On what makes memes popular

An idea/meme tends to be more popular/viral if it is useful. However, many memes are -or have become- useless but are nevertheless still widespread and thriving. How can some ideas be both irrelevant and popular? Firstly, the timing of an idea is crucial: an idea can capture mindshare when the time is right, much in the same way a company captures marketshare when people are ready for a new product or service; and once an idea captured this mindshare, it will be hard to dislodge it with new competing ideas. Secondly, an idea/meme can also appeal to our lazy brains by offering a simple explanation for a complex world.

How useful a meme is to the carrier of the meme (us) is generally correlated to its level of contagiousness, i.e. the better the meme serves us, the more we tend to spread it (applicable to countless memes, for example: boiling scalpels before an operation, drinking bloody marys after a hangover, or coughing to cover the sound of farts). But some memes manage to become immensely popular without offering much in return. What other attributes do they have going for them?

1. First mover’s advantage: just as Amazon won a decisive battle by being one of the first in e-commerce websites, many ideas survive largely because of the initial support they garnered. Galileo’s research wasn’t the first to demonstrate that the Earth wasn’t at the centre of the universe, nor was Darwin’s Origin of Species the first book to refute creationism. Others had spotted and exposed the errors in those theories before, but reversing the tide of a popular idea can take centuries. In fact, we can confidently predict many other misconceptions will likely never be turned around by homo sapiens. As a general rule, new ideas are considered guilty until proven innocent.

Furthermore, today’s ideas are the construction blocks for tomorrow’s. When having any point/counterpoint discussion, academics often refer to the original author who was first quoted by an academic on this very topic, often without even bothering to read it. Consequentially, you can expect that a theory which is transmitted by the right apostoples at the right time can become the ultimate reference for the ages. Nassim Taleb makes this point in The Black Swan: “I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.”

2. Story telling quality: there seems to be an unlimited amount of literature on how “telling a story” can make an idea more viral. You don’t need to talk to an ad guru to figure this one out: we’ve all experienced how setting someone’s name in a contextual framework or finding a pattern in a number sequence helps us remember them better. Similarly when an idea can be visualized –if only symbolically-, it stands a much greater chance of being remembered and passed on. French anthropologist Dan Sperber argues that cognitive processes are geared toward the maximisation of relevance, that is, a search for an optimal balance between cognitive efforts and cognitive effects. In other words, keep it simple.

Many stories flourish simply because they help us make sense out of things that don’t otherwise (see conspiracy theories). Economists are still making a living from offering predictions even though they have systematically failed to anticipate events correctly in the past. Or in the words of Taleb: “They’re no more reliable than astrologers, and they do more damage.” He goes on to explain how the ludic fallacy makes us ready to accept easy (and often wrong) explanations:

We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (bullshitt), the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Française, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated.

Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters — we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial — and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort.