You are one degree away from everyone you know, two degrees away from everyone they know, and so on. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore.'Ī 'degree of separation' is a measure of social distance between people. People have had this suspicion that we are really close. What we're seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity. Horvitz told the Post: 'To me, it was pretty shocking. The researchers wrote: 'Via the lens provided on the world by Messenger, we find that there are about "seven degrees of separation" among people.' But some were separated by as many as 29 steps. They found that the average length was 6.6 hops, and that 78 per cent of the pairs could be connected in seven steps or fewer. They looked at the minimum chain lengths it would take to connect 180 billion different pairs of users in the database. The database covered all the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006, equivalent to roughly half the world's instant-messaging traffic at that time.Įric Horvitz and fellow researcher Jure Leskovec considered two people to be acquaintances if they had sent one another a message. This was 'the first time a planetary-scale social network has been available,' they observed. Researchers at Microsoft studied records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people in various countries, according to the Washington Post. The news will come as no surprise to film buffs who for years have been playing the parlour game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, in which they link other actors to Bacon in six films or fewer. In other words, putting fractions to one side, you are linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances to Madonna, the Dalai Lama and the Queen. By studying billions of electronic messages, they worked out that any two strangers are, on average, distanced by precisely 6.6 degrees of separation. The theory of six degrees of separation contends that, because we are all linked by chains of acquaintance, you are just six introductions away from any other person on the planet.īut yesterday researchers announced the theory was right - nearly. We are proud to have built a team with a mix of senior and young professionals based on their curiosity, creativity, and tenacity, and who have empathy and great interpersonal skills.Īs a result, Xperts Council is able to partner with our clients to truly understand their needs, providing them with potentially game-changing expertise and exceptional service.In a world of 6.6 billion people, it does seem hard to believe. Our approach means that 80% of the experts we present are not currently working with other Expert Networks. Together we can then generate the right leads and find the perfect expertise.
Our consultants’ mission is to understand each project and its context, presenting this first to our Knowledge Team in order to refine our understanding and subsequent search angles. Through human research rather than mechanical database selection, we find professionals who will support our clients accurately and in an efficient timeframe.
Right from the beginning, we decided to gather an outstanding team of consultants who excel in finding the right people quickly. It also shows that it can be necessary to seek support or shortcuts in order to generate these relevant connections.
This shows that not everyone has access to the same number or relevant connections in order to get to the right individual.
What few realise, however, is that only around 30% of the packages actually reached their destination and the broader results also indicated that in some instances only 2 degrees of connection were needed, and others more than 12! So what does this mean? His conclusive experiment took place in the US where a sample of around 160 people were required to send a package to a specific recipient in Boston, using only personal connections to try and achieve this. It is commonly known as the “6 degrees of separation” or “small world” theory. In the late 1960s, Stanley Milgram – an American psychologist made famous by his experiments on the obedience to authority – demonstrated that on average any two individuals in the world are separated by five connections.