Have you ever wondered how many people connect you and your favorite pop star—maybe Beyonce, for example? Conventional wisdom says that there are up to six degrees of separation between you and Queen Bey. Well, with a new study from Facebook, it now looks like that that number is much smaller than you think.
On Thursday morning, Facebook released a new report on their blog announcing that every single person in the world is only separated from each other “by an average of three and a half other people.” So now, instead of the familiar “six degrees” between you and someone else, you are actually much, much closer. The New York Times points out that Facebook’s calculations only include the 1.59 billion people who are active on Facebook, leaving out several billion humans who aren’t on the social network. Still, it’s pretty amazing how much social networks have shrunk our world.
In order to find out really how many people separated us, Facebook used “statistical techniques to precisely estimate distance based on de-identified, aggregate data.” Which basically means that they did a lot of math.
As well, if you are logged onto your Facebook and click on the original blog post, it will tell you your average degrees of separation from “everyone”, shown below.
This is not the first time that Facebook has done a study on degrees of separation, though. As recently is 2011, the blog post reports, researchers found that the average degrees of separation was 3.74. Back then, only 721 million people were using the site. Now, with almost twice as many people using Facebook, every person has grown more connected, hence a smaller degree of separation—only 3.46.
This might seem like a whole lot of numbers that don’t mean much, so let me boil it down for you—There are now only three and a half people standing between you and your future husband (aka Ryan Gosling). You’re welcome.