Facebook said Thursday that its research showed that "each person in the world" is separated from every other individual by "an average of three and a half other people."
The finding,
in a blog post, runs contrary to the longstanding "six degrees of separation" — meaning the number of links in a chain of acquaintances, for a total of seven,
The New York Times reports.
Based upon its research, Facebook found the true number to be 3.57 or 4.57 degrees of separation.
The figure, however, only includes connections between Facebook's 1.59 billion users — excluding the roughly 5.7 billion other people who are not on the network, the Times reports.
For context,
the United Nations estimated the world's current population at 7.3 billion.
The "six degrees" issue was addressed by the playwright John Guare in 1990 in the drama "Six Degrees of Separation." Three years later, it became a movie starring Will Smith and Stockard Channing.
Many people, however, were later introduced to the idea via a game that uses a celebrity’s proximity to actor Kevin Bacon on a cast list as a measure of how much weight he or she carries in Hollywood, the Times reports.
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