Facts, basics, statistics, tests

participated in several more benign experiments. Have you ever
heard of the term “six degrees of separation”? If so, you can thank
Stanley Milgram for that.
In the 1950s, political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool and
mathematician Manfred Kochen posed several questions: What
would be the probability of two complete strangers having a mutual
friend? What if there were no mutual friend? How long would that
chain be for them to reach each other? Approximately a decade

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later, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment known as “The
Small World Experiment” in an effort to answer these questions.
Milgram gave 300 letters with instructions to people in Omaha,
Nebraska, and Wichita, Kansas, and set up one “target” in Boston,
Massachusetts. The 300 people were told to mail the letter to a
friend that they thought was close to the target (and that they knew
on a first name basis), and this friend would get the same
instructions, creating a chain. Milgram received a postcard with
each forward and recorded the relationship between sender and
receiver. Milgram discovered that within almost all instances, the
chains had approximately five or six links that connected any two
people.
Stanley Milgram brought great—and sometimes scary—insight to
humanity in ways that many had never seen before. While his
controversial (and now classic) obedience study showed the rather
negative side of what an individual could be capable of doing, his
small world experiment was able to show the interconnectivity and
closeness that people share. To this day, his work continues to be
incredibly influential and extremely important, and he is firmly
planted as one of the most discussed psychologists in the history of
psychology and experimentation.

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ALFRED ADLER
(1870–1937)
It’s all about the individual
Alfred Adler was born on February 7th, 1870, in Vienna, Austria, to
the family of a Jewish grain merchant. Adler had suffered from
rickets as a child, and because of this did not learn how to walk until
the age of four. When Adler was five years old, he developed
pneumonia and almost died from the condition. His early
experiences with illness sparked an interest in medicine and inspired
him to pursue a career as a physician.
Following school, he worked as an ophthalmologist and
eventually switched to general practice. Adler set up his office in the
lower class part of Vienna, and across the street from his office was
an amusement park and circus. As a result, most of the clients he
saw were circus performers. By studying the unusual strengths and
weaknesses that these circus performers had, Adler began to create
his organ inferiority theory, wherein he posited that a person with a