Critically discuss Milgram’s experiment, and assess the extent to which the “small-world effect” can be found in the random poisson network, in the Barabási-Albert “scale-free” network, and in the Watts-Strogatz “small-world” network.

Social Network Analysis – Small world Network, Scale free, random Poisson network.

The experiment that Stanley Milgram conducted in 1967 provided empirical evidence in favour of what is now referred to as the “small-world effect”, namely the fact that the average geodesic distance is small even for very large networks

Critically discuss Milgram’s experiment, and assess the extent to which the “small-world effect” can be found in the random Poisson network, in the Barabási-Albert “scale-free” network, and in the Watts-Strogatz “small-world” network.

Milgram, S. (1967), The small world problem, Psychology Today, 2, 60-67.