| Wikipedia Intro |
Daniel Dennett Ted Talk | Social Contagion Theory
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| Contagion Types |
Memetics vs Contagion | The Meme Machine
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| The Memeplex |
Viral Trademarks |
Cultural Selection Theory |
A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.
Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.
- Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution.
- Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success.
- Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate.
- Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.
and cultural evolution.
Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans,
who have evolved as efficient copiers of information
and behavior.
Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.
Dawkins noted that in a society with culture a person need not have biological descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death:
But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.
In that context,
Memetic lifecycle: transmission, retention
Memes, analogously to genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate; successful memes remain and spread, whereas unfit ones stall and are forgotten. Thus, memes that prove more effective at replicating and surviving are selected in the meme pool.
Memes first need retention. The longer a meme stays in its hosts, the higher its chances of propagation are. When a host uses a meme, the meme's life is extended. The reuse of the neural space hosting a certain meme's copy to host different memes is the greatest threat to that meme's copy. A meme that increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. On the contrary, a meme that shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear faster. However, as hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate a meme in the long term; memes also need transmission.
Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means). Memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time.
Memes reproduce by copying from a nervous system to another one, either by communication or imitation. Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behavior of another individual. Communication may be direct or indirect, where memes transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score. Adam McNamara has suggested that memes can be thereby classified as either internal or external memes (i-memes or e-memes).
Some commentators have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions. Social contagions such as fads, hysteria, copycat crime, and copycat suicide exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors.
Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":
- Quantity of parenthood: an idea that influences the number of children one has. Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas that directly or indirectly encourage a higher birth rate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birth rates.
- Efficiency of parenthood: an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents. Cultural separatism exemplifies one practice in which one can expect a higher rate of meme-replication—because the meme for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas.
- Proselytic: ideas generally passed to others beyond one's own children. Ideas that encourage the proselytism of a meme, as seen in many religious or political movements, can replicate memes horizontally through a given generation, spreading more rapidly than parent-to-child meme-transmissions do.
- Preservational: ideas that influence those that hold them to continue to hold them for a long time. Ideas that encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.
- Adversative: ideas that influence those that hold them to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those that hold them. Adversative replication can give an advantage in meme transmission when the meme itself encourages aggression against other memes.
- Cognitive: ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them. Cognitively transmitted memes depend heavily on a cluster of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely held in the population, and thus usually spread more passively than other forms of meme transmission. Memes spread in cognitive transmission do not count as self-replicating.
- Motivational: ideas that people adopt because they perceive some self-interest in adopting them. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes.
The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of
thought copied from person to person," regardless of whether that thought
contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could
consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in
which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a
gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the
self-replicating chromosome.
Dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur:
- variation - or the introduction of new change to existing elements;
- heredity or replication - or the capacity to create copies of elements;
- differential "fitness" - or the opportunity for one element to be more or less suited to the environment than another.
Dawkins emphasizes that the process of evolution naturally occurs whenever these conditions co-exist, and that evolution does not apply only to organic elements such as genes. He regards memes as also having the properties necessary for evolution, and thus sees meme evolution as not simply analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection. Dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves.
For example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture. Each tool-design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. Consequently, a successful meme may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host.
Unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian traits. Cultural memes will have the characteristic of Lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it. Take for example the case of the transmission of a simple skill such as hammering a nail, a skill that a learner imitates from watching a demonstration without necessarily imitating every discrete movement modeled by the teacher in the demonstration, stroke for stroke. Susan Blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of memes, characterizing the Darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the Lamarckian as "copying the product."
Clusters of memes, or memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes. Memeplexes comprise groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt. Memes that fit within a successful memeplex may gain acceptance by "piggybacking" on the success of the memeplex. As an example, John D. Gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained. Theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased vertical transmission of the parent religious memeplex. Similar memes are thereby included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or set of dogmas, eventually finding their way into secular law. This could also be referred to as the propagation of a taboo.
Memes 101: How Cultural Evolution Works
because of memes. Philosopher Daniel Dennett muses
on an idea put forward by Richard Dawkins
in 1976. - (Big Think)
Ever wondered where the word ‘meme’ comes from? Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett explains the term, coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, and its effects on our lives and history. How did we, as a species, become what we are – or more relevantly who we are? Natural selection and genetic evolution have made our physical bodies, but we are so much more than a collection of cells. We are also a conscious community, with language, music, cooking, art, poetry, dance, rituals, and humor. Dennett explains how these behaviors are the product of our cultural evolution. Memes are cultural replicators that spread like viruses, and only the most advantageous – or “the fittest” – of them survive. Daniel Dennett’s most recent book is - From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
Transcript- Daniel Dennett: Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. And what he proposed was that human culture was composed, at least in part, of elements, units that were like genes in that they were copied and copied and copied and copied and copied. And it was the differential copying, the differential replication of these items, these memes that accounted for the excellent design of so much in human culture. And this is a very repugnant and offensive idea to many people, especially in the humanities. They wanted to hang onto the idea of the God like genius creator who out of sheer conscious brilliant comprehension makes all these wonderful things, whether they're poems or bridges or whatever. He was saying in effect well yes people do make amazing things, but if you look at the projects in detail you see that they couldn't do that if they hadn't filled their head with all these informational things, which are like genes, which are also information. But they're not fast down through the germ line. They're not passed down through the sperm and the egg. You don't get them with your genes. You get them from the ambient culture, from your parents, from your peers, from the society in which you're raised. It requires perception.
Now a lot of people think we'll wait a minute there's a huge disanalogy here. Genes are DNA. What's the DNA of memes? And the first thing you have to appreciate is; no genes aren't DNA. Genes are the information carried by the DNA. Genes are no more DNA than poems are made of ink. I mean you can send somebody a poem that's written in ink or you can say it aloud. There's many different ways of transmitting that poem or saving that poem from one place to another.
The same thing is true of genes. Once you get used to thinking of genes as not DNA but the information carried by the patterns of the nucleotides of DNA, then you can see that there really is a nice parallel. Well then what's playing the role of DNA in the land of culture? What are the physical implementations? Well, they are wonderfully various. There is ink on paper. There's lines carved into stones. There's lines drawn in the sand. There's skywriting. And, of course, there's what we're doing right now – there's audible language.
And one of the great features of language, not sufficiently appreciated by those who aren't linguists, is that what makes language a potent medium for the transmission of information is that it's digitized in the same way that DNA is digitized. It's composed of fundamental elements, in the case of DNA it's ACGT, four different nucleotides. In the case of language it's 20 to 30 phonemes. We are designed to pick up the phonemes of our native language and then automatically we categorize incoming utterances by correcting them to the norm of whatever the phonemes in our language are. And it doesn't matter whether I say doooog or dog or doog or dog or dog, it all comes out as a dog. It doesn't take any effort to recognize that these are all tokens of the same type. That's digitization. And that's what makes it possible to transmit information from one person to another to another and the person in the middle doesn't have to understand what it means. All they have to do is copy the sequence of phonemes and the message will get through.
It looks as if we're pretty stupid. We're just walking breathing vectors that are carrying all these memes around in our heads sort of like having a cold, like viruses. And they are like viruses. And the first memes were even more like viruses because they weren't particularly useful. They were just habits that were catchy in one way or another and they spread or not and they didn't have to do any good they just had to be not too harmful. As long as their vectors stayed alive and spread them then they could spread, they could thrive just like the cold virus. The cold virus isn't for anything except for making more copies of the cold virus and early memes were just like that.
But eventually competition for utility arose. And now memes, whether they were words or other ways of doing things that actually were of benefit would spread differentially because there were better ways of doing things that could be not even recognized it's just that those who adopted them fared better than those who didn't. And before you know it you have competitive differential replication of cultural items and that's what does all the heavy lifting and design work in getting human culture off the ground.
It's only very recently that we've had people who style themselves as meme creators, as designers of memes. Think about coined words. You have a vocabulary 50, 60, 70,000 words. Very few of them were deliberately coined by anybody, yet they're all useful and they are all robust enough to survive until they go extinct, words go extinct all the time. And so it is with culture much more generally. It's composed of elements which have histories. They have lineages. They can combine in ways that genes normally don't but can. And the result is this tremendous creative stew of differential replication, creating ideas that people latch onto and benefit from without having to understand why they're good or how they're good and they never would have invented them themselves. That is a brilliant piece of engineering and nobody invented it.
Social Contagion Theory - The conditions for the spreading of ideas
behaviour, emotions or conditions
spreading spontaneously through
a group or social network.
Various Typologies have been
proposed for social contagion.
(three typologies below);
1 - By What is Being Transmitted
Social contagion can be broadly spilt into;
- behavioural contagion and
- emotional contagion.
The spread of ideas is sometimes considered a third broad category, though that is often considered part of memetics.
Dr Paul Marsden has said (behavioural contagion) can be split into six sub categories:
hysterical contagions, deliberate self-harm contagions, contagions of aggression, rule violation contagions, consumer behaviour contagions, and financial contagions.
2- By Causal Pathway
Three main causes of social contagion have been proposed.
Disinhibitory
Disinhibitory contagion involves a type of behaviour that person already has some desire to engage in, but from which normally they would refrain due to a desire to comply with social norms. When they witness others in the crowd performing the behaviour, this can break the inhibitory effect.
Echo contagion
Echo contagion represents the spontaneous imitation of a behaviour, or transition into conformance with an emotional state shared by others.
Hysterical contagion
Hysterical contagion represents the unwanted transmission of a behaviour, emotion or affect among a group by unknown means. Unlike with echo or disinhibitory contagion, what is being transmitted may in no way be desirable or attractive, yet it transmits anyway.
3 - By Cardinality of Exposure
Social contagion can be examined with threshold models based on how much exposure an individual needs before transmission of a behaviour or emotion occurs. Some models assume an individual needs to be convinced by a fraction of their social contacts above a given threshold to adopt a novel behaviour. Therefore, the number of exposures will not increase chances of contagion unless the number of source exposures pass a certain threshold. The threshold value can divide contagion processes to two types: Simple contagion and Complex contagion.
Simple contagion
With simple contagion, an individual only needs a single exposure to the new behaviour. For instance, cars travel in groups on a two-lane highway since the car in each cluster travels at a slower speed than the car behind it. This relative speed spreads through other cars who slow down to match the speed of the car in front.
Complex contagion
With complex contagion, the individual needs to be in contact with two or more sources exhibiting the novel behaviour. This is when copying behaviours needs reinforcement or encouragement from multiple sources. Multiple sources, especially close friends, can make imitation legitimate, credible and worthwhile due to collective effort put in. Examples of complex contagions can be copying risky behaviour or joining social movements and riots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contagion
Social Contagion in Social Science
Memetics & Social Contagion: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
Published in The Journal of Memetics: Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission 1998 Vol 2.
The Contagion Phenomenon
Two centuries ago, a wave of suicides swept across Europe as if the very act of suicide was somehow infectious. Shortly before their untimely deaths, many of the suicide victims had come into contact with Johann von Goethe's tragic tale "The Sorrows of Young Werther," in which the hero, Werther, himself commits suicide. In an attempt to stem what was seen as a rising tide of imitative suicides, anxious authorities banned the book in several regions in Europe (Phillips 1974, Marsden 1998).
During the two hundred years that have followed the publication and subsequent censorship of Goethe’s novel, social scientific research has largely confirmed the thesis that affect, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour can indeed spread through populations as if they were somehow infectious. Simple exposure sometimes appears to be a sufficient condition for social transmission to occur. This is the social contagion thesis; that sociocultural phenomena can spread through, and leap between, populations more like outbreaks of measles or chicken pox than through a process of rational choice.
The term contagion (kentâ-jen) itself has its roots in the Latin word contagio, and quite literally means "from touch". Contagion therefore refers to a process of transmission by touch or contact. The Microsoft Dictionary (Microsoft 1997) defines contagion as the
"transmission of a disease by direct contact with an infected person or object; a disease or poison transmitted in this way; the means of transmission; the transmission of an emotional state, e.g. excitement; a harmful influence."
From this definition, contagion refers to 1) the social transmission, by contact, of biological disease, and 2) the social transmission, by contact, of sociocultural artefacts or states.
The contagion concept first became popular as both a descriptive and explanatory device for social, as opposed to biological, phenomena in the late 19th century France, notably through the work of James Mark Baldwin (1894), Gabriel Tarde (1903) and Gustave Le Bon (1895). Empirical research into the phenomenon did not, however, begin until the 1950s. This more recent research has unequivocally established the fact of the social contagion phenomenon, and has identified its operation in a number of areas of social life. The implications of this social contagion research are radical: The evidence suggests that under certain circumstances, mere 'touch' or 'contact' with culture appears to be a sufficient condition for social transmission to occur.
Despite this promising start, social contagion research has evolved into a field that is now unorganised, disparate and incoherent, lacking both an organising principle and a conceptual framework (Levy and Nail 1993).
There is, in fact, a complete absence of agreement among researchers as to the particular mechanism that underlies social contagion. This lack of consensus has lead to a proliferation of definitions of the phenomenon which range from the vague to the plain contradictory. For example, the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology (Reber 1995) defines contagion simply as the "spread of an activity or a mood through a group". The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Sociology (Marshall 1994) adopts a similarly vague definition of "ideas moving rapidly through a group." Other definitions, whilst more extensive, provide little in the way of increased clarity or utility. The Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology (Sutherland 1995) defines contagion as "the spread of ideas, feelings and, some think, neuroses through a community or group by suggestion, gossip, imitation etc." Some definitions attempt to clarify the concept in terms of a putative uncritical and non-rational mode of inheritance/infection. Thus, The Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Psychology (Furnham 1983) defines contagion as a process and form of collective excitement "in which emotions and behavioural patterns spread rapidly and are accepted uncritically by the members of a collective." In contrast, other definitions make no mention of this uncritical nature of inheritance but specify instead the perception of non-intentionality in transmission (e.g. Levy and Nail 1993) such that contagion becomes the "spread of affect, attitude or behaviour from Person A (“the initiator") to person B (“the "recipient") where the recipient does not perceive an intentional influence attempt on the part of the initiator." A very different definition of contagion has also been proposed, referring to neither the non-intentional nature of transmission, nor the uncritical nature of inheritance, but rather to a putative phenomenon of disinhibition. Thus, Wheeler (1966) states that:
"If the set of test conditions T1 exists, then contagion has occurred if and only if Person X (the observer) performs behaviour N (BN) where T1 is specified as follows: a) A set of operations has been performed on Person X which is known to produce instigation toward BN in members of the class to which X belongs: b) BN exists in the response repertoire of X, and there are no physical restraints or barriers to prevent the performance of BN; c) X is not performing BN; d) X observes the performance of BN by Person Y (the model)." (p. 180)
Together, these very different definitions of contagion have been operationalised to produce studies that have little in common except the observable phenomenon of spread by contact. Most of these insist on the presence of a number of internal states and mechanisms (intentionality, approach-avoidance, conflict etc) for the process to count as ‘true’, as opposed to merely ‘apparent’ contagion. However, these various qualifications have not only contributed to the confused nature of social contagion research, but have also undermined the central rationale of the metaphor; that observable culture spreads as if it has contagious properties.
One of the clearest and most inclusive definitions of social contagion is that proposed by The Handbook of Social Psychology (Lindzey and Aronsson 1985). This definition refrains from positing as necessary internal states. Instead social contagion is held to be "the spread of affect or behaviour from one crowd participant to another; one person serves as the stimulus for the imitative actions of another." Such a definition has the advantage of focusing and clarifying the observable contagion phenomenon, whatever internal states may or may not be present. It should be noted however that there is no reason for the contagion phenomenon to be restricted to the crowd scenario, to be sure, the mass media allows for the possibility of contagion through dispersed collectivities.
Social Scientific Research on Social Contagion
Despite the varied definitions of contagion, the empirical research has tended to confirm that the hypothesis that human behaviour clusters in both space and time even in the absence of coercion and rationale. This tendency towards homogeneity has been identified in a number of types of behaviour using one or more of three basic approaches. In the case of dispersed collectivities or masses, evidence for and against the social contagion phenomenon has been typically drawn from correlational studies where aggregate statistics on exposure and infection are correlated, such as media reporting on suicide stories and suicide rates (e.g. Phillips 1974, Marsden 1998). In the case of local collectivities such as crowds, research methods have included field studies using participant or non-participant observation (e.g. Reicher 1984 on Bristol riots), or formal experimental studies under laboratory conditions (e.g. Freedman, Birsky and Cavoukian 1980). Bringing the disparate data from the various methods together, meta-analyses of the contagion phenomenon have also been conducted (e.g. Levy and Nail 1993).
Substantively, social contagion research can be broken down into two major areas, studies investigating emotional contagion (the spread of mood and affect through populations by simple exposure) and studies investigating behavioural contagion (the spread of behaviours through populations by simple exposure). Behavioural contagion research can itself be broken down into six broad areas, based on the nature of the behaviour that is spread; hysterical contagions, deliberate self-harm contagions, contagions of aggression, rule violation contagions, consumer behaviour contagions, and financial contagions.
A hysterical contagion is "the dissemination of a set of symptoms among a population in which no manifest basis for the symptoms may be established". (Kerckhoff and Back 1968). Also known as contagious psychogenic illness (Cohen, Colligan, Wester II and Smith 1978), hysterical contagions involve the spread by contact of reported symptoms and experiences usually associated with clinical hysteria (hallucinations, nausea, vomiting, fainting etc) in the absence of a biological contagion. The paradigmatic example of hysterical contagion is the "June Bug" incident that occurred in a US textile factory in 1962, where 62 factory workers reported having been bitten by a mythical bug that ‘caused’ symptoms such as numbness and nausea (Kerckhoff and Back 1968). More recently, Colligan and Murphy (1982) have analysed a further 23 examples of hysterical contagion - "the collective occurrence of a set of physical symptoms and related beliefs among two or more individuals in the absence of an identifiable pathogen", and found that it was the verbal reporting of the symptoms that spread in a contagious-like manner rather than the symptoms themselves. Their research also largely confirmed Kerckhoff and Back's theory that those susceptible to hysterical contagion were suffering from intra-psychic stress. More recently still, Showalter (1997) has suggested that chronic fatigue, Gulf war and multiple personality syndromes might spread by contagion, and Pfefferbaum and Pfefferbaum (1998) have argued post-traumatic stress disorder also spreads by contagion. The hallucinatory component of hysterical contagion may also account for the spread of supernatural phenomena such as the sightings of Diana ghosts following the death of the princess in 1997 (Marsden 1997), as well as reports of UFO sightings and alien abductions (Houran and Lange 1996, Showalter 1997).
A second class of behaviour that appears to spread through populations by contagion is rule breaking or rule violation behaviour. Evidence has tended to support the thesis that an individual's exposure to rule violations increases their likelihood of engaging in similar or identical behaviour. Such rule violation contagions have been identified in teenage smoking (Ritter and Holmes 1969, Rowe, Chassin, Presson, Edwards and Sherman 1992), speeding (Connolly and Aberg 1993), substance abuse (Ennett, Flewelling, Lindrooth and Norton 1997), delinquency (Jones 1998), youth sex (Rodgers and Rowe 1993) and criminality (Jones and Jones 1995).
A third class of behaviour, which has been the focus of empirical social contagion research, is deliberate self-harm (DSH), of which suicide is the paradigmatic example. Specifically, research has shown that suicide rates and other examples of DSH vary proportionally to the extensity, intensity and content of exposure, both in local and dispersed collectivities (Phillips 1974, 1980, 1982, Stack 1987, 1990, Higgins and Range 1996, Gould 1990, 1996, Gould, Wallenstein and Kleinman 1987, Gould, Wallenstein and Davidson 1989, see Marsden 1998 for a ‘memetic’ overview). Contagion is now an accepted risk factor in suicide research, and the overwhelming evidence has prompted the establishment of several government programmes to minimise the effects of suicide contagion.
