Is the six degrees of separation true?

Ming Yan

A problem I would want to solve with Social Network Analysis would be the six degrees of separation idea. This is a popular idea that talks about relationships. When people talk about six degrees of separation, they mean that a person only needs to make six different connections to connect them to anyone else. One famous way this idea has spread is using the actor Kevin Bacon to connect any other Hollywood figure. I would test the six degrees of separation idea by looking at the Social Network Analysis of hundreds of people and seeing how these people are connected by six degrees or less through their networks.

The question that the SNA would address would be how closely any random person can be connected to another person. This would mean trying to demonstrate what is considered a social tie. For this kind of experiment I would think that Facebook friends will work as a social tie to measure. This is because it is a real tie that can be seen via SNA. Also, understanding what is a real social tie and what is not will be tricky. This way, the differences between family and friends and acquaintances is made clearer by just labeling everyone Facebook friends and leaving it at that.

So the design of the experiment would be to randomly select 300 Facebook users, check their friends list and then the friends of those lists and so on until six degrees are reached, and then map that out using SNA. Because the Facebook friends list of most users is public, this data will be easy to access. It also will not need to make anyone’s personal information public because the different users can be anonymous. This data would be easy to get because it uses Big Data. It would not be invasive and the participants would not even need to know that they are selected for the work. It is simply checking and analyzing publicly available things that can be found online. It will not be expensive or time consuming to get this data either. So it is a good candidate for SNA work.

The most important network measures will be the strength of the ties. So if someone has a lot of Facebook interactions with a person, it is a strong tie. If someone does not, it is a weak tie. Other than that, the only important network measure will be the quantity of ties. For example, someone who has 30 friends on Facebook will make it less likely that they fit the six degrees of separation theory than someone who has 300 friends. This means that it will be hard to prove the theory if people have a lot less friends than we think. It will also be hard to prove if people are not big social media users, like if they only have real-life social ties that are not provable via SNA work.

The SNA will help to show connectivity all over the world. It will help to show how much even very different people are connected via humanity. It will show how small the world is in terms of social connections, which may help people to have more confidence in different environments. It makes a difference by making people feel more common ground with other human beings.