A rchive Date
[ 06-02-2004 ]
Category
[ Science ]
sub-Categoy
[ Memetics ]
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[http://www.thoughtcontagion.com/mamd.htm
Memes and Mass Delusion
A Lecture Presented to the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking
February 21, 1998.
by Aaron Lynch
Memetics, the replicator science of beliefs, provides a powerful new tool for understanding the evolution and spread of Science irrational thoughts-and offers new hope for countering them.
In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, zoologist Richard Dawkins expressed modern evolution theory in terms of genes as replicators. But in the last chapter, he chastened the sociobiologists who took the gene as the root of all behavior. This is where he coined the word "meme" (which rhymes with "theme") to refer to the replicating pieces of information stored in brain memory. His objectives were limited, and he did not pursue the subject with anything like the energy that he poured into biological evolution theory. Others took up the subject on a piecemeal basis, and the work progressed slowly for 20 years. So it was not until late 1996 that I published Thought Contagion as the first serious book devoted entirely to this new replicator theory of ideas.
Memetics offers fresh insights into the evolution and spread of irrational thoughts by inverting an age old question. Instead of just taking the familiar tack of asking how people acquire beliefs, the new theory focuