A Small World? Don't put anything here Page Content Don't put anything here Page Name (for URL) Page Title Breadcrumb Text I've always had doubts about the whole "small world" thesis, feeling that [Milgram's 1967 study](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_phenomenon) didn't quite warrant the conclusion that *any* two people in the world are six degrees apart. After seeing Milgram cited once again today, I got curious about whether anyone have attempted to replicate the study recently and on an international scale. After a Google search, it sounds like a team at Columbia tried to replicate the study a in 2003, asking over 60,000 people to forward messages to 15 targets around the world. They got the same average of around 6 for completed chains, though - just as in Milgram's study, most messages never got delivered. (In fact, apparently, only a bit over 300 messages got delivered - a success rate of just 0.5%) The study thus suffers from the same problems as Milgram's original study. While googling, I also came across [an interesting article](http://www.judithkleinfeld.com/ar_bigworld.html) by Judith Kleinfeld which seemed to capture some of my doubts about Milgram's experiment and support it with some evidence from Yale archives. Most interestingly, Kleinfeld cites a less known study from the 1970s that found that while middle-class networks may form somewhat of a small-world, low-income people are largely cut out of those networks. Don't put anything here Advanced Fields Category 2002200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014E. AsiaE. EuropeL's FamilyL's FriendsN. AmericaN. EuropeS. AmericaS. AsiaW. EuropeY & LY's FamilyY's Friends Prototype Redirect Permissions0 Actions Config Markup Module HTML/Meta/Keywords HTML/Meta/Description Save Hook HTML Fields Main Head Body Header Menu Logo Content Template Page Sidebar Footer Tags Allowed for XSSFilter HTTP Fields Cache-Control Expires Guru Fields Templates Translations Fields Edit UI Admin Edit UI A summary of your changes Edit Summary Don't put anything here Don't put anything here Don't put anything here save preview cancel
