“However, people may now have more contacts, but that should not be confused with the number of actual ‘friends’ they have,” he cautioned. Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, said sites such as Facebook and Twitter had provided a mechanism which allowed more people to be in touch at the same time around the world. The connectivity that social networks have brought means that someone on Facebook in Siberia or the Peruvian rainforest is probably no more than a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. The average distance between people on the site in 2008 was 5.28 degrees, while now it is 4.74. The team found that as the site has grown representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, the degrees of separation between people has been falling. “We found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users: While 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (5 hops),” the Facebook Data team said.įacebook has become the world’s largest social network, with more than 800 million members. “Using state-of-the-art algorithms…we were able to approximate the number of ‘hops’ between all pairs of individuals on Facebook.
The huge piece of research, which took a month to conduct and analysed 69 billion connections across the site, found that any two people on Facebook are on average separated by 4.74 intermediate connections.
However, a vast new study by Facebook’s data team and the University of Milan, which assessed the relationships between 721 million active users (more than 10 per cent of the global population) of the social network, has found that the average number of connections between people has dropped to four.
Since the American social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, conducted his famous ‘small world experiment’ in the 1960s, it has been commonly accepted that most people have six degrees of separation between them. The Facebook era and rise of social networks means that people are more closely connected than ever before, with four degrees of separation having become the norm.
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