Thursday, January 24, 2002

By SHELLEY EMLING
COX NEWS SERVICE

NEW YORK -- In the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram claimed that anyone on the planet could be linked to anyone else by a chain of only six other people -- the famous "six degrees of separation."

Milgram's theory has never been put to the test -- until now.

The "Small World Research Project" at Columbia University is asking thousands of volunteers to reach about 20 "target" individuals by forwarding e-mail to the person they know who is most likely to know a selected target.

Already, one target living in Siberia was reached by a participant in Australia through only four e-mails.

Thousands of volunteers have agreed to participate. The project seeks as many as 500,000. The volunteers receive only the most basic information about their target -- their name, their employment, where they live, and where they attended college.

"I really believe the theory will hold up as being more or less true," said Duncan Watts, an assistant professor of sociology who's leading the project.

Watts hopes to have some answers within six months or so.

In his 1967 experiment, Milgram asked a few hundred people in Omaha to forward a letter to a "target" stranger in Boston through personal contacts, and ended up with 60 completed chains of letters that averaged six senders.

Decades later, Milgram's theory caught the public's fancy through John Guare's play "Six Degrees of Separation" and through the trivia game that asked players to compose the shortest list of movie casts connecting actor Kevin Bacon to other stars. After the terrorist attacks drew Americans together, their interest in the "small world phenomenon" was piqued even more.

The "Small World Research Project" seeks not only to test Milgram's theory in a world wired for instant e-mail communication, but also to study the barriers that divide society by investigating whether age, race, or education levels have any bearing on how quickly e-mail messages get through.

Watts said his findings could also help researchers learn how to obstruct the spread of computer viruses and relieve congestion on computer networks.

"With the Web growing so big, we may need to find new ways to search big networks. We may need to find alternatives to search engines with centralized directories," Watts said.

In a separate but similar project, researchers at Ohio State University are working to create a social map of the Internet that shows how people connect and pass information through social networks.

The school is asking e-mail users to complete an online survey on age, race and employment. It then asks about their use of e-mail. The school will contact the participants a year later to determine how e-mail relationships have changed and evolved over time.

Since the Ohio State project, backed by a grant from the National Science Foundation, launched three months ago, about 1,200 people have taken the survey.

"The hype is that we're all better connected because we have access to e-mail and that we can reach others more easily and quickly than ever before," said James Moody, a sociologist who's leading the project. "We want to see if that's really true."

Certainly cyberspace has changed the way people communicate, and it poses challenges for those studying e-mail connections.

"This is a different age in which people often don't even open up their e-mail because they figure most of it is useless," Watts said.

Thomas Blass, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland, oversees a Web site on Milgram, who died in 1984. Milgram "definitely would be thrilled" about the new projects, he said, "because this is an extension of the work he loved."

JOIN IN

To participate in the online "six degrees of separation" experiments, go to:

Ohio State site: smallworld.sociology.ohio-state.edu

Printer-friendly version

E-mail this story

Get e-mail news updates

Subscribe to the P-I