been made to prove that mutual friends might connect two random people.