Another, very different focus of social contagion research has been the financial contagion phenomenon, manifested in the behaviour of stock markets which lurch from state to state as a result of selling panics and buying frenzies that sweep across the globe. Financial contagion research has tended to investigate the various factors that may exacerbate and contribute to the phenomenon such as analysis techniques, the level and nature of information available to dealers, and social communication networks (e.g. Orlean 1992, Temzelides 1997, Lux 1998).
A fifth area of contagion research has investigated the contagious properties of consumer behaviour which sometimes results in the spread of consumer fashions and fads through populations in a manner more indicative of an influenza epidemic than rational behaviour (Marsden in press). This phenomenon has prompted the development of deterministic and stochastic models with good predictive power that forecast both sales realisation and new product adoption patterns based on the ‘infectiousness’ of consumer goods (Bass, Mahajan and Muller 1990, Rashevsky 1939, 1951, Rapoport 1983, Rogers 1995).
A sixth focus of social contagion research has been the contagion of aggressive behaviour, a phenomenon that has been shown to operate in both local and dispersed collectivities. Whilst much of this research has been of a descriptive nature within transitory and unpredictable angry crowds (mobs) (Bandura 1973, Reicher 1984, Lachman 1996), results have been supported with experimental evidence (Bandura, Ross and Ross 1963, Wheeler and Caggiula 1966, Wheeler and Levine 1967, Wheeler and Smith 1967, Goethals and Perlstein 1978). In dispersed collectivities, where the contagion of aggression is mediated by the mass media, research has focused on measuring exposure and infection rates and testing for correlations. (Atkin, Greenberg, Korzenny, and McDermott 1979, Sheehan 1983, Phillips 1983).
Finally, social contagion research has not only restricted itself to the
spread of behaviours, a significant number of studies have identified a
variety of emotional contagions. The emotional contagion phenomenon was
originally defined by McDougall (1920) as "the principle of direct induction
of emotion by way of the primitive sympathetic response" and more recently
by Sullins (1991) as "the process by which individuals seem to catch the
"mood" of those around them". The proposed mechanism for this spread of mood
is an automatic and continuous human tendency to synchronise facial
expressions, voices, and postures with others in the immediate environment
(Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson 1993). These behavioural cues then appear to
trigger the appropriate emotions in a system of feedback. The Emotional
Contagion Scale (Doherty 1997) has been recently developed and validated to
assist further research in this area, which has already identified various
examples of emotional contagion including mood (Hsee, Hatfield and Chemtob
1992), anxiety (Behnke, Sawyer and King 1994), fear (Gump and Kulik 1997),
appreciation (Freedman and Perlick 1979) and enjoyment (Freedman et al.
1980).
The Social Contagion Phenomenon Explained (Away)?
Whilst the vast majority of social contagion research has demonstrated the existence and voracity of the empirical phenomenon, the theoretical implications of the results have not been addressed. The results of contagion research suggest that just as we do not choose to be infected with, and pass on, biological contagions, we often behave as if we have little control over the culture we become infected with and consequently spread. Such an observation undermines the traditional understanding of the human subject as an autonomous agent whose action is defined by individual intentionality and rational evaluation. Whilst we may like to believe that we consciously and rationally decide on how to respond to situations, social contagion evidence suggests that some of the time this is simply not the case. Rather than generating and ‘having’ beliefs, emotions and behaviours, social contagion research suggests that, in some very real sense, those beliefs, emotions and behaviours ‘have’ us.
The failure of mainstream social science to take this implication of social contagion evidence seriously is certainly in part due to the above-mentioned disorganised and incoherent state of the field. However, the failure is also probably due to a fundamental incompatibility between the concept of social contagion and the Cartesian voluntarism implicit in much social science. In fact, standard explanations of social contagion can be characterised by an almost desperate attempt to restore irreducible individual agency and rational action to the phenomenon.
In trying to explain away the social contagion phenomenon, two types of theory have been developed. Firstly, a number of theories suggest that the spread of homogeneity is a consequence of conscious and deliberate imitation in situations usually defined by uncertainty or ambiguity.
Secondly, contagion has been accounted for by putative latent homogeneities in terms of prior motivations that antecede the observable phenomenon.
An example of the first type of explanation is Emergent Norm Theory (e.g. Turner 1964) which states that the spread of behaviour through a population is not by contagion (contact) but is the result of conscious and deliberate attempts to adhere to norms and rules emerging out of complex and subtle interaction within collectivities. Similarly Social Learning Theory (e.g. Bandura 1971, 1986) holds that homogeneity is the result of the conscious and deliberate imitation that takes place when individuals are presented with uncertain and ambiguous situations. When we are unsure of how to react to a stimulus or a situation, these theories suggest that we actively look to others for guidance and consciously imitate them.
