You've probably heard the phrase a thousand times. Maybe you were playing that game about Kevin Bacon at a bar, or perhaps you were just marveling at how you somehow know your boss’s second cousin’s ex-wife. It feels like magic. But the 6 degrees of separation meaning isn't just a catchy movie title or a party trick. It’s a mathematical reality of how human beings clump together in a world that is far smaller than it looks.
Think about it. There are roughly 8 billion people on this planet. Yet, supposedly, you are only six handshakes away from a goat herder in Mongolia or the President of France.
It sounds fake. Honestly, if you told someone in the year 1800 that they were linked to a shogun in Japan through just six people, they’d think you were possessed. But as our world shrank through telegraphs, planes, and eventually the fiber-optic cables under the ocean, what was once a poetic idea became a measurable science.
Where did this "Six Degrees" idea actually come from?
Most people think it started with the 1993 Will Smith movie. It didn't.
The core concept actually traces back to a 1929 short story called "Chains" by a Hungarian author named Frigyes Karinthy. He was obsessed with how the world was shrinking due to technological advances. He proposed that any two individuals could be connected through a chain of personal acquaintances.
Then came Stanley Milgram.
In 1967, this social psychologist—the same guy famous for those controversial obedience experiments—decided to actually test Karinthy’s theory. He called it the "Small World Problem." Milgram sent out packages to random people in Omaha, Nebraska, and Wichita, Kansas. The goal? Get the package to a specific stockbroker in Sharon, Massachusetts.
📖 Related: Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen Menu: Why You’re Probably Ordering Wrong
Here was the catch: you couldn't just mail it to the guy. You had to send it to someone you knew personally who might be "closer" to the target.
It was a messy experiment. Only about 20% of the chains were actually completed. But for those that did make it, the average number of intermediaries was—you guessed it—around six. That’s the 6 degrees of separation meaning in its rawest, most academic form. It’s the average path length between any two nodes in a social network.
The Kevin Bacon Factor and the Pop Culture Explosion
We can't talk about this without mentioning the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon."
Back in 1994, three students at Albright College—Craig Fass, Brian Turtle, and Mike Ginelli—watched Footloose and The River Wild and realized Bacon was everywhere. They claimed he was the center of the entertainment universe. It started as a joke on The Jon Stewart Show, but it highlighted a fundamental truth about "Scale-Free Networks."
In any network, there are "hubs." Kevin Bacon is a hub. He’s worked with so many people in so many genres that he provides a shortcut through the massive graph of Hollywood.
This isn't just about actors. In your own life, you have hubs. You know that one person who seems to know everyone in town? The one who can get you a table at a booked-out restaurant or find you a plumber on a Sunday? They are your shortcut to the rest of the world. They reduce your degrees of separation from the "rest" of society from six down to maybe three or four.
👉 See also: 100 Biggest Cities in the US: Why the Map You Know is Wrong
Is it actually six degrees anymore?
Probably not.
Social media killed the number six. In 2011, researchers at Facebook (now Meta) teamed up with the University of Milan to analyze billions of friendships. They found that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people on the platform wasn't six.
It was 4.74.
By 2016, as the platform grew more dense, that number dropped to 3.57. Basically, you are now roughly three and a half "likes" away from almost anyone else with an internet connection.
This brings up a weird paradox. While the 6 degrees of separation meaning implies we are all connected, it doesn't mean we are all close. There is a massive difference between a "weak tie" and a "strong tie." Mark Granovetter, a sociologist at Stanford, wrote a groundbreaking paper in 1973 called The Strength of Weak Ties.
His big find? You’re actually more likely to get a new job or a fresh piece of information from a "weak tie"—an acquaintance—than from a close friend. Why? Because your close friends know the same people you do. They exist in the same bubble. Your weak ties are your bridges to other clusters. They are the reason the "six degrees" thing works. Without those random acquaintances, the world would be a series of isolated islands rather than a giant, interconnected web.
✨ Don't miss: Cooper City FL Zip Codes: What Moving Here Is Actually Like
Why this matters for your career and life
If you understand that you are only a few steps away from your goals, the world becomes a lot less intimidating. It turns "networking" from a dirty corporate word into a simple mathematical exercise.
Let’s look at "Small World Networks" in nature. It’s not just humans.
- Neural Networks: The neurons in your brain follow a small-world pattern to speed up signal processing.
- Power Grids: Electrical grids are designed this way to ensure power can be rerouted quickly.
- The Internet: Routers and servers are linked to minimize the number of "hops" a data packet takes.
The 6 degrees of separation meaning is essentially an efficiency protocol for the universe. It ensures that information, viruses (unfortunately), and ideas can spread with maximum velocity.
The dark side of the connection
We saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because we are so tightly linked, a pathogen in one corner of the globe can reach the other side in days. The same applies to "viral" misinformation. In a six-degree world, a lie doesn't have to travel far to find a new audience. It just needs to hit a "hub"—an influencer or a news outlet—and suddenly the path length to millions of people drops to nearly zero.
How to use the 6 Degrees principle today
So, how do you actually apply this? Knowing the theory is one thing, but using it is another.
First, identify the "Super-Connectors" in your field. These are the people with high "betweenness centrality." If you want to get into the tech industry, you don't necessarily need to know a CEO. You need to know the person who organizes the local tech meetups. They are the node that connects a hundred different clusters.
Second, don't ignore the "random" people you meet. That guy you talked to for five minutes at a wedding might be the second degree of separation between you and your dream client.
Actionable Steps to Shrink Your World:
- Audit your "Weak Ties": Go through your LinkedIn or contact list. Find five people you haven't spoken to in two years. Send a low-pressure "how are you" message. These are your bridges to new networks.
- Target the Hubs: Instead of trying to meet everyone, focus on people who manage communities. Teachers, recruiters, community leaders, and long-term industry veterans are "hubs" that can skip you forward three degrees in one jump.
- Be a Bridge: The best way to benefit from a network is to provide value to it. Introduce two people who don't know each other but should. By doing this, you become a "hub" yourself.
- Understand the "Shrinking" Reality: Recognize that your reputation precedes you. In a world with only 3.5 to 6 degrees of separation, "burning bridges" is statistically dangerous. You are much closer to your past mistakes—and your future opportunities—than you think.
The 6 degrees of separation meaning isn't about how big the world is. It’s about how small we’ve made it. Every person you meet is a doorway to a thousand others. When you realize that, "it’s a small world after all" stops being a song and starts being a strategy for navigating life.