It's like 100 degrees of separation right there."īut Ward and Schick were much more optimistic. Though Pierre said Schick "looks like a Spanish guy from 'The Young and the Restless,'" and Ward "is all right looking," he had never them either.Īsked if he thought Ward and Schick could connect with him just by building a chain of their friends and acquaintances, Pierre shot back, "No way, I think it's impossible. "Primetime" showed Pierre a picture of the two people who were about to start searching for him. "Primetime" showed a picture of Pierre to Ward and Schick and asked them a simple question: Do you know this man? Both said no. In a region ripe with economic depression, Pierre has been trying to make a name for himself as an amateur boxer. Pierre lives in Bedford Stuyvesant, also known as Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood of Brooklyn that has little in common with the areas Ward and Schick call home. The challenge was to link up by creating a human chain of contacts that ended with their "target," a man named Petey Pierre. Both were going to try to connect with someone they had never met.īut connecting to that person didn't mean finding them - that would have been too easy. When Ward and Schick met for the experiment, "Primetime" told them that they were about to compete. She has a home in the Hamptons herself as well as on Manhattan's fashionable Upper East Side.ĭarren Schick grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania but now also lives in Manhattan, where he sells expensive china and crystal stemware to some of the nation's top retailers. Kristina Stewart Ward is the editor of Hampton Style magazine, which chronicles the lives of the rich and famous people who congregate in New York's high society summer playground.
To see if people could connect across class, race, economics and geography, "Primetime" started out by locating volunteers who would be at opposite ends of the social spectrum. With Watts' help, "Primetime" set up the test so that the participants would not just be strangers, but would literally come from different worlds. The "Primetime" experiment went beyond the previous limits. First, it may be true the majority of most people who participate in the Small World Project are of the same social class, and some say it's easy to connect the searcher with the target if both are college educated or middle class. Of the hundreds of chains that have been completed, Watts says the average number of links has been six, supporting the six degrees of separation theory.īut Watts admits there are built-in biases to his work. Some 60,000 people from 170 countries have taken part in the experiment. The hope is to eventually send an e-mail to someone who knows the target personally, completing the chain. They ask that person to continue the links by e-mailing someone else they know. But there's a catch - they can't just send an e-mail directly to the target, they must connect by creating a human chain.įirst, the participant e-mails someone they know. Their job is to link to this person via e-mail. In the experiment, each participant, or "searcher," is assigned a random "target," one of 18 people around the world. The Small World Project is carried out online. Watts himself has led one of the most significant experiments, Columbia's Small World Project. Everyone is connected in some way or another."Īs widespread as the notion of six degrees has become since it was hatched in the 1960s and has since become the subject of a play and movie, there has been very little effort to try to prove whether the hypothesis is true. "You may think that you're sort of locked away in your little part of the world," Watts said. Network Theory covers many subjects, including how people interact socially, how diseases spread, how people find jobs, and even how aspects of the World Wide Web operate. It's a Small World After Allįor a number of years, Watts has studied Network Theory, the scientific field that examines how networks form and how they work in society. With the help of Columbia University professor Duncan Watts, "Primetime" created a test that pitted real people against each other in a race to see who could connect themselves to a random third individual the fastest, and do it in an unusual way. "Primetime" resolved to find out by conducting a groundbreaking social experiment. See how "Primetime's" experiment played out on "Basic Instincts: The Human Chain" Wednesday, Dec.
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