Comment on Kleinfeld's "Could
it be a big world after all?"
Judith Kleinfeld argues, on the basis of her research, against the validity and reliability of Milgram's "small world" phenomenon i.e., that two strangers in different parts of the country could be linked by about 5 or 6 intermediaries who knew each other.
Kleinfeld deserves credit for helping renew interest in a fascinating phenomenon. My purpose in writing this note is my concern that people reading her article might come away with the erroneous conclusion that her analysis is the last word on the subject.
As someone who has been immersed in Milgram's research for quite a few years, I can tell you it is not. Kleinfeld raises some interesting questions. However, the problem with her analysis is that she goes out on a limb to draw firm, critical, conclusions on the basis of ambiguous evidence.
Specifically, she bases her argument on
three things:
1) Most of the letter chains were not completed. In
Milgram's main study only about 30% of the letters reached their target. Actually,
Milgram was quite "up front " about this
,saw this as a shortcoming that might give "the illusion that the chains
are shorter than they are". But just how problematic this is for the small
world phenomenon
depends on how one
accounts for the low completion
rates. Kleinfeld chooses to interpret this as damaging
: that people tried to pass the
letter on but could not find the right intermediaries, hence no "small
world". That is possible. Milgram ,however,
believed that "chains die before completion because on each remove a
certain proportion of participants simply do not cooperate and fail to send on
the folder." That interpretation is also possible ,and
there is really no way to know what is the best explanation. Milgram went on to
note that his colleague at the Social Relations Dept in Harvard, the
mathematical sociologist Harrison White, developed "a mathematical model
to show what the distribution of chain lengths would look like if all chains
went through to completion. In terms of this model, there is a transformation
of data, yielding slightly longer chains". [quotes
are from Milgram's article "The small world problem" in Psychology Today, May, 1967.]
2) Kleinfeld claims that Milgram's subjects
were from the high-income upper-class. They may well live in a world of small-world
connectivity but not others. Hence, according
to her, Milgram demonstrated a limited phenomenon. How does she know that Milgram's subjects were from the upper
class? Many of Milgram's subjects came from mailing lists that one can buy. The
people on these kinds of lists, she claims ,are
typically high-income. This is pure speculation.
3) In searching the literature, Kleinfeld found
very few between-city replications of Milgram's "small-world" findings. I have
no doubt that she did a thorough search and the results of her search are
accurate. What I disagree with are the conclusions she draws. She sees this
situation as being due to the fact that many may tried to carry out "small
world " experiments but were not able to replicate Milgram's findings. While
this is possible, it is speculation. Another likely, and perhaps more likely, possibility
is that very few others even tried to conduct such an experiment. Others may
not have shared Milgram's fascination with the phenomenon. His fellow social
psychologists, who were used to conducting
single-point-in-time lab experiments, were not likely to be attracted to a
tedious, longitudinal study. And even those who may have been interested may
have found the task too daunting. Milgram had the energy, drive
,perseverance ,organizational ability, and attentiveness to detail that
an exp like the "small world" required. Milgram thrived on the challenge
of coming up with new techniques to study a phenomenon -- he referred to it as "experimental
invention"-- no matter how much time and energy it took. He was always
like that. When he was a doctoral student at Harvard, he proposed to Gordon Allport, his mentor, a cross-cultural experiment on
conformity which would involve conducting an Asch-type
conformity experiment in two different countries ,as
his dissertation project. Allport, who was always supportive of Milgram's efforts, tried to dissuade
it him as being too unrealistic. Milgram was not deterred, however. He
spent one year in
A final point. Kleinfeld refers to Milgram's small-world "theory". Actually, Milgram did not have a theory, formal or informal, about the small world. Like most of his other research, it was atheoretical -- something he would be criticized for throughout his career. He developed the small world method simply to provide an empirical test of a mathematical model of small-world connectivity formulated by Ithiel de Sola Pool and Manfred Kochen.