Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time (Portfolio Non Fiction)

by Keith Ferrazzi

Dr. Stanley Milgram proved this idea in a 1967 study. He ran an experiment that set out to show that our big, impersonal world is actually quite small and friendly. It was Milgram’s experiment that created the notion of “six degrees of separation.” In the experiment, he sent a package to a few hundred randomly selected people in Nebraska with the instructions that they forward the package to an anonymous stockbroker in Boston whom they did not know. Each person could send the packet only to someone whom they knew on a first-name basis, and who they thought was more likely to know the stockbroker than they were themselves. About a third of the letters reached their destination, after an average of only six mailings. What was surprising was that when all those chains of people were analyzed, Milgram found that a majority of the letters passed through the hands of the same three Nebraskans.