Not to be attempted before week 2 lecture

Tutorial task two (max 500 words)

Due date: 23.59pm [end of day] Sunday March 13th, 2022
Topic: Milgram’s small world phenomenon

Question 1. What is the main premise of the study and how did Milgram test this?
[reference]

Question 2. What were his (and later) Facebook findings [reference]?

Question 3. Relate your findings [Activity 1] to Milgram’s contention of six degrees

of separation

Activity 1. Six degrees of separation game

[https://oracleofbacon.org/]

Using the above web site, try to find two Hollywood movie stars who have not acted
in the same movie, but also have more than six connections between them.
Note, you can change both actors [that is, you can replace Kevin Bacon on
the left hand side with another actor]
Two requirements
1. You are required to copy and paste a final image [see example below]
2. The longer the chain, the better – hint – try foreign actors or historical actors

Include your best attempt – here is an example

Activity 2: Dunbar’s number: Analysis of social media

Question 4. Define and explain how Dunbar uses brain [cognitive] capacity to
determine social group size in humans [reference]

Complete the following table and include the completed table in your answer
Either use your social media platform [or another person if you do
not have one] and answer the following questions Number
1. Overall, how many contacts are on your [their] social media page
2. How many are only yearly contacts
3. How many are monthly contacts
4. How many are weekly contacts
5. How many are daily contacts

Question 5. Does your data [in the table] support Dunbar’s theory?

Question 6. Relate this to Milgram’s research on small world

Question 7. Using Milgram’s research, explain the spread of viruses in our

community [Influenza, Covid, HIV, etc] and the role of “lock-down” [or
condom use] as a preventative strategy]
 How Small is the World, Really?

https://www.kdnuggets.com/2016/02/how-small-is-world-really.html

Social network analysis is back in the news again, with a recent Facebook
project which determined that there are an average of 3.5 intermediaries
between any 2 Facebook users. But this is different than "6 degrees of
separation." Read on to find out why, and how.

By Duncan Watts, Microsoft Research.

Last week’s finding by a team of data scientists at Facebook that everyone in
the social network is connected by an average of 3.5 “intermediaries” has
renewed interest in the longstanding “Six Degrees of Separation” hypothesis:
that everyone in the world is connected by some short chain of
acquaintances. Not surprisingly, the attention has focused on the plausible
assertion that online social networks like Facebook have made the world
smaller: that what used to be six degrees is now almost half that. But really
what it has revealed is how little we understand this intriguing phenomenon
and what it might mean for our world.

This “small world” hypothesis, as it is known in sociology, has been

percolating in popular culture for a long time. Almost a century ago the
Hungarian poet Frigyes Karinthy wrote a short story called “Chain Links” in
which he claimed he could reach anyone in the world, whether a Nobel Prize
winner or a worker in a Ford auto factory, through a series of no more than
five intermediaries. Subsequently, writers like Jane Jacobs, John Guare,
and Malcolm Gladwell have periodically reinvigorated the idea with their own
colorful characters and fantastical speculations about who really runs the
world.
But arguably no one has had more impact on the question of how small the
world is than Stanley Milgram, a Harvard psychologist who in the 1960s
conducted an ingenious experiment to test it (Milgram is even more famous
for another experiment of his, on obedience to authority, but that’s for another
day). In brief, Milgram chose a single person, an acquaintance of his who was
a stockbroker living in Sharon Mass, just outside of Boston, to be the “target”
of the experiment. In addition he chose roughly 300 others — 100 from Boston
itself and the other 200 from Omaha Nebraska, which Milgram figured was
about as far away from Boston, socially and geographically, as one could get
within the US.
Milgram then sent these 300 subjects special packets containing a good deal
of information about the target — his name, address, occupation, etc. — and
also instructions that they were to try to get the packet to him. But there was a
catch: they could only send the packet to him if they knew him personally,
meaning on a first-name basis. In the overwhelmingly likely event that that
they did not, they were instead to send to someone they did know on a first
name basis and who was closer to the target than they were themselves.
These new participants would then get the same packet with the same
instructions, and the process would repeat until — hopefully — some of the
packets reached the target.
Milgram’s question then was: for successfully delivered packets, how long
would the chains be? Curiously, before he ran the experiment Milgram asked
lots of people to guess the answer. Many assumed it wasn’t possible while
others figured it would take hundreds of steps. So when Milgram found that
not only did 64 packets, roughly one fifth of the initial sample, reached the
target, but that the average length of the successful chains was just 6, he
knew it would surprise many people.
In many ways, it still does. Although the phrase “Six Degrees of Separation”
has become a cliché, when pressed many people still find it difficult to imagine
how they could really reach anyone — not just someone like them or someone
near to them, but anyone at all in the whole world — in something like six
steps. Understandably then, the Facebook result also attracted some
resistance: “Facebook is an unrepresentative sample of the population;”
“Facebook friends aren’t real friends” and so on. But although these critiques
may have merit, they miss the point. In reality, the 3.5 number is simply
incomparable to Milgram’s 6 for three reasons.
First, the number 3.5 counts intermediaries not degrees of separation. If I am
“one degree” from someone I know them directly; there are zero
intermediaries between me and them. Likewise, there is one intermediary
between me and my “two degree” neighbors, and so on. In general, therefore,
an average of 3.5 intermediaries corresponds to 4.5 degrees of separation,
which is almost exactly what Facebook itself found when it performed
a similar exercise a few years ago. Conversely, Milgram’s six degrees result
corresponds to five intermediaries, which is actually the number he reported in
his original paper with Jeffery Travers. So already the difference is one less
than it appears.
Second, though, Milgram’s experiment was a subtly but importantly different
test than the one run by Facebook. Whereas the latter measured the length of
the shortest possible path between two people — by exhaustively searching
every link in the underlying Facebook graph — the former is simply the
shortest path that ordinary people could find given very limited information
about the underlying social network. There are, in other words, two versions
of the small-world hypothesis — the “topological” version, which refers only to
underlying network structure, and the “algorithmic” version, which refers to the
ability of people to search this underlying structure. From these definitions, it
follows that algorithmic (search) paths cannot be shorter than topological
paths and are almost certainly longer. Saying that the world has gotten
smaller because the shortest topological path length is 4.5 not 6 therefore
makes no sense — because the equivalent number would have been smaller
in Milgram’s day as well.
Finally, the number 6 is also in some respects too small. As has been pointed
out many times since Milgram’s experiment, only about 20% of the letters
made it to their target. More importantly, these letters were almost certainly on
shorter paths than the ones that didn’t make it, meaning that estimates of path
length that don’t take into account the missing data are almost certainly
biased downwards. Fortunately it is possible to correct for this bias using
standard statistical methods. In a 2009 paper my colleagues and I performed
exactly this analysis both on Milgram’s original data and also on our data from
a similar — but much larger — experiment that we had conducted ourselves in
2003.

