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"In the late nineteen-sixties, a Harvard social psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in an effort to find an answer to what is known as the small-world problem, though it could also be called the Lois Weisberg problem. It is this: How are human beings connected? Do we belong to separate worlds, operating simultaneously but autonomously, so that the links between any two people, anywhere in the world, are few and distant? Or are we all bound up together in a grand, interlocking web? "
"Proximity overpowered similarity. ... what friends really tend to have in common are activities. We're friends with the people we do things with, not necessarily with the people we resemble. We don't seek out friends; we simply associate with the people who occupy the same physical places that we do ... Six degrees of separation doesn't simply mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those few."
"When we say, then, that Lois Weisberg is the kind of person who 'knows everyone,' we mean ... that she belongs to lots of different worlds."
"fifty-six per cent of [job-seekers] had found their jobs through a personal connection ... the best way to get in the door is through a personal contact. But the majority of those personal connections ... did not involve close friends. They were what he called "weak ties." ... People were getting their jobs not through their friends but through acquaintances. ... Mere acquaintances ... are much more likely to know something that you don't. ... 'the strength of weak ties.' The most important people in your life are, in certain critical realms, the people who aren't closest to you, and the more people you know who aren't close to you the stronger your position becomes."
" ... what matters in getting ahead is not the quality of your relationships but the quantity -- not how close you are to those you know but, paradoxically, how many people you know whom you aren't particularly close to."
"The social instinct makes everyone seem like part of a whole, and there is something very appealing about this, because it means that people like Lois aren't bound by the same categories and partitions that defeat the rest of us. This is what the power of the people who know everyone comes down to in the end. It is not -- as much as we would like to believe otherwise -- something rich and complex, some potent mixture of ambition and energy and smarts and vision and insecurity. It's much simpler than that. It's the same lesson they teach in Sunday school. Lois knows lots of people because she likes lots of people. And all those people Lois knows and likes invariably like her, too, because there is nothing more irresistible to a human being than to be unqualifiedly liked by another." ... [more]
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