"The Small World Problem", in Psychology Today

Stanley Milgram

Editore: Psychology Today, 1967

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Stanley Milgram, "The Small World Problem", in Psychology Today, 1967 (May), Vol 1 No. 1 pp. 60-67. Individual issue in original wrappers. Prior owner's name printed on front wrapper, otherwise fine.__+__ Milgrim's article appears in the inaugural issue of Psychology Today, and was an interesting and popular presentation that would after two years be supplemented with a longer technical article (and a co-author Jeffrey Travers) in Sociometry as An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 1969), pp. 425-443. __+__ Stanley Milgram (1933-1984), is best remembered for his famous obedience experimental studies (loosely in the banality-of-evil category in reference to Nazis simply following orders, the nature of conformity, obedience to authority, etc.) and the Small-World experiment (offered here) in which he investigated the hypothesis that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else via a series of short pathways. It was a study of the growing idea of the shrinking world and its developing interconnectedness, and in time would be better and more famously known as the six degrees of separation hypothesis.__+__ Abstract: The simplest way of formulating the small world problem is "what is the probability that any two people, selected arbitrarily from a large population, such as that of the United States, will know each other?" A more interesting formulation, however, takes account of the fact that, while persons a and z may not know each other directly, they may share one or more mutual acquaintances; that is, there may exist a set of individuals, B, (consisting of individuals 61, 62.6,) who know both a and z and thus link them to one another: More generally, a and z may be connected not by any single common acquaintance, but by a series of such intermediaries, a-b-c- . . -y-z; i.e., a knows 6 (and no one else in the chain); 6 knows a and in addition knows c, c in turn knows d, etc. __+__ The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggested that human society is a small-world-type network characterized by short path-lengths. The experiments are often associated with the phrase "six degrees of separation", although Milgram did not use this term himself. --Wikipedia __+__ "Guglielmo Marconi's conjectures based on his radio work in the early 20th century, which were articulated in his 1909 Nobel Prize address, may have inspired Frigyes Karinthy to write a challenge to find another person to whom he could not be connected through at most five people. This is perhaps the earliest reference to the concept of six degrees of separation, and the search for an answer to the small world problem." --Wikipedia.

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: "The Small World Problem", in Psychology Today
• Editore: Psychology Today
• Data di pubblicazione: 1967
• Rilegatura: Soft cover
• Condizione: Fine
• Cataloghi dei venditori:
  • Psychology