How Far Are We From Each Other? 6 Degrees of Separation

The world is a place of vastly different languages, cultures, and societal structures. With a population that amasses over 7.8 billion total citizens, we typically believe that our reach is confined to the community around us, mostly made up of our friends and family. Interestingly enough, the theory contends that we are merely six introductions away from any human being across the globe. 

As defined by Wikipedia, the “Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people on average are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other. Also known as the 6 Handshakes rule. As a result, a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.” 

According to the original idea (first formulated by Frigyes Karinthy in 1930), the 6 degrees of separation is based on a formula that balances each individual’s number of connections. The theory claims that, on average, a human will know around 100 people to some significant extent. In actuality, that number is likely larger when you consider acquaintances, but we’ll work with the 100 as the original benchmark for the rest of this world piece.

Presuming that the first link encompasses this 100, then you thereby have access to 10,000 people through the second link in the chain, as each of your 100 contacts has another 100 of their own. At the sixth link, you would have access to 1,000,000,000,000 people (based on the 100 connection assumption that was previously made). This ultimate “mutual friend” argument shows that through 6 stages of connectivity, we would have the power to network with 1 trillion people. 

The clear counter-argument would be to point out that this claim assumes a unique set of connections for each person, but a large proportion of these would overlap with one another. However, this idea is easily refutable. The world doesn’t hold a trillion citizens. Still, the tremendous disparity between the estimated intertwined connectivity of 1 trillion and our status quo 7.8 billion makes this theory not only plausible but probable as well. 

If we were to broaden our definition of connection to a scope that amassed our minor daily interactions with cashiers, waiters, strangers on the train to work, and the other minimal communications that we encounter, the reach would be even further secure. We could make this case without significantly infringing on the overall viability of the theory. 

So, what does this mean? From a cultural perspective, it means that humans aren’t as far away from each other as we may believe, regardless of geographical location. While our world societies, languages, and interests may differ in significant ways, humanity is (at our core) an intertwined race, networked through our friends of friends of friends of friends.