part0082

I have never deliberately made up an urban legend and succeeded in spreading it around, but sometimes I hear about people who do so. They try this as some kind of social experiment—or just out of curiosity, to see what will happen.

One person told me that “The Poodle in the Microwave” legend was invented by a sociologist at an East Coast university who wanted to see how long it would take for the new story to reach California.

The sociologist started telling the cooked-pet legend to everyone he knew, and supposedly it reached the West Coast in three days.

Other people who describe such experiments to me mention a different legend or a joke. But they are usually in agreement that three days after it is planted in the East, the story or joke is going around in the West.

The three-day figure sounds unlikely to me, though, for a couple of reasons. For one, telephones and the mass media make it possible for stories to race from coast to coast in a matter of hours. What’s more—and this is what triggered my suspicions—three is the most common folkloric number of all: three little pigs, three blind mice, three on a match—you get the idea.

Several of the people mentioning this experiment have reported hearing about it in a college sociology class. So I mentioned the legend to a sociologist friend of mine, who said it sounded like a generalized description of experiments done by Stanley Milgram at The City University of New York in the mid-1960s.

Milgram summarized his findings in Psychology Today , in an article called “The Small World Problem.” Mil-gram asked here, “Starting with any two people in the world, what is the probability that they will know each other?” He wanted to discover how many intermediate links are needed before x and y (any two individuals) are connected. In effect, he was testing the idea that “it’s a small world,” but with the question of number of personal contacts, not number of days.

The experiment was fairly simple. Volunteers in the Midwest were given a “message”—a folder containing instructions for participants in the experiment. They were asked to send the message to a person they knew personally who lived in the direction of the target individual, a resident of Massachusetts.

Eventually, Milgram conjectured, the message would reach someone who knew the target individual personally.

One chain linking a volunteer to the target was only two links long: in other words, the original volunteer knew someone who knew the target individual! On the average though, five people had a hand in sending a folder from the Midwest to its Massachusetts destination.

Milgram and Jeffrey Travers of Harvard University described a larger version of the “Small World” experiment in the journal Sociometry in 1969. This time, 296 individuals, some in Nebraska and others in Boston, had mailed messages in the direction of a Boston stockbroker. With the aid of numerous charts, graphs, and formulas, the two experimenters showed that for the 64 “starters” who completed the chain, “the mean number of intermediaries between starters and targets was 5.2.”

I’ll skip the subtleties of the sociologists’ further experiments with the “Small World” problem using different methodologies and social groups. My eyes got strained looking at all those graphic representations of networks, chains, pathways, and variables, and the results nearly always averaged about five links anyway.

My own question is this: Is there any link between the “Small World” experiments and the “Small World” legend I’ve heard about? My sociologist friend said that when he presented Milgram’s findings in classes, he lectured from memory, without consulting the published scholarly work again. He admitted that he probably had distorted the events somewhat. This is doubtless true for other teachers as well. Could they have so modified the experiment until the “messages” were said to be urban legends? Could the flow of information have switched from eastward to westward; and then could “three days,” not “five individuals,” have become the standard unit of measurement? And could students have passed the story along until the legend reached outsiders like me? If so, then garbled retellings of “The Small-World Problem,” an academic inquiry, have crystallized into “The Small-World Legend,” a piece of modern academic folklore.

One further piece of evidence that supports this hypothesis is another story that seems apocryphal. A student once told me that his sociology professor in a Midwestern university had described “The Small-World Problem” in a class, adding an anecdote that “proved” it. He had heard about the experiments spreading oral stories being discussed at an academic gathering, when a member of the audience—another professor—stood up and said, “Wait a minute. Do you mean to say that there are going to be only three people between me and, say, Haile Selassie?”

A murmur went around the room as the speaker groped for a reply, until another professor spoke up. “Well, I happen to know Haile Selassie, and I know professor so-and-so here. So there’s your connection in only two links.”