How to work the theory of six handshakes?
In a random fellow traveler, we will learn the Uhager of your mom’s times of her youth, the son of a neighbor comes to get to work, the tutor of your children finds his lost cat through the district group in the social network … We call it the theory of six handshakes.
How it works? Consider the situation. I’m a little girl, I go to kindergarten. My mom works at school teacher geography. Mom knows the director of the school, who is familiar with the director of the Department of Education, he, in turn, was at a meeting with the mayor, and he once seen with the president. Girl – Mom – Director of the School – Director of the Department – Mayor – President. Thanks to this chain, we can see how little five-year-old girl indirectly familiar with the president.
For the first time, this idea was formulated in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Freedy Karinity in the book "Links of Chains". And I decided to spend the first experiment in 1986, Milgram. He put forward a hypothesis that each person is familiar with an average of every sixth man through a chain of acquaintances.
Milgram chose residents of two cities: Omaha, Nebraska, and Wichita, Kansas. Their residents distributed three hundred letters in which the essence of the experiment was set out and data on a certain exchange broker in Boston, including initials, but the address was not indicated. Nevertheless, the letter had to be delivered to the addressee. If the sender did not know the broker, he needed to give a letter to his friend who is more likely to know this person. Ultimately, the letter should have fallen into the hands of a man who is familiar with the stock broker from Boston and will be able to send a letter to him personally. Out of 300 letters to the addressee reached only 66. In the chain, on average five to six people were involved. Thus, Wednes Milgram proved that the inhabitants of the Earth are much closer to each other than they think.
And in the era of digital technologies to find a person even easier. In 2012, an experiment was conducted in Abu Dhabi. According to the rules of the game, it was necessary to find a person by photo, knowing the city in which he lives (US and Europe), and clothes in which he is dressed. For 12 hours, the winners – a team of some Alex Rauntford – I found three out of five people.
