Milgram’s experiment also helped to launch the field of network theory, leading to insights into other important features of an evermore connected world. “It was really the first thing to experimentally demonstrate a phenomenon which is one of the most important properties of the social network of the world, which is that we’re all just a few steps from each other,” said Jon Kleinberg, a Cornell University computer scientist who studies networks. In the 51 years since he published his results in 1967 (the same year he took over the social psychology doctoral program at City University of New York), the answer Milgram came up with - six - has become a commonplace truism and a Kevin Bacon–flavored parlor game. In it, packages were sent to hundreds of participants like the wheat farmer, as Milgram tried to determine just how many degrees of separation exist between any two people. It’s known as the small-world experiment. It’s a finding that feels just as relevant now as it was then, and it’s one worth revisiting in what seems like an increasingly divided era. The resulting connection - a rapidly created chain of acquaintances joining two perfect strangers in just a few links - was the first indication that Stanley Milgram, the social psychologist who designed the experiment, was on his way to a moving discovery: It really is a small world after all. The wheat farmer had given the package to an Episcopalian minister in his hometown, who then mailed it to a colleague in Boston, where it soon reached its target. One of hundreds of participants in an ambitious scientific experiment, he had been asked to try to convey the folder to Alice by giving it to someone in his social circle who might be more likely to know her, who then took up the same task. The wheat farmer had followed his instructions. “Alice,” said one of her instructors, approaching her and holding the same brown folder. Just four days later and hundreds of miles away, Alice was on a sidewalk in Cambridge when something surprising happened. Half a century ago, a wheat farmer in Kansas received in the mail a brown folder containing a set of instructions and the name of an assigned target: a Boston divinity school student named Alice. Psych 101 is an occasional series on classic psychology research and how it informs the way we understand ourselves today.
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