The other day in class, Professor Kleinburg spoke briefly of Judith Kleinfeld, the psychologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who wrote a paper discrediting Stanley Milgram’s famous “six degrees of separation” findings, and his “small world problem.” To find some more information on Kleinfeld’s problem with Milgram’s famous study, I found the paper in which she attacks it. A link to it is given below:

http://www.uaf.edu/northern/big_world.html

In this paper, entitled “Could It Be a Big World After All? The ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ Myth,” Kleinfeld describes her investigation into Milgram’s famous small-world experiment as well as other similar experiments, and proposes psychological reasons why she believes the “small-world phenomenon” to be such a popular belief.

Kleinfeld identified a few reasons why she felt Milgram’s findings could be discredited; one was the first experiment conducted by Milgram, the results of which he never published. In this experiment the target was the wife of a divinity student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and only 3 out of the 60 starter packages reached her. Also, Kleinfeld wrote that Milgram’s selection process of the “random” group of starters in both Cambridge and Nebraska was subtly biased towards the selection of wealthy people, who, she claimed, are more likely to be able to find someone through a social network. She also commented on other small-world experiments that had led researchers to conclude that it is much more difficult for paths to be found across economic (lower class to middle or upper) and racial lines of division.

Kleinfeld’s paper also discussed the psychological reasons that she believes most people so readily accept Milgram’s “small-world” conclusions. She claimed many people feel secure, believing that all mankind is connected by only a few acquaintances. She also explained that many people’s interpretation of the “small-world” phenomenon differ from Milgram’s definition; many people describe a “small-world” experience as running into an old friend or meeting a stranger who knows a friend from his or her past, whereas Milgram’s “small-world” looks at the connectedness between two random people.

 In this class I feel we have talked much more about the mathematical models as opposed to the psychological side of networks. I do not see this as necessarily a bad thing, since there is a great deal of research going on right now in using mathematics and computer science to model networks (in her paper, Kleinfeld mentions the research done by our very own Professor Jon Kleinberg), but I found this paper very interesting because it approached the “small-world phenomenon” as a psychological issue, mainly in claiming that people believe they are much more connected to each other than they really are.