An example of the second type of explanation is Convergence Theory (e.g. Turner and Killian 1987) which suggests that homogeneity and clustering is not a result of contagion but the result of prior shared motivations that cause collectivities to converge in the first place. From this perspective, similarities cause collectivities and not vice versa. A similar explanation is provided by Disinhibition Theory (e.g. Freud 1922, Redl 1949, Wheeler 1966, Ritter and Holmes 1969, Levy and Nail 1993) which states that contagion is "essentially imitation mediated by restraint release due to observing another perform an action that the individual is in conflict about performing himself" (Freedman 1982). In other words, from this perspective, behaviours are not transmitted by contact; rather inhibited behaviours (sometimes unconscious and "primitive") that are already held in an individual’s behavioural repertoire are simply released. Thus, homogeneity spreads as a result of the intra-psychic conflict resolution that occurs through social evidence. Another variation on the 'prior motivations' theme is Deindividuation Theory (e.g. Diener 1976, 1979, Festinger, Pepitone and Newcombe 1952, Zimbardo 1969). This theory holds that the anonymous nature of collectivities can engender a restraint reduction in individuals. This sense of anonymity is held to cause a reduction in the individual's sense of personal accountability and responsibility, allowing them to engage in behaviour from which they might otherwise abstain. When anonymity leads to restraint reduction of similar behaviours within individuals within a collectivity, this produces the appearance of contagion.
Both the ‘conscious choice’ and ‘prior motivations’ theories may explain the social contagion phenomenon in some circumstances, but none of them can comprehensively explain the phenomenon. Indeed, it is difficult to see how any of the theories could provide a credible explanation of either emotional or hysterical contagion, except by maintaining that we either choose illnesses or emotional states based on those that are around us, or worse we have hidden desires to be ill, angry or anxious! Social contagion stretches Cartesian rational action theory to such a degree that the latter becomes an untenable explanation of the former. Valiant attempts at squeezing irreducible individual agency and rational evaluation into the phenomenon are simply at odds with data. The evidence shows that we inherit and transmit behaviours, emotions, beliefs and religions not through rational choice but contagion. Does this rejection of rational choice/action theories mean that social contagion is a homeless body of research, a body of evidence with no theoretical home to go to? No, I think there is an alternative paradigm that has the potential to explain more of the data more of the time. That paradigm is memetics.
The Memetic Stance
Social theorists often use the language of architecture, they speak of theory building, laying theoretical foundations, or constructing theoretical edifices. This is useful language, it indicates the step by step, laborious nature of their enterprise. Meme theory is no different in this respect, many problems still have to be resolved within the new paradigm (Rose 1998). However, meme theory is developed enough to be operationalised conservatively by adopting what could reasonably be called a memetic stance. Not a fully blown theory, the memetic stance is more of a way of looking a the world, a set of guiding principles, a useful heuristic, based on some hopefully important insight into the nature of the social world. Whether the memetic stance turns out to be an explanatory device in an evolutionary extension of folk psychology, or a proper theory of mind where memes are internally instantiated in the neural networks of our brains is an issue that will one day have to be resolved empirically. For now, by adopting the memetic stance, these issues may be bracketed, and research can proceed based on the utility of this ontologically minimalist heuristic.
So what exactly is the memetic stance? The memetic stance states that human condition is minimally defined by two selective processes operating in two different substrates, the biological and social (Marsden forthcoming). This is because the necessary conditions for the evolutionary loop of replication, variation and selection are present in the two substrates. This is not contentious in itself, what is more contentious is that the memetic stance sees these processes operating at the level of what is being replicated, that is, the gene and the meme. Thus, the memetic stance involves taking a meme’s-eye perspective and understanding of the social world, thinking not in terms of selfish genes, but selfish memes. Taking this memetic stance has allowed researchers to explain the spread of non-rational behaviour in terms of the fitness of that behaviour itself. Examples include altruism (Allison 1992, 1993, Blackmore forthcoming) chain letters (Goodenough and Dawkins 1994, Hofstadter 1995, Allison 1993), chain e-mail (Jones 1995) religions and cults (Dawkins 1993, Lynch 1996 and Cowley 1997), political revolutions and war (Vajk 1989), religious scriptures (Pyper 1997) Usenet content (Best 1997), management practices (Price and Shaw 1996, 1998), media representations, (Rushkoff 1994), urban legends (Gross 1996) and consumer behaviour (Marsden in press, Brodie 1996).
The memetic stance suggests that design in the social world is at least partly a product of the evolutionary loop of replication, variation and selection operating on culture, or more specifically cultural instructions coding for behaviour (Cloak 1975, Marsden forthcoming). It is not necessary to invoke conscious choice or rational evaluation by an entity - homuncular, divine or otherwise - standing miraculously outside evolution to explain design; given enough iterations, natural selection will inexorably and inevitably give rise to design.
Once we take the memetic stance, features of the world that are difficult to explain from the orthodoxy of traditional social science become non-miraculous and eminently explicable. The memetic stance can explain not only apparent design in the social world, but importantly it can also explain phenomena that seem to negate the omnipresence of individual agency in human affairs. Put simply, the memetic stance states that the reason why some social behaviour doesn't seem to make sense from the perspective of the individual is because we are looking at that behaviour at the wrong level. We are taking an anthropocentric or homuncular view of a social world that was created at least in part at a memetic level. Trying to explain the social world from the perspective of the individual is like trying to explain the movements of a car without reference to the driver. The movements of a car can be rationally described, explained and understood in terms of the car's own needs as (somewhat circuitous) trips from petrol pump to petrol pump. However, by ignoring the driver much of what is observed makes no sense at all. The same argument holds for the social world, just as we can explain much of our (somewhat circuitous) social behaviour in terms of the needs of the meme-vehicle (individual), much of what is interesting about that behaviour is overlooked. By taking the memetic stance we can account for what happens when the needs of an individual cannot explain behaviour, the equivalent of all the non-petrol seeking activity of a car, and this stance provides an evolutionary rationale for explaining why the social contagion phenomenon occurs.