Remarkably we found that after the correction, both experiments yielded

similar results: the median shortest path was 7, meaning that 50% of chains
should complete in 7 or fewer steps while the other 50% would be longer.
Many people find this result surprising because it seems so clear that the
world has gotten smaller in the last 50 years. Yet this apparent stability is
exactly what one would predict from my early theoretical work with Steven
Strogatz back in the late 1990’s. In a nutshell what we showed is that it is
easy to turn a “large” world into a “small” one, just by adding a small fraction
of random, long-range links, reminiscent of Mark Granovetter’s famous “weak
ties.” The flip side of our result, however, is that once the world has already
gotten small — as it was already by the 1960's — it is extremely hard to make it
smaller. Obviously Facebook did not exist in 2003 so possibly since then
something has indeed changed. But I suspect that the difference will be small.
Why does any of this matter? There are three reasons. First, the two versions
of the small-world hypothesis — topological and algorithmic — are relevant to
different social processes. The spread of a sexually transmitted disease along
networks of sexual relations, for example, does not require that participants
have any awareness of the disease, or intention to spread it; thus for an
individual to be at risk of acquiring an infection, he or she need only be
connected in the topological sense to existing infectives. On the contrary,
individuals attempting to “network” — in order to locate some resources like a
new job or a service provider — must actively traverse chains of referrals, and
thus must be connected in the algorithmic sense. Depending on the
application of interest, therefore, either the topological or algorithmic distance
between individuals may be more relevant — or possibly both together.
Second, whereas the topological hypothesis has been shown to apply
essentially universally, to networks of all kinds, the algorithmic hypothesis is
largely (although not exclusively) concerned with social networks in which
human agents make decisions about how to direct messages. And third,
whereas the topological version is supported by an overwhelming volume of
empirical evidence — hundreds of studies, if not thousands — have found that
nodes in even the very largest known networks are connected by short paths,
the practical difficulty of running “small-world” experiments of the sort that
Milgram conducted in the 1960s has meant that much less is known about the
algorithmic version.
On this last point, for example, our 2009 analysis also found evidence that
some of the longer paths could be much longer than the median, adding
weight to the skeptics’ claims that in spite of the small-world phenomenon,
some people remain socially isolated. Given the importance of social
networks in determining life outcomes, it would be extremely interesting and
useful to understand better who these people are and why they are isolated.
Is it something to do with their underlying networks or is it that their search
strategies are somehow less effective? Could it be, as my coauthors and
I speculated many years ago, some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, in which
the perception of social isolation discourages one from searching one’s
network, and that the resulting lack of success reinforces the original
perception of isolation? Answering these questions would require new
experiments that are only now just becoming possible. But the answers would
not only be of academic interest — they could also potentially help many
people access currently inaccessible reserves of “social capital” thereby
improving their lives. Far from being settled, the small-world problem still has
much to teach us about the world, and ourselves.

Bio: Duncan J. Watts is a sociologist and principal researcher at Microsoft

Research, New York City known for his work on small-world networks.