Reduction to Maximum Independent Set Suppose you had a set $P$ of people. Every person $p_j \in P$ is familiar with atleast one other person $p_i$ (familiarity is symmetric). Is there a subset $S$ of people such that for $|S| \ge k$, no two people in $S$ know each other? Show that the problem is NP-Complete.

Clearly this resembles the Maximum Independent Set problem, however, I am having trouble seeing how to do the reduction. My idea is to generate a graph $G'$ such that vertices represents people and an edge between two vertices means those two people know each other. 

The problem is, this graph can be disconnected so any ideas as to how this can be reduced?

EDIT:

Take for instance this graph $G'$



One possible Maximum Independent Set is clearly $\{2,3,7,5\}$ but does it matter if the graph is disconnected?
Your problem, as stated, is already the independent set problem, as defined e.g. on Wikipedia.
A very similar NP-Complete problem is Clique, which is part of Karp's original 21 NP-complete problems, where, given a graph $G$ and an integer $k$, you try to find a complete subgraph of size $k$. It is easy to see that looking for an independent set in a graph is the same as looking for a clique in its complement graph.
In Karp's paper one can also find a straightforward reduction from SAT to Clique, and the reduction does not depend on whether the graph is connected or not. Hence it does not matter whether your graph is connected or disconnected.