Six Degrees Of Separation
POST ROSSO - "CAREER OPPORTUNITIES"
Sapete come è nato il detto "Sei Gradi Di Separazione" (che peraltro ha ispirato un bel film di Fred Schepisi che mi sento di consigliare a tutti)? Ce lo racconta Malcolm Gladwell nell'articolo citato nel post precedente, e ci racconta anche di più: un post per comprendere ancora meglio l'importanza dei "brokers".
In the late sixties a Harvard social psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to find an answer to what is known as the small-world problem: how are human beings connected? Do we belong to separate worlds or are we all bound up together in a grand, interlocking web?
Milgram tested this question with a chain letter, he got the names of people at random in Omaha, Nebraska and he mailed each of them a packet with the address of a stockbroker who worked in Boston and lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. Each person was instructed to write his name on a roster and send it on to someone who would get it closer to the stockbroker.
Milgram found that most of the letters reached the stockbroker in five or six steps: it is from this experiment that we got the concept of six degrees of separation.
But that phrase is now so familiar that it is easy to lose sight of how surprising Milgram's finding was.
In another well-known study two psychologists asked people living in uptown Manhattan about their closest friend: almost ninety per cent of the friends lived in the same building, and half lived on the same floor. Proximity overpowered similarity, we're friends with the people we do things with, not necessarily with the people we resemble. More, we don't seek out friends, we simply associate with the people who occupy the same physical places that we do.
Back to Milgram's then. People in Omaha are not, as a rule, friends with people in Massachusetts so how did the packets get halfway across the country in just five steps? The explanation is that in the six degrees of separation not all degrees are equal, many of the chains reaching to Sharon followed the same asymmetrical pattern, half of the packets passed through the hands of 3 people: Jacobs, Jones and Brown.
Six degrees of separation means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those few.
Sapete come è nato il detto "Sei Gradi Di Separazione" (che peraltro ha ispirato un bel film di Fred Schepisi che mi sento di consigliare a tutti)? Ce lo racconta Malcolm Gladwell nell'articolo citato nel post precedente, e ci racconta anche di più: un post per comprendere ancora meglio l'importanza dei "brokers".
In the late sixties a Harvard social psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to find an answer to what is known as the small-world problem: how are human beings connected? Do we belong to separate worlds or are we all bound up together in a grand, interlocking web?
Milgram tested this question with a chain letter, he got the names of people at random in Omaha, Nebraska and he mailed each of them a packet with the address of a stockbroker who worked in Boston and lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. Each person was instructed to write his name on a roster and send it on to someone who would get it closer to the stockbroker.
Milgram found that most of the letters reached the stockbroker in five or six steps: it is from this experiment that we got the concept of six degrees of separation.
But that phrase is now so familiar that it is easy to lose sight of how surprising Milgram's finding was.
In another well-known study two psychologists asked people living in uptown Manhattan about their closest friend: almost ninety per cent of the friends lived in the same building, and half lived on the same floor. Proximity overpowered similarity, we're friends with the people we do things with, not necessarily with the people we resemble. More, we don't seek out friends, we simply associate with the people who occupy the same physical places that we do.
Back to Milgram's then. People in Omaha are not, as a rule, friends with people in Massachusetts so how did the packets get halfway across the country in just five steps? The explanation is that in the six degrees of separation not all degrees are equal, many of the chains reaching to Sharon followed the same asymmetrical pattern, half of the packets passed through the hands of 3 people: Jacobs, Jones and Brown.
Six degrees of separation means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those few.
posted by faustotazzi at 10:32 AM
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