Six Degrees of Separation the theory that everyone and everything is six or fewer degrees or steps away from each other you might be familiar with Stanley mgam a social psychologist best known for his experiments on obedience at Yale which involved delivering electric shock in a so-called memory test with increasing intensities in 1967 mgram coined the phrase Six Degrees of Separation after conducting his small world experiment describing that growing social networks had a world shrinking effect the experiment tested how many steps it took for a package to be delivered from the West Coast in the US to a stock broker in Boston by having one acquaintance mail it to another he found that it only took an average of six steps to reach Boston in the 19 1960s but what about now in the 21st century where social networking sites dominate the internet if you use LinkedIn or Facebook you've seen the Six Degrees of Separation at work LinkedIn uses a connection system where individual profiles in the people you may know section are labeled as second or third connections with a map showing how that person is related to you through your first connections who are acquaintances already on your friends list similarly Facebook shows knows a mutual friends count and now has a function that enables you to message friends of friends if enough shared contacts exist it used to be that we were all just Six Degrees of Separation apart connecting anyone to anyone else via finding a friend who knew someone else who knew someone else and so on but research conducted by Facebook in the University of Milan in 2011 shows that the number of degrees is now as small as four 721 million active users and 69 billion friendships were analyzed for 1 month and the results were as follows 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths within 5° 92 are connected by only 4° the average distance between all people on Facebook in 2008 was 5.28 de and in 2011 it lowered to 4.74 who knows what the number would be now it's a small small world so what do you think about this Theory do you think social networking decreases the number of degrees needed to reach someone let us know in the comments below if you enjoyed this video be sure to check out our website and other social media for more content and don't forget to subscribe thanks for watching