Unlocking the Mystery of Six Degrees of Separation

You may be familiar with the “six degrees of separation” concept, which involves linking people through shared acquaintances. Interestingly, this isn’t just a casual game but an actual phenomenon supported by research from various countries.

The core idea of “six degrees of separation” suggests that any two people on Earth can be linked through a chain of mutual acquaintances in no more than six connections.

This allows for the establishment of a connection between them by tracing a series of “a friend of a friend” relationships.

One of the most well-known applications of this theory is the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” where the objective is to connect any actor to Kevin Bacon within no more than six connections. Actors are considered connected if they have appeared together in a movie or commercial.

The Experiment That Started It All

In 1929, Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy introduced the concept of six degrees of separation, suggesting that people are connected by, on average, six intermediaries.

This concept was revived in 1967, when a Harvard professor named Stanley Milgram distributed 300 packages across the United States, asking people to pass them on to a specific person.

What he found was astonishing: it usually took just six handshakes for the package to reach its target.

Since then, similar studies have shown that, on average, you can connect any two people through six connections or fewer, whether it’s on Facebook, through email, in the world of actors, or among scientists.

The Balancing Act

Researchers from Israel, Spain, Italy, Russia, Slovenia, and Chile published a paper in Physical Review X that sheds light on the mechanism underlying this phenomenon.

So, why does this happen? It all boils down to how we humans behave and how we balance the effort of making new friends with the benefits.

Think of it this way: making friends takes work and keeping them can cost time and energy. But we all want to be in the center of our social circles, right?

How It Works

In this “social game,” people make decisions.

They ask themselves if making new friends or sticking with old ones is better for their reputation and influence in the group.

They consider the costs and benefits.

The Magic Number Six

When this game reaches a point where changing connections doesn’t help anyone anymore, it reaches what experts call “Nash equilibrium.”

At this point, the network naturally ends up with the six degrees of separation rule.

Per phys.org:

“As a result, the research shows, social networks, whether on or offline, are a dynamic beehive of individuals constantly playing the cost-benefit game, severing connections on the one hand, and establishing new ones on the other. It’s a constant buzz driven by the ambition for social centrality. At the end, when this tug-of-war reaches an equilibrium, all individuals have secured their position in the network, a position that best balances between their drive for prominence and their limited budget for new friendships.”

That means you can connect any two people in the group through six connections or fewer.

Mystery solved!

“When we did the math, we discovered an amazing result: this process always ends with social paths centered around the number six. Each individual acts independently without knowing the network as a whole, yet this self-driven game shapes the structure of the entire network, leading to the small world phenomenon and the recurring pattern of six degrees,” lead author Baruch Barzel, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, explains in a statement.

Why It Matters

Understanding how this works isn’t just fascinating; it has real-world applications.

It can help us design better social platforms, improve transportation systems, and even predict how diseases might spread, like we saw with COVID-19.

In a Nutshell

This study gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of human social networks and the math that shapes our connected world.

Furthermore, it demonstrates how interconnected our world has become as a result of the magic of six degrees.

Sources:

https://mathcenter.oxford.emory.edu/site/cs171/sixDegreesOfSeparation/

https://studyfinds.org/six-degrees-of-separation-math/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/six-degrees-of-separation-theory-has-been-confirmed-by-experts/ar-AA1gw4bs#image=1

https://neurosciencenews.com/six-degrees-social-connectedness-23530/

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A version of this story originally appeared on Medium.