In the mid-1960s the legendary social psychologist Stanley Milgram asked randomly selected citizens of Kansas and Nebraska to try to connect with social "targets" in Massachusetts by mailing letters to likely intermediaries. The average number of links between strangers turned out to be surprisingly small. Milgram claimed we're all connected, on average, by half a dozen interpersonal avenues� a numinous network popularized by the phrase "six degrees of separation."
Now some mathematicians say the dynamics of such networks can describe a host of natural and technological systems. But Kleinfeld, who has reviewed the Milgram archive at Yale University, says the small world may have no basis in fact. "It's not a robust social-science finding," she asserts. "It's a very odd one that has never been replicated."
As a graduate student in the late 1960s at Harvard, where Milgram worked from 1963 to 1967, Kleinfeld had known of Milgram's studies. But it wasn't until the 1990s that she decided to try to repeat his study as an exercise for her graduate students. When she went to the Yale archives to find out more about his methods, Kleinfeld saw that the rates of completion in Milgram's studies were lower than she'd realized. In the main study, using almost 300 starters, only 29 percent of the documents reached a Boston stockbroker� and 100 of the Nebraska starters owned blue-chip stocks. In a pilot study� the one that yielded the anecdote of the divinity student's wife� just 5 percent of 60 documents reached the target, and they passed through an average of eight people. And Kleinfeld couldn't find any exact replications of Milgram's experiments in the literature.
Karen White in Discover Magazine
{Stanley Milgram's also the guy who designed and executed the infamous 'obedience' studies. his hagiographer has a website which can be found through Google.}
