A Small World? Don't put anything here Page Content 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 Page Content Template Sidebar Footer Tags Allowed for XSSFilter Don't put anything here HTTP Fields Cache-Control Expires Don't put anything here 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 save preview cancel