Social Contagion from the Memetic Stance
Taking the memetic stance involves, to use an overused concept, a true Kuhnian paradigm shift; just as evolution in the biological world evolves according to what is better (not best) for the gene in its environment, so too does the social world evolve according to what is better for the meme. The memetic stance involves describing, explaining and understanding social behaviour from this meme's-eye perspective. From the memetic stance “What makes this person want to do x?" becomes “What is it about x that makes people want to do it?” Social contagion can be explained by the memetic stance because culture has an independent evolutionary dynamic that is derived from the genetically evolved human capacity and predisposition to replicate culture (see Flinn 1997 for a review). Because social learning is an evolved psychological trait, it follows that we have an evolved predisposition to replicating the behaviour of those around us. Successful social contagions are those elements of culture that operate as both stimulus and response, and that are adapted to the evolved architecture of the human brain. No homunculus need be invoked, only evoked imitation.
In this way, the memetic stance deconstructs the homunculus into what can be understood as replicating cultural instructions (memes). This opens up an exciting research programme for memetics, as contagion is no longer understood as a metaphor but an evolutionary process. Social contagion research, from the memetic stance could focus on the particular characteristics that render behaviours and emotions. It could also investigate why certain people are immune to certain contagions, or how they develop resistance to contagion, or conversely what makes certain people particularly susceptible to contagion, and others not.
Similarly, memetic research could look for the limiting factors of the contagion phenomenon in both time and space. How, for example, is social contagion bounded? Can social contagion epidemics burn themselves out and if so, how? How does a contagious epidemic become an endemic trait in the social world? Is it possible to quarantine areas exposed to contagion, or quarantine those who have been infected? Can individuals be vaccinated against contagion? How long is the incubation period, that is, the time from exposure to infection? What are the primary vectors of contagions, that is, what are the primary channels of infection? Are contagions specific or diffuse? These are all questions that are more or less precluded in a traditional paradigm dominated by a Cartesian homuncularism and rational action theory which essentially deny the existence of the social contagion phenomenon. By deconstructing the homunculus into a web of replicating instructions, the memetic stance allows the social contagion phenomenon to become a theoretically informed research enterprise.
Memetics and Social Contagion: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
Taking the memetic stance allows research to proceed with the objective of explaining the spread of non-rational behaviour in terms of the fitness of that behaviour itself. Until recently, such memetic research has been of a largely non-rigorous and anecdotal nature. Despite offering the exciting prospect of being an autonomous social theory that is compatible and coherent with, but not reducible to, our knowledge of the biological world, the emerging discipline of memetics has yet to produce any concrete results. This is essentially because the issue of how to successfully operationalise the emerging paradigm has yet to be addressed; memeticists have yet to exploit their innovative analytical framework to build a body of theoretically informed empirical research.
It is here that the body of social contagion research may be of particular use to memetics, offering itself up as a rich source of empirical evidence, whilst offering important methodological lessons and inspiration for future research. For example, the emotional contagion scale developed by Doherty (1997) could be used by memeticists, as could the field studies, correlational and experimental methods that have been exploited by social contagion researchers. More generally, memeticists could develop the social contagion research tradition of using the substrate neutral tools of epidemiology to assist their research programme. These tools could be adapted to provide useful information about differential incidence and prevalence of evolving cultural traits, as well as structure of endemic and epidemic features of society.
The use of epidemiological tools would have the advantage of allowing
memetic research to proceed without making any ontological claims as to the
nature or status of what exactly is being spread. Epidemiology is not the
study of the inheritance of particular diseases or pathologies per se;
rather it is the study of the distribution and pattern of the measurable
effects of infection. Memetics qua social epidemiology might aspire to a
similar goal. In the same way that causal mechanisms in the epidemiology of
disease depend on, and vary with, the particular pathology that is being
studied, taking the memetic stance does not require that social patterns be
reduced to any one particular selective mechanism. Epidemiology may proceed
independently of the aetiology of social products being researched; no
assumptions about the heterogeneity or homogeneity of causal mechanisms are
necessary.
Conclusion
The emerging paradigm of memetics and the established tradition of social contagion research do not simply have much to learn from each other, they are in fact two sides of the same social epidemiological coin, the former a theory-rich version of the latter, and the latter an evidence-rich version of the former. Taking the memetic stance is a radical move, but there are some wheels, particularly of the methodological variety, that just don't need to be reinvented by memeticists, because they can already be found in social contagion research. Equally, memetics brings to the social contagion table an innovative conceptual framework with an important evolutionary component that the latter currently lacks. By integrating social contagion research and the memetic paradigm we would allow for the development a robust body of theoretically informed empirical research. In doing this we will be laying one more foundation for the long overdue Kuhnian paradigm shift that will finally see the integration of social science within a broader evolutionary paradigm.
Dr Paul Marsden is a research psychologist at the London School of Economics
The author would like to thank members of Meme Lab, Sue Blackmore, Nick Rose and Derek Gatherer, for discussing and reviewing earlier drafts of this article and for their useful constructive criticism. The usual qualifier of course applies.
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The Meme Machine
Susan Backmore - https://www.susanblackmore.uk/In the book The Meme Machine, Blackmore tries to create a consistent vocabulary, since memetics has had a wide range of different terminologies and therefore, in Blackmore's opinion, many misleading concepts. Some of the terms that are central in her book include:
Copy-the-product: e.g. make a copy of the soup. This is more prone to error since it requires an analytic capability of the soup itself and then a synthetic ability to combine the recognised elements. Any inserted errors will be passed on in the event of this copy of a soup being copied.
Copy-the-instructions: e.g. make a copy of the soup recipe. This is less error prone since the important elements of the soup are identified and the synthetic method explained. Any errors in using the recipe will not be passed on to future copiers since they will receive the recipe itself.
Meme Fear: The idea that we are vessels for memes unacceptably undermines the popular understanding of free will and autonomy.
Memeplex: Memes that are replicated together, such as religions and cultures.
Memetic Theory of Altruism: She proposes that meme theory explains altruism better than genetics. That other things being equal, more people will observe altruistic behavior than selfish behavior, will like the altruistic person better than the selfish one, and will be more likely to adopt the behaviors of the altruistic person than the selfish one.
The Meme Machine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meme_Machine
Meme Warfare - How Countries Are Weaponizing Memes
The Memeplex
The study of memes, units of cultural information, often involves the examination of meme complexes or memeplexes. Memeplexes, comparable to the gene complexes in biology, consist of a group of memes that are typically present in the same individual. This presence is due to the implementation of Universal Darwinism's theory, which postulates that memes can more effectively reproduce themselves when they collaborate or "team up".
Various manifestations of memeplexes can be observed in our everyday surroundings, and they usually have a profound impact on shaping individual and societal behaviors. Some of the most common examples include:
Belief Systems and Ideologies:
This refers to a wide array of constructs such as religions, philosophies, political alignments, and overall worldviews. All of these systems are composed of multiple interrelated memes that collectively form a cohesive belief system.
Organizations and Groups:
Entities such as churches, businesses, political parties, and clubs also illustrate memeplexes. These groups often share a common set of principles, rules, or beliefs that are propagated among their members.
Behavioral Patterns:
These include various cultural practices and routines, such as musical practices, ceremonies, marriage rituals, festivities, hunting techniques, and sports.
Contrary to inherited gene complexes, memeplexes encounter less pressure to provide benefits to the individuals exhibiting them for their replication. This distinction is due to the fact that memes and memeplexes propagate virally via horizontal transmission, making their survival not solely dependent on the success of their hosts.
For memes and memeplexes to successfully replicate, they do not necessarily have to be useful, accurate, or factual. As an example, the geocentric model was a widely accepted concept despite its inaccuracies and has since been largely supplanted by more scientifically sound theories.
Prominent figures like philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and consciousness researcher Susan Blackmore, the author of The Meme Machine, advocate for the field of memetics, the study of memes and memeplexes. These thinkers argue that memes and memeplexes have a substantial influence on our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors, shaping our cultural evolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex
Memetic Theory, Trademarks & The Viral Meme Mark
This Article proposes that memetic theory is a useful lens through which to view trademarks, particularly as there has been a rise in the number of applications for culturally-driven words and catchphrases in the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Memetic theory, or memetics, is a scientific field related to how units of information evolve and replicate.
These units of information, called memes, undergo a process of natural selection comparable to that of genes. To survive as trademarks, memes must not only exist in the proper form, but they must also subsist in an environment where replication, variation, and selection exist in appropriate measure. Under current trademark jurisprudence, over-protection and over-enforcement of trademarks pose a threat to the natural selection environment. The recent phenomenon of trademark applications for culturally driven words and catchphrases is but one manifestation of the interaction between memetic theory and trademark law. Applying memetics to trademark law calls for a reassessment of current legal standards. This Article concludes by offering further insight into where to explore the intersection between this incipient science and trademark law.
https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1318&context=ripl
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Cultural Selection Theory
Social Contagion Theory’s epidemiological approach construes social entities as analogous to parasites that are transmitted virally through a population of biological organisms.
Evolutionary epistemology's focus lies in causally connecting evolutionary biology and rationality by generating explanations for why traits for rational behavior or thought patterns would have been selected for in a species’ evolutionary history.
Memetics models cultural change after population genetics, taking cultural units to be analogous to genes.
A good example of this theory is found by looking to the reason large businesses tend to grow larger. The answer includes the benefits of mass production and distribution, international advertising, and more funds for product development. These self-amplifying effects, known as the economies of scale, give rise to selection effects which have a quantitative nature, unlike the qualitative effects described by the theory of memetics.
On the whole, cultural selection theory embraces the inherent complexity of cultural change and vouches for a systemic, rather than deconstructionist, approach to analyzing the way a society's norms and values change.
Cultural selection theory - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_selection_theory
Why People Go Along With The Crowd - "Social Contagion" Theory Explained
