Back ست درجات من التباعد Arabic Ayrılığın altı dərəcəsi Azerbaijani Тэорыя шасці рукапацісканняў Byelorussian Sis graus de separació Catalan Šest stupňů odloučení Czech Seis grados de separación Spanish شش درجه جدایی Persian Kuusi erottavaa askelta Finnish Six degrés de séparation French שש דרגות של הפרדה HE

Six degrees of separation

For other uses, see Six degrees (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Six degrees of freedom.
A map of several branches and degrees of a small social group: Ryan is six degrees of separation from Pablo

Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of "friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It is also known as the six handshakes rule.[1]

The concept was originally set out in a 1929 short story by Frigyes Karinthy, in which a group of people play a game of trying to connect any person in the world to themselves by a chain of five others. It was popularized in John Guare's 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation.

The idea is sometimes generalized to the average social distance being logarithmic in the size of the population.

  1. ^ "6 Handshake Rule - Are We Still 6 People Away From Each Other?". Youth Time Magazine. 2020-06-10. Retrieved 2022-04-18.

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