90 years ago, a Hungarian writer named Karinsi wrote the short story Chain, which said that any two people in the world can be connected by at most five people. Fifty years ago, StanleyMilgram, a Harvard professor who studied social interpersonal relationships, made a famous "Migram mail delivery experiment". The professor randomly selected some subjects to send a letter to a stranger in Massachusetts. Only the name, occupation and approximate location of the receiver are provided to the sender. The rule is that they can make a judgment based on this limited information, choose a friend who is most likely to be close to the recipient in their circle of friends, and the next person will continue according to this method. Before the experiment, it was expected that the letter would pass through a large number of intermediaries when it reached its target, but the result was unexpected. However, through 5-7 intermediaries, most letters successfully reach the recipients. Michaelis's experiment proves that the world is not as big as you and I thought. Two strangers can establish contact through six people. The development of Internet and social media has brought people closer. In 20 16, FACEBOOK published a study on "3.5-degree segmentation", because they found that only 3.57 people could establish contact between two strangers on average.
Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at Oxford University, did another experiment. He asked some subjects to list the people they associate with, and found that the average number of stable social contacts was 65,438+048, which could be counted as 65,438+050. This is the famous Dunbar number, also known as the 150 rule. Combined with the theory of six-degree division, one person knows 150 people, and then extends his tentacles to six degrees through this 150 people. 1 1.4 trillion to the sixth power, which is countless times the total population of the world, haha.
Finally, I want to talk about mark granovetter. When he was a graduate student at Harvard, he wrote a paper to discuss the ways for graduates to find jobs. He found that only a few people were admitted through public channels such as job advertisements, and most of them were recommended through contacts, which were divided into "strong contacts" and "weak contacts". The success rate of job hunting through "weak contacts" was even higher than that of "strong contacts".
Explain the definition, everyone has their own close circle, such as relatives, colleagues and classmates, which is called strong contact; At the same time, there is an indirect social relationship with relatively infrequent communication, which is called "weak ties". Don't underestimate the "weak relationship" that is common in this society. Sometimes the effect is unimaginable. The reason is simple: "strong connection" is iron, but narrow; The "weak connection" relationship is relatively alienated, but it spreads widely, which is equivalent to "clairvoyance" and "clairvoyance". According to Dunbar's number 150, only 30 social relationships are "strong connections", and the rest 120 social relationships are "weak connections". Ironically, this paper written by Mark when he was young was not submitted at that time, and many years later, when this article was considered as a very valuable research achievement, he was already a sociologist at Stanford University.
When the fat man told me about the interesting projects he did in summer school, I became interested in psychology, sociology and anthropology, which belonged to the influence of "strong connection"
Finally, let everyone have a look. The three big coffees mentioned in my thesis, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, look like this.