FEMI TAIWO ON MONDAY: Your Brother’s Keeper (ii)

Michael Oluwafemi Taiwo, PhD

I assumed, rather hastily, in the first installment of this series that “we now know that there are at most six degrees of separation between any two people in the world.” Since then, a few people have asked me how I came to this conclusion.

I will, therefore, take a step back and explain this a little further before I build a case of why enlightened self-interest wins out over myopic selfishness. If six degrees of separation will be the foundation of our philosophy of altruism, we should make sure it is a solid one.

A Harvard professor in 1967, Stanley Milgram, formulated what he called “the small world problem.” The simplest way of describing this small world problem is “what is the probability that any two people, say Sam and Mary, selected arbitrarily from a large population, will know each other?” The population can be that of a country, a continent or even the entire world.

A more intriguing formulation takes into account the fact that while Sam and Mary may not know each other directly, they may be connected or linked by a series of intermediaries, Sam-Matt-Abdul-…Taiwo-Mary; i.e. Sam knows Matt (and no one else in the chain); Matt knows Sam and in addition knows Abdul, Abdul in turn knows Matt, etc.

With the popularization of social networks, this problem is easier imagined than when it was first formulated decades ago. Think of LinkedIn, for instance. You probably have people in your 2nd or 3rd degree connections.

This means you don’t know them directly, but you know someone who knows them (2nd degree connection) or you know someone who knows someone that knows them (3rd degree connection). We assume here the “knowing” is symmetrical: if Sam knows Matt then Matt knows Sam i.e. there is a mutual relationship between them. So, knowing about a famous person, for instance, does not count: I cannot say I “know” Obama unless we have a mutual relationship. Milgram’s question is that what is the minimum number of intermediaries that can exist between Sam and Mary?

For the modern reader, the small world problem formulation can go like this: if we assume that first, everyone on this planet is on LinkedIn and second, you can only add or request connection from people you actually have a mutual relationship with (they know you and you know them in the real world), then what is the maximum number of connections that can exist between you and any other random person somewhere on the globe?

From the results of Milgram’s experiments in 1967 and 1969 and countless other similar sociological research since then, it turns out that the magical number is six. This is where the term “six degrees of separation” comes from. It means any two individuals on this planet are connected by at most five others.

Think about this: the President of United States and that elementary school teacher in Kano, Nigeria are separated by only five intermediaries; you and David Wineland (last year’s Nobel Prize winning Physicist) are separated by at most five other connections, etc.

The fact that we are bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people is, to me, one of the most profound socio-scientific findings of the last century. It is why Martin Luther said, “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” This is also why we all must be our brother’s keeper because it is not just about your “brother,” it is also about the people in your “brother’s” 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th degree connections which – as we just found out – means the entire Earth’s inhabitants. We all want to change the world for the better. The concept of “six degrees of separation” means by impacting just one life positively, you have shifted the whole world, however slightly, however imperceptibly, in the direction of happiness.

By helping another person, you know it will come back to you because we are all interrelated. So you act kindly and generously out of a bigger perspective, because you know that it makes your own world a better place to live in.

P.S.

I have used the “six degrees of separation” concept here to argue for how through one person, you can reach the world and hence you should do all that is in your power to help the one. I realize, however, that the concept can be applied in so many ways.

After reading this article, I would like to have your comments and questions.