6 Degrees of Separation And The Real Power of Networking – Part 1

“6 degrees of separation”, is the phenomenon that causes you to say the phrase “It’s a small world” when we discover people in common when meeting someone new. This 6 degrees of separation shows the real power of networking. If you can tap into this power, your life will be a much more enjoyable journey!

(This is the first of a two part series on the power of social networking.)

6 degrees Of Separation

Remember the last time you were on vacation and that you met a group of new compatriots. I bet even money, that you discovered in your conversations that you had a few common acquaintances. This happens a lot on holidays, even more than in “normal” daily life. Why is this?

The first reason is that we truly live in a small world and the second, is that you took the time to explore the different ways that you have to each other. On holidays we are more relaxed, and are more open and patient to listen to a new acquaintances. Moreover, since you don’t know the people you have just met, you are still open and curious to explore all differences and similarities you may have.

When we typically meet new people in our daily life, it is almost always in a specific environment: colleagues at the office, business people at a professional event, family at birthday parties, etc. In these situations we have a common interest that is already established, just by the nature of the context. That’s the reason why we tend to limit our information exchange and don’t search for more common information from the new people we meet. Once we are introduced to people, we put them in one or more categories in our minds. The disadvantage to this approach is that we only know snippets of information about the people in our daily lives and miss lots of opportunities for interesting conversations. We also tend to talk about the subjects we already believe a person is interested in.

Because we only know little “parts” of other people, we are still surprised when we find out that we have something in common with someone else. “It’s a small world” is a phrase you hear from time to time. When two people discover that it is indeed a small world, you feel the mood change between them. Suddenly things are more relaxed, fun and there is an implied trust between people based on this common or shared experience.

We indeed live in a small world

We are connected to anyone and everyone on this planet via 6 people. This phenomenon is called the “6 degrees of separation”. In this era of social-networking where people are reconnecting via LinkedIn and Facebook, it is really very exciting that you can contact anyone on this earth in a maximum 6 steps, that we are all that close and related to each other.

The “small world experiment” by Stanley Milgram in 1967 has given way to this belief of being connected to anyone else in the world via 6 steps. In short the experiment went as follows: Stanley Milgram randomly selected people in the mid-West to send packages to a stranger located in Massachusetts. The senders knew the recipient’s name, occupation, and general location. They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of all their friends, to know the target personally. That person would then do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient. Although the researchers expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, it only took on average six intermediaries to get each package delivered.

Although the results of his experiment were not scientifically founded (the test population was too small and participation was very low), other experiments showed that’s indeed a small world. One of them was the experiment of Duncan Watts. In 2001, Watts, a professor at Columbia University continued his own earlier research into the phenomenon and recreated Milgram’s experiment on the Internet. Watts used an e-mail message as the “package” that needed to be delivered, and surprisingly, after reviewing the data collected by 48,000 senders and 19 targets (in 157 countries), Watts found that the average number of intermediaries was indeed, six.

One example of how the “six degrees of separation” work in practice is the networking website LinkedIn. On this website you can see how many people you have in your direct network and with how many people you are connected through each steps or degrees of separation. I have yet to make a connection through participating in groups and have yet to connect with anyone more than 3 steps away from me.