The world has become closer: any two people are now separated not by 6, but by 3.57 handshakes
For years, many of us believed in the theory of six handshakes . According to her, any two people on Earth are separated by no more than five levels of mutual friends (and, accordingly, six levels of connections).
The theory was based on experimental data from volunteers and analysis of e-mail messages. Now the company Facebook has published a new graph , which dramatically brings together humanity: it turns out that any two people are shared not by 6, but by 3.57 connections, on average.
The theory of six handshakes was launched in 1969 by American psychologists Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers. The proposed hypothesis was that each person is indirectly familiar with any other inhabitant of the planet through a chain of mutual friends, on average consisting of five people.
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Milgram relied on experimental data in two American cities. Residents of one city were given 300 envelopes, which had to be handed over to a certain person living in another city. Envelopes could be transferred only through their friends and relatives. 60 envelopes reached the Boston addressee. After making the calculations, Milgram determined that on average each envelope went through five people. Thus, the theory of the “six handshakes” was born.
Later, the theory was confirmed by other experiments, including Microsoft's analysis of emails of 242.7 million users.
Now Facebook has analyzed the social graph of all 1.59 billion active users and published a new result: each user can find any other, on average, through the 3.57 level of connections or “handshakes”. For residents in the United States, this figure is 3.46 handshakes.
It seems that thanks to social networks, humanity has become more crowded, so to speak: people have become closer to each other.
In more sociable people, this figure is even less. For example, Facebook executive director Mark Zuckerberg - 3.17, and operating director Cheryl Sandberg - 2.92. If you are registered on Facebook, then on this page the social network will try to calculate your degree of level of connections (for some reason, it could not do this for me).
The theory was based on experimental data from volunteers and analysis of e-mail messages. Now the company Facebook has published a new graph , which dramatically brings together humanity: it turns out that any two people are shared not by 6, but by 3.57 connections, on average.
The theory of six handshakes was launched in 1969 by American psychologists Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers. The proposed hypothesis was that each person is indirectly familiar with any other inhabitant of the planet through a chain of mutual friends, on average consisting of five people.
')
Milgram relied on experimental data in two American cities. Residents of one city were given 300 envelopes, which had to be handed over to a certain person living in another city. Envelopes could be transferred only through their friends and relatives. 60 envelopes reached the Boston addressee. After making the calculations, Milgram determined that on average each envelope went through five people. Thus, the theory of the “six handshakes” was born.
Later, the theory was confirmed by other experiments, including Microsoft's analysis of emails of 242.7 million users.
Now Facebook has analyzed the social graph of all 1.59 billion active users and published a new result: each user can find any other, on average, through the 3.57 level of connections or “handshakes”. For residents in the United States, this figure is 3.46 handshakes.
It seems that thanks to social networks, humanity has become more crowded, so to speak: people have become closer to each other.
In more sociable people, this figure is even less. For example, Facebook executive director Mark Zuckerberg - 3.17, and operating director Cheryl Sandberg - 2.92. If you are registered on Facebook, then on this page the social network will try to calculate your degree of level of connections (for some reason, it could not do this for me).
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/390169/
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