While every Hollywood star seems to be within six degrees of Kevin Bacon ?” an actor whose appeared in nearly 60 films ?” a new study by Sacramento State Marketing Professor Gail Tom reveals that students and faculty are separated by less than half that distance, an average of 2.3 degrees.

“People are closer than they think,” Tom said. “CSUS can seem alienating and impersonal, (this study) seems to personalize it and give it meaningful intimacy for the individual.”

The marketing college in the Department of Business Administration conducted research to find out how many connections there were between random Sac State students, faculty and staff, studying what is known as the “small world phenomenon” pioneered by Yale social psychologist Stanley Milgram through his six degrees of separation concept in the 1960s.

This phenomenon occurs when someone meets a complete stranger and is amazed to find that they both share a common friend. Though surprising, research from the Mathematics Department at Cornell University showed that such networks are common within social systems.

Tom’s report was published in the September 2005 issue of the Teachers College Record ?” a research journal in the field of education ?” and was conducted when a sender would be given the name and major, or department, of a target and asked if they knew the target on a first-name basis. If the sender did not, they would recommend a middle man who they thought would be helpful in identifying the target, and so on, until the target was reached.

Sac State graduate students Alice Chen, Harriet Liao, Jian Shao and Raman Singh helped conduct the study that showed two randomly selected Sac State staff members have an average 2.05 degrees of separation. Between two random faculty members, the distance shrinks to an average 1.3 degrees of separation. When the initiator was staff and target a student, Tom’s study found 2.3 average degrees of separation.

Sac State students say they feel closer to their fellow students as they progress through their academic careers.

“By the end of the second year I started to see faces I knew around campus,” said Matthew Clifford, senior history major. “By my third year, I began taking major classes and started recognizing half the faces in my classes.”

Emeritus Professor of Marketing Arthur Jensen, who has taught at Sac State since 1976, said although Sac State is a small world, there still remains some anonymity in faculty member circles and between students and faculty.

Sac State faculty and staff played a large role in the study since their e-mail addresses are published in the campus directory, but because no such database was available for Sac State students, random student-to-student relationships were not tested as part of Tom’s research.

Tom’s work highlighted a smaller group of people, referred to as mavens, who are commonly used to link a large number of people. For example, the dean of a college department would serve as a maven used to contact people within their department. The role of maven is played by the more popular people in social structures ?” like Kevin Bacon in Hollywood.

“Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” is a game where the player tries to connect actors to Kevin Bacon though a chain of common film appearances.

The game is thought to be a play on words since “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” sounds similar to “six degrees of separation,” a famous study conducted in 1967 by Milgram, which found that two randomly selected individuals would be expected to know each other within six connections.

For example, Chuck Norris was in “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” with Cayden Boyd, who was in “Mystic River” with Kevin Bacon. This makes Chuck Norris only two degrees away from Bacon.

“Six Degrees of Separation” is also the title of a Will Smith movie released in 1994.Students at the University of Virginia Computer Science Department created a Web site, www.oracleofbacon.org, which uses information from an Internet movie database to search for Kevin Bacon connections.

A search of the LexisNexis search engine shows that the game was first mentioned in November of 1995 in the Tampa Tribune, shortly after being mentioned on MTV’s short-lived John Stewart Show.

The game was originally created by three college students who went to Albright College.John Stewart is two degrees away from Kevin Bacon by being in “Death to Smoochy” with Edie Inksetter, who was in “Cavedweller” with Bacon.

Thanks to technological advances, the world is getting smaller than everIn 2002, the National Science Foundation and Ohio State University teamed up to conduct the Electonic Small World Project to test Milgram’s theory through e-mail by challengimg the capabilities of electronic communication. Assistant Professor of sociology James Moody headed the project, and over 4,000 people from all over the globe participated, creating a map of links around the world, according to the project’s Web site.

One popular social networking Web site, www.myspace.com, boasts a membership of 12,174 current Sac State students, making up over one-third of the school’s population in one big interconnected digital mass.

Avi Ehrlich can be reached at [email protected],

Quiz: Six degrees of Hollywood

Find the shortest way to connect actors Sean Penn and George Clooney. E-mail your results to [email protected].