Gladwell's View of Milgram Experiment

http://www.gladwell.com/1999/1999_01_11_a_weisberg.htm

Many of you have probably read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. This link contains the chapter where he talks about the Milgram Experiment. Gladwell's explains the small world phenomenon with a little bit of psychology on personalities. His claim is that if you are trying to get from person A to person B, most paths will include the same few people because they have the type of personalities that seem to know everyone and have a knack for meeting people. It is an interesting aspect of social networks that is probably difficult for engineers to model.

One of those personalities that he talks about are the "connectors", which are the people who have a "truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances". It may not be simple to model, but the connectors would just be modeled by having edges between them and hundreds of other nodes. If you're curious if you're a "connector", you can take Gladwell's simple test:

http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/tp_excerpt2.html