Discover great deals on unqiue gifts for baseball fans with big saving!! Boston Red Rox, Chicago Cubs, New York Yankees and much more!

Small

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

Home

Baseball & Softball Items

Accessories

Apparel & Footwear

Balls

Bats

Batting Gloves

Large

Medium

Other

Small

Minors

Other

Philadelphia Phillies

World Series

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 term six degrees of separation, although Milgram did not use this term himself.

Historical context of the small world problem

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. Technological advances in the early 20th century 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.

Stanley Milgram re-visited this idea indirectly through a landmark set of experiments beginning in 1967 at Harvard University. Milgram was a renowned experimental social psychologist. Perhaps his most famous work is a study of obedience and authority, which is widely known as the Milgram Experiment. Milgram, however, like Karinthy, was also fascinated by the increasing interconnectedness among human beings. He thus sought to devise an experiment that could answer the small world problem. It is unclear whether Milgram was directly influenced by Karinthy's work, though it is remarkable how similar the two pieces are

The experiment

Milgram's experiment developed out of a desire to learn more about the probability that two randomly selected people would know each other . This is one way of looking at the small world problem. An alternative view of the problem is to imagine the population as a social network and attempt to find the average path length between any two nodes. Milgram's Experiment was designed to measure these path lengths by developing a procedure to count the number of ties between any two people.

Basic Procedure

Though the experiment went through several variations, Milgram typically chose individuals in the U.S. cities Omaha, Wichita, and Boston, to be the start and end points of a chain of correspondence. These cities were selected because they represented a great distance in the United States, both socially and geographically .; Information packets were initially sent to randomly selected individuals in Omaha or Wichita. They included letters, which detailed the study's purpose, and basic information about a target contact person in Boston. It additionally contained a roster on which they could write their own name, as well as business reply cards that were pre-addressed to Harvard.; Upon receiving the invitation to participate, the recipient was asked whether he or she personally knew the contact person described in the letter. If so, the person was to forward the letter directly to that person. For the purposes of this study, knowing someone "personally" is defined as knowing them on a first-name basis.; In the more likely case that the person did not personally know the target, then the person was to think of a friend or relative they know personally that is more likely to know the target. They were then directed to sign their name on the roster and forward the packet to that person. A postcard was also mailed to the researchers at Harvard so that they could track the chain's progression toward the target.; When and if the package eventually reached the contact person in Boston, the researchers could examine the roster to count the number of times it had been forwarded from person to person. Additionally, for packages that never reached the destination, the incoming postcards helped identify the break point in the chain.;