Duncan Watts, of Watts-Strogatz model fame, is in the process of conducting a modernized version of Stanley Milgram’s original 1967 “small world” experiment as mentioned in class. Watts, now at Columbia University is the principal investigator on the the Columbia Small World Project. In this version of the experiment, people can volunteer to start a chain from the website. The user is then given the name of a target person as well as some personal information what they do for a living and where they living. Much as in the Milgram experiment, the volunteers are then asked to send the message to a person they think is closer to the target with the eventual goal of reaching the target. This however is where the similarites end.

With the benefit of hindsight, Watts and his colleagues have made many improvements on the original experiment. First, and most notably is the use of email rather than snail mail to send the the messages provides many advantages over the original experiment. Other than the obvious fact that email is much faster (especially in the case of overseas targets), email also allows a single person to start multiple chains very easily. This in turn allowed the experimenters to examine the effectiveness of different strategies of connecting people (geographically vs. occupationally for example). Also the experimenters hosted the email client that was used to send all of the emails for the experiment. This allowed them to more easily keep track of who was sending what where as well as discourage any sort of cheating.

Watts’ team also did a better job of collecting information on the participants. All volunteers were asked to provide demographic information on themselves before starting. This information included address, age, race, gender, religion, and occupation. In addition every time an email was sent, the sender had to say how they knew the recipient, and how strong their tie to them was. The recipient then had to confirm this information. The results of the first round of the experiment, which involved over 60,000 people and 18 targets in 13 countries, can he found here.