In the world of reaction images, doom rolling and “brain rot”, memes have become one of the primary methods of processing reality. But when symbolic shortcuts replace deeper thinking, our understanding of the world can become shallow and reactive.
A lot of our online interactions revolve around sharing memes. Friends on social media, message boards, and group chats can spend days communicating with each other only through snappy pictures, emoticons, reaction GIFs, short clips, and recycled inside jokes.
We all know memes in our daily life. They are one of the smallest units of cultural exchange on the Internet because they are often able to communicate complex ideas quickly, visually, and in an entertaining way.
While memes can be funny, clever, and insightful, they also have the potential to make us understand our world in a shallow and superficial way, especially when they are our primary way of learning new information.
It’s not uncommon for people these days to get most of their news through memes while casually scrolling through social media. We read a sensational headline and, at most, react to it with the latest reaction image from our favorite movie or TV show.
Like all forms of communication, memes influence how we process and interpret our world; even if we don’t realize it, they can shape our beliefs and the map of reality. When memes become the default way of learning new information, we run the risk of becoming “meme-brained”—interpreting reality only on a superficial and reactive level without delving into the details or nuances.
First, let’s examine the most important psychological characteristics behind internet memes.
The Psychology Behind Internet Memes
According to the new research in communication psychology, internet memes are often:
- Focused on humor – They aim to make us laugh, including memes about negative topics and usage dark humor. Like most humor, memes help create emotional distance from serious topics.
- Promotes in-group identity – Memes can reinforce tribal identity, meaning you have to belong to a certain group to “get” the meme. This can foster a sense of belonging among online communities, but it can also lead to increased polarization between in-groups and out-groups.
- Caricatures – Simplifications of people, situations and reactions. Memes generally require the avoidance of nuance, detail, and external context to be effective, otherwise they dilute the original message (see simple vs complex communication).
- Replicability – One of the defining characteristics of memes is that they can be easily reproduced and shared with others. Memes are units of cultural exchange. When this exchange of ideas escalates between opposing groups, it can turn into a “meme war.”
- Context collapse – Memes can be re-contextualized in different situations. If you browse through the common meme templatesyou can probably recall the many times these memes have been adapted to different social, cultural and political viewpoints.
- Low reputation cost – Sharing memes is a very “low risk, high reward” activity. The benefit of going viral or getting attention outweighs the downside of offending others because you can always laugh it off or say “it’s just a joke”.
- Signaling – Memes express a point of view or feeling that we want to share with others. This includes both in-group/out-group signals (“I’m on your team” or “I’m not on your team”) and more subtle or covert messages such as “dog whistling” (when people express conflicting views that only those “in the know” pick up on).
- Hermeneutic sources – Memes aren’t just jokes; they grow into mental frameworks for interpreting the world. They have become one of the primary symbolic languages we use to understand reality. If you look through someone’s meme collection, you can learn a lot about who they are and how they see the world.
Meme Brain: The Rise of Reactive Thinking
In our accelerated visual world, the perspective of reality is increasingly “meme-driven”.
Excessive consumption of memes can begin to distort our perception of reality and our ability to think clearly, especially when we only see and react to the world in a reactive, image-based, “just for laughs” way, and are no longer capable of deeper and more thoughtful analysis.
Daily Internet users intuitively know they’re on a diet of bad information when their online feeds are labeled “brain rot,” “content pollution,” and “doomscrolling.” Many people agree that social media makes them dumber and more negative.
If memes were to be placed in the information pyramidthey would consider their educational value to be one of the lowest types of information, next to gossip, gossip, and cartoons.
Of course, political cartoons in newspapers have been used for centuries to satirically poke fun at current events. Memes serve a similar function. However, if we only got our news through memes, it would be like a newspaper where every page is full of cartoons. It would be fun, but it probably wouldn’t give you enough insight into what’s really going on in the world.
More research appeared in Social media + society shows how memes can train our minds to condense complex situations into instantly recognizable emotional templates: hero vs. villain, cringe vs. based, winner vs. loser, NPC vs. enlightened thinker. Public figures are transformed into cartoon characters, sometimes directly referring to pop culture: “This person is like Darth Vader/Voldemort!” Memes encourage us to do so straw man with opposing argumentssimplifying them to the point of absurdity to get our point across.
While memes can bring people together within the group, they can also be divisive and backfire among people outside the group. Studies to show that memes can often become embedded in political polarization and social conflict, so they may not be as effective at “convincing” people to your side as they are at signaling where loyalties lie.
Memes are symbolic shortcuts, they cannot replace rational thinking
According to cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, fast and slowmemes can be considered part of System 1 thinking: automatic, fast, instinctive and intuitive pattern recognition. This contrasts with System 2 thinking, which is slower, conscious, rational, and deliberate.
Both types of thinking are part of a healthy and functioning brain. System 1 thinking helps you recognize and respond to the immediate threat of a snake or predator (an unconscious response), while System 2 thinking helps you solve a math equation or choose which college to attend (requires more conscious effort).
A primarily meme-brain diet activates system 1 thinking, but ignores our system 2. Rather than taking the time to consider additional information, details, or context before forming a judgment, our brains seek the quickest possible symbolic shortcut.
Memes activate our knee-jerk reactions. When we become meme-brains, political conflicts are reduced to fan wars, historical figures are reduced to reactionary images, culture is compressed into bite-sized content, and serious moral questions are reduced to recycled internet archetypes and one-liners.
In the right doses, memes are harmless fun. Carelessly used memes close the door to dialogue instead of opening it. In a world where social divisions are increasing and more information pollution on the internet, it’s now more important than ever to track our consumption of memes and how they affect our psychology and worldview.
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