Could it be a big world after all?

This is an interesting paper that questions the reliability of the Stanley Milgram's Small World experiment and the "six degrees of seperation" idea. As we learned in class, Stanley Milgram constructed an experiment in which he measured the average path lenght of the social network in the United States. He discovered that the path in this social network was relatively small. This study is often associated with the "six degrees of seperation" idea. According to this idea, if a person is one step away from a person they know (and thus two steps away from the person who is known by a person they know), then every person on earth is at most six steps away from each other.
According to this paper, the theories that stemmed from Stanley Milgram's idea are flawed. One of the arguments used in the paper is the fact that Milgram's experiment was never fully repeated by others. Similar studies were started but never completed. A psychological approach is also taken in the paper, as it is argued that the ability of humans to believe this counter intuitive fact reveals more about human psychology than the physical world. Overall, this is an interesting paper that shows that although the 'small world' experiment and the 'six degrees of seperation' idea are widely discussed in mathematics as well as other fields such as neuroscience and disease transmission, there is not a strong enough basis for the validity of this theory.

Here's the link, it's pretty interesting, I would recommand that you take a look:

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