Connected by Six Degrees: Exploring the Interconnectedness of Human Society

The term ‘six degrees of separation’ refers to the idea that any two people in the world can be connected to each other through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than six intermediaries, or “degrees,” between them.

The concept was first proposed by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a 1929 short story called “Chains,” in which he described a game where people tried to connect any person to any other person through a chain of mutual acquaintances.

In the 1960s, the sociologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to test the theory, where participants were given a target person and asked to send a letter to someone they knew who might be able to forward it on to someone else, and so on until the letter reached the target person. The results showed that the average number of intermediaries in the chain was around six.

The idea has since been popularized in popular culture, such as the 1993 film “Six Degrees of Separation,” and is often used to illustrate the interconnectedness of human society and the ease with which people can be linked together through social networks.