6 Degrees of Separation - Social Media Users Only 3.5

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In 2016, researchers at Facebook reported that the social media and networking site had reduced the chain length of Facebook users to three and a half degrees of separation.

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The typical Facebook user has 155 friends, but only describes 50 of them as friends in real life, according to a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center. Thirty-five percent of people have Facebook friends they've never met in person.

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Six degrees of separation is the theory that any person on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.

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In 1967, American sociologist Stanley Milgram devised a new way to test the theory, which he called "the small-world problem." Milgram randomly selected people in Kansas and Nebraska to send packages to a stranger in Boston. The senders knew the recipient's name, occupation and general location. Each participant was instructed to send the package to a person he knew on a first-name basis who was most likely, out of all the participant's friends, to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on until the package was personally delivered to its target recipient.

Although participants in the small-world experiment expected the chain to include at least a hundred intermediaries, it only took on average between five and seven intermediaries for each package to be delivered successfully. Milgram's findings of the small-world project were published in Psychology Today and inspired the phrase "six degrees of separation."

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