The Little Book of Big Decision Models

MODEL 47

MILGRAM’S SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION MODEL

Use this to understand the reach that social media has in terms of marketing and brand recognition.

Stanley Milgram was a social psychologist who conducted the infamous ‘Experiments in Obedience’. Much less sinister was his experiment that showed that there were between two and ten acquaintances/links between a specified person and any other person in the world, with an average of five intermediate links. This gave rise to the Six Degrees of Separation theory (the original person and the five acquaintances).

While Milgram’s original research was flawed, Microsoft demonstrated that the principle was in fact correct. They found that the average separation was 6.6.

You may be wondering why ...