How many people are really six introductions away from someone like Brad Pitt, Oprah or someone they have yet to meet? The idea of six degrees of separation has been around for over 80 years. And, with social networking sites booming, more people are connecting across the globe than ever before. The world is shrinking…figuratively speaking.
We’ll take a look at whether six degrees of separation is fact or fiction, and give it a test-run ourselves. That's the topic of today's "Just Explain It."
First, let’s take a look back. The Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called “Chains” first proposed the theory of six degrees in 1929. Karinthy’s belief was that we are all connected to each other by a string of friends, and that string was made up of six or less people. But he had little evidence to back up his suggestion.
Over the years, many attempts have been made to prove that mutual friends might connect two random people.
In the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley
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