It’s a small world you know and may be getting smaller. Ever been at a party and it turns out the stranger you’re talking to knows someone you know (or knows someone who knows them)?

Having run our uncommon knowledge hypnotherapy course for ten years now I am continually surprised by how many of our hypnotherapy students have shared acquaintances. I shouldn’t be at all surprised because we are all connected by six degrees of separation and we are getting more connected all the time.

Pass the parcel across America

The ’small world’ phenomenon is common to most people. Stanley Milgram the famous psychological experimenter (famous for showing that most people will electrocute an actor they believe to be a real victim to the point of death if instructed by an authority figure in a white coat) set out to test if it really is a small world. And what did he find?

A letter was sent to 198 different people living in Nebraska USA who were asked to make sure it got to a ‘target person’ a named stock broker who worked in Boston and lived in Sharon Massachusetts. But they could only send it via people they personally knew by first name. People they hoped might somehow know this man. Each recipient of the parcel was asked to do the same and send it on to someone who just might know this person. Well there are around 514,600,000 people in America but the researchers found there tended to be just 6 degrees of separation between the initial volunteer and the target person. It seems we are all much more tightly knit than we might have supposed. Which may be one reason why ‘word of mouth advertising’ can be more effective marketing than more expensive forms and why gossiping can spread like wild fire and ‘get back to the person.’

This amazing linkage seems to manifest itself in other networks too such as in brain function, the operation of power grids, the spread of disease and also information passed via the internet. Indeed modern communications will only bring us all closer together. Psychologist Richard Wiseman and colleagues replicated the pass the parcel experiment in Britain in 2003 and found four degrees of separation.

So next time you’re at a party and you meet someone whose best friend’s father was friends with your mothers maiden aunt don’t be in the least bit surprised

All the best

Mark