A Sad Day For Kevin Bacon

Scientists Debunk 'Six Degrees of Separation'

Talk of the Nation, January 25, 2008 · The well known "six degrees of separation" idea traces back to a 1967 experiment by Stanley Milgram, who tried to determine how many acquaintances it would take to pass a letter between two randomly selected people.

The result that entered the public imagination was that, in general, it took six steps or fewer to bridge the gap between any two people. But is that result accurate?

Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska, researched Milgram's original experiment in the hopes of updating it for the digital world.

"Milgram's startling conclusion turns out to rest on scanty evidence," she says. "The idea of 'six degrees of separation' may, in fact, be plain wrong — the academic equivalent of an urban myth."