Milgram's Nebraska Packets and the Friend You Haven't Asked

A packet went out to a stockholder in Nebraska in the 1960s with the name of a Boston stockbroker inside it and one instruction: do not mail it to him. Hand it to someone you know on a first-name basis, who might be closer to him than you are. The stockbroker lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. Stanley Milgram, the social psychologist, wanted to know how many hands it would take, and in the write-up with Jeffrey Travers he noted that people guessed a hundred or more.

The answer is in “An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem,” published in Sociometry in December 1969. There were 296 starters, 196 in Nebraska and 100 in the Boston area. Of the chains that actually began, 64 reached the broker, and the mean number of intermediaries on those chains was 5.2. That mean is where “six degrees of separation” comes from, though the paper never uses the phrase and the number applies to the chains that finished, not to everyone.

The finishing rate is the part that gets dropped when the experiment is retold. Travers and Milgram reported 64 completed chains; the widely quoted completion figure of about 29 percent counts the 217 chains that were actually started, not all 296 starters. Measured against all 296 it is closer to 22 percent. Either way, most packets never arrived.

What do the numbers say about the small world?

Two things at once, and the second tends to be forgotten. The world is short: when a chain survived, it got there in a handful of steps. And the world is leaky: most chains stopped somewhere, with a person who put the packet down.

In 2003, Peter Sheridan Dodds, Roby Muhamad and Duncan Watts ran the experiment by email, in Science (volume 301, pages 827-829). Participants in 166 countries started 24,163 chains aimed at 18 targets in 13 countries. Only 384 chains completed, which is about 1.6 percent. The authors then adjusted for the chains that died along the way and estimated that searches would typically take between five and seven steps, depending on how far apart source and target were.

They also looked at why chains failed and how the successful ones moved. Their summary: the successful searches ran mainly through intermediate-to-weak ties, did not depend on well-connected hubs, and leaned more on professional relationships than failed searches did. The hubs people imagine as the secret of small worlds were not needed.

Read the two experiments together and the lesson is not “you are six steps from anything.” It is that distance is rarely the obstacle. Attrition is. A request travels well through a network until it lands on someone who has no particular reason to act on it.

Why start with a friend instead of a stranger?

Because the first hop is the one you control, and it is the hop most likely to be answered. A chain is only as good as its weakest forwarder, and your friends are the forwarders whose behavior you can predict.

There is a real tension here, and it is better to state it than skip it. Mark Granovetter’s 1973 paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties” (American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), pages 1360-1380), argued that acquaintances matter disproportionately because they connect you to circles your close friends do not reach. A 2022 Science paper by Rajkumar and colleagues tested this with randomised experiments on LinkedIn’s “People You May Know” feature, covering more than 20 million people over five years, and found that moderately weak ties produced the most job mobility. If weak ties carry the opportunities, why ask your friends at all?

Because the two ideas describe different jobs. The weak tie is often where the introduction ends up. The friend is where it begins, because a friend will read your message, will not ask you to justify it, and can name someone you did not know to look for. You are not asking the friend to be the destination. You are asking them to be the first forwarder, the one Milgram’s chains kept losing.

The friends who see your mornings are good at this for a plain reason. They already know your calendar, your job, what you are trying to get out of this year, and whether you are the sort of person who follows through on a favor. Nobody has to be briefed. Someone who has watched you get up for three months can vouch for the one thing a stranger cannot: that you actually do what you say.

There is a smaller mechanical point. Chains die in silence, and a message that sits in an unread inbox dies the same way. A friend you are already in daily contact with is a person who sees your message today.

What is the plan for asking one friend for one introduction?

Keep it small enough that it cannot stall. This is working practice built from the attrition finding, not something either study tested.

1. Pick the target, not the friend. Write one sentence naming a type of person, not a famous one: “someone who runs a small ceramics studio,” “a nurse who moved into hospital administration,” “anyone who has done a mid-career switch into data work.” Milgram’s target was a stockbroker, an ordinary professional, and that is why the packets could move.
2. Pick one friend. Choose the person most likely to answer within a day, not the one with the best contacts. If you are unsure, go back to the group you see most often. The framework in Dunbar’s circles of friendship is a reasonable way to find who sits in your closest rings, and those are the people whose replies you can count on.
3. Make the ask answerable in one line. “Do you know anyone who has done X? A name is enough, and I will write the message myself.” You are asking for a name, not for them to take on a project. Dodds and colleagues found chains did not need hubs; they needed people who passed the message on.
4. Offer to do the writing. Offer a two-sentence blurb the friend can forward without editing: who you are, what you want to ask, how much time it takes.
5. Close the loop. After the introduction, tell the friend what happened, even if the answer was no. A friend who hears back becomes a friend who will make the next introduction. The follow-up discipline in this piece on networking follow-through applies directly: most of the value in a contact is lost in the days after meeting, not in the meeting.

Then do it. Send the message today. A plan to ask someone is a packet sitting on a desk.

Does it matter that the friend sees your mornings?

This part is argument, not data, so weigh it accordingly. The reason it might matter is trust under uncertainty. Someone you introduce to a colleague is spending a little of their own reputation, and people spend it more readily on a person whose reliability they have seen.

Some people have an unusually literal version of this. If you use an alarm that sends a wake-up photo to friends you chose, DontSnooze for example, those friends have watched you do something unglamorous on schedule, over and over. That counts for more with a person weighing an introduction than a polished profile does. It also leaves an open thread with them every day, which makes “do you know anyone who…” an easy message to send into a channel they already read.

The same logic does not need an app. A standing weekly walk, a Saturday run, or a shared group chat does the job. What matters is that you are regularly visible to someone who can say “I know a person you should meet.” If you are not sure how to open that conversation with someone who has been watching your habits, how to ask someone to be your accountability witness covers the wording.

What if the first friend does not know anyone?

Then you have learned something cheap and you ask the next friend. Milgram’s 64 finished chains got through in spite of the ones that stalled. The failure rate in both experiments is a reminder that a single ask is a draw, not a verdict.

Neither experiment found the network to be the bottleneck. The open question each time was whether the next person picked the packet up, and a friend is the pickup you can best predict.