Milgram Chain Letter Experiment

Milgram chain Letter Experimentafter

Milgram's study was originally conducted in the absence of a specific public, not in the professional, highly cooperative mathematical and performing arts sectors (see below). However, it still suffers a lot of criticism. In the first chain letter experiment (recorded in the undated paper "Results of Communication Project"), Milgram sent 60 letters to the Kansas Wichita voluntary participants and asked them to transfer them to a stockbroker at a designated location in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The participant can only give the letter to an acquaintance who believes it is possible to send the letter to his destination, either personally or through his friends. Although 50 people were involved in the experiment, only three of the groups were sent to the destination. When the letter reached the fifth person, only three letters arrived at the destination. In his 1967-year famous paper [1], Milgram mentioned that in the initial experiment, one of the letters was delivered to the destination in less than four days, but he overlooked the important fact that only less than 5% of the letters were eventually served. In the subsequent two chain letters experiments, the results were not published because the proportion of the chain was too low to complete. Fortunately, however, researchers have found that many subtle factors can have a significant impact on the results of chain-letter experiments. The researchers tried to repeat the experiment in different races and different income groups, and they found huge differences. In fact, a paper co-authored by Milgram revealed that if the final recipient of the letter was black, the rate of delivery was 13%, and if it was white, the rate of delivery rose to 33%, even though the experimenter did not know the recipient's race at the beginning.

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Despite the controversy, Milgram brought many novelty discoveries. After many improvements, Milgram found that the value of a letter or package in people's minds was an important factor in influencing people's decision to continue to pass it on. He succeeded in raising the rate of delivery to 35%, which later rose to 97%. Aside from the suspicion that "the Earth is small", there is no doubt about the assertion that "a particular world is small" (for example, from a college to the University of Michigan to the Jewish community in Montreal). On average, in order to achieve a single delivery, six intermediaries were required to derive the six-degree separation theory (six Degrees of Separation), which he could derive from six degrees of freedom (six Degrees of Freedom). Not only that, Milgram also found a funnel effect, and he found that most of the transmission was done by a handful of star characters. In a 5% pilot experiment, he found that 2/3 successful delivery was done by the same "star".

Nonetheless, the experiment still has a challenging hypothesis: it assumes that all the experimenters in the delivery chain are fully capable of discovering the effectiveness of the two-person transmission of the chain terminal.

Milgram Chain Letter Experiment