Editing Small-world experiment (section)

===Results===

Shortly after the experiments began, letters would begin arriving to the targets and the researchers would receive postcards from the respondents. Sometimes the packet would arrive to the target in as few as one or two hops, while some chains were composed of as many as nine or ten links. However, a significant problem was that often people refused to pass the letter forward, and thus the chain never reached its destination. In one case, 232 of the 296 letters never reached the destination.<ref name=milg />

However, 64 of the letters eventually did reach the target contact. Among these chains, the [[average path length]] fell around five and a half or six. Hence, the researchers concluded that people in the United States are separated by about six people on average. Although Milgram himself never used the phrase "[[Six Degrees of Separation|six degrees of separation]]", these findings are likely to have contributed to its widespread acceptance.<ref name=bara />

In an experiment in which 160 letters were mailed out, 24 reached the target in his home in [[Sharon, Massachusetts]].  Of those 24 letters, 16 were given to the target by the same person, a clothing merchant Milgram called "Mr. Jacobs".  Of those that reached the target at his office, more than half came from two other men.<ref>{{cite book |last=Gladwell |first=Malcolm |title=The Tipping Point |publisher=Little Brown |pages= 34–38 |chapter=The Law of the Few}}</ref>

The researchers used the postcards to qualitatively examine the types of chains that are created. Generally, the package quickly reached a close geographic proximity, but would circle the target almost randomly until it found the target's inner circle of friends.<ref name=milg /> This suggests that participants strongly favored geographic characteristics when choosing an appropriate next person in the chain.