I Forced My Way into Hollywood: Small-World Networks and Six Degrees of Separation

In today’s episode, I’m going to do a little social climbing by sheer cheek. I’m going to use a bit of psychology to force my way into Hollywood’s acting circle and enjoy the delusion of being part of the Hollywood film industry for a moment.

My target for this bit of social climbing is Hollywood star Mr. Kevin Bacon.

If that name doesn’t ring a bell, then everything is going according to plan. Mr. Kevin Bacon is the kind of actor who’s been perpetually almost-famous but never quite there, and has never achieved especially high name recognition. But take a look at his face—didn’t you recognize him at once? Exactly. Like me, Bacon has been forever unsuccessful at becoming a major star, but he’s also a truly tireless actor. He’s appeared in dozens of films, including quite a few excellent ones, so you must recognize that face. He was Sebastian Shaw, the man who killed Magneto’s mother, in X-Men: First Class; astronaut Jack Swigert, who blasted into space with Tom Hanks in Apollo 13; Detective Sean Devine in Mystic River; and the Invisible Man in The Invisible Man (2000 version) (okay, that last one doesn’t count).

In fact, Mr. Kevin Bacon has another identity: he is Hollywood’s “king of people piggybacking on his fame.” For a very long time, how easy it is to connect yourself to Kevin Bacon has been an important sign of whether an actor is doing well in Hollywood.

So what’s going on here?

This game is called the Kevin Bacon game (Kevin Bacon game).

The rules are very simple: if actor Wang Tiedan has worked with Kevin Bacon in a film or TV show, Wang Tiedan’s Kevin Bacon number is 1. If another actor, Zhang Tiezhu, has never worked with Bacon, but has worked with Wang Tiedan in some film or TV show, and Wang Tiedan has worked directly with Mr. Bacon, then Zhang Tiezhu’s Kevin Bacon number is 2. If several paths like this can connect someone to Mr. Bacon, use the shortest one to calculate the number.

In other words, the more direct your working relationship with Kevin Bacon, the smaller your Kevin Bacon number.

So what does the Kevin Bacon number mean? It means that if an actor has a very large Kevin Bacon number, they probably aren’t doing particularly well in Hollywood.

Why can we draw that conclusion? Because the network of working relationships among Hollywood film actors is a small-world network.

Small-world network is a concept in complexity science. In a small-world network, most nodes are not directly connected to one another, but some key nodes act like bridges, creating long-distance connections between nodes that would otherwise be far apart. As a result, through these key nodes, most nodes in the network can connect to one another in just a few steps.

There is an example of a small-world network on the screen. Take a look:

In this diagram, without those key nodes connected by line segments inside the ring, the distant nodes around the ring would need many connections before they could reach one another. With those few key nodes, this ring-shaped world suddenly becomes “smaller.”

Small-world networks are everywhere in real life. One of the most typical examples is the “social network.” Treat each person as a node, and relationships between people—friendships, working relationships, acquaintances, and so on—as links, and you get a social network.

Sometimes you’ll find that, in a social network like this, people who seem “far away” from you are actually “very close.” For example, the younger brother of a famous author you really like may turn out to be the boyfriend of your elementary-school classmate; or a new colleague you’ve just met may have gone to the same doctor as you. Whenever this happens, you may find yourself exclaiming: “This world is so small!”

That feeling is perfectly justified, because social networks really are small-world networks.

The famous social psychologist Stanley Milgram once conducted a very famous little experiment: he mailed letters to 298 people living in Nebraska, asking them to help forward each letter to a “final recipient”: a stockbroker working in Boston. If they didn’t know the stockbroker, they could send the letter to an acquaintance they thought might know him. And so the relay began.

The result was astonishing: although the United States had a population of hundreds of millions, connecting the first sender with the final recipient took only six people on average. This became the famous rule of Six Degrees of Separation (Six Degrees of Separation).

This rule vividly shows that real social networks are small worlds.

The network of working relationships among Hollywood film actors is also a social network, and it too is a small-world network. Within Hollywood’s social network, there are quite a few key nodes that can shorten the paths between actors.

And an actor like the tireless Mr. Kevin Bacon, who has appeared in dozens of films and TV shows, is bound to be very close to quite a few key nodes (in fact, he is a key node himself).

So as long as an actor isn’t too marginal within the small world of the “Hollywood acting circle,” they should be able to connect with Mr. Bacon in only a few steps. That’s why, if an actor’s Kevin Bacon number is very large, they probably aren’t doing particularly well in Hollywood.

**Well, if the social network of the real world is a small world,** then the distance between me and Mr. Kevin Bacon can’t be as great as I imagined. So what is my Kevin Bacon number?

I worked with Ni Ni on the radio drama The Genius on the Left, the Madman on the Right. In that program, Ni Ni voiced the female madwoman, Guo Xiaodong played the male madman, and Mr. Feng Yuanzheng played the writer interviewing the madman. Physicist Mr. Li Miao and I stood outside the fourth wall, taking on the role of the onscreen-commentary team, commenting on and analyzing what the madman in the story was thinking.

So I worked directly with Ni Ni; Ni Ni worked with Dutch actor Ron Smoorenburg in the film The Wrath of Vajra; and Ron Smoorenburg worked directly with Kevin Bacon in the film White Elephant.

So my Kevin Bacon number is astonishingly only 3. The social climbing worked!

That’s how I shamelessly slipped into Hollywood’s acting circle, and my position in the circle isn’t even all that marginal! Feel free to throw flowers in the comments and onscreen chat.

That’s all for this episode. As usual, I’ve put the main references mentioned in the episode in the text description below the video. I’ve also included a website where you can look up actors’ Kevin Bacon numbers, so if you’re curious, go check the number for an actor you like.

I’m Zhichao Wei. If you enjoy my programs, please follow, like, save, and comment. I’ll keep updating this channel with all kinds of serious and unserious psychology knowledge. Let’s understand psychology together, and use psychology to understand the world. See you next episode.

• Kevin Bacon number

  This website lets you look up an actor’s Kevin Bacon number: https://oracleofbacon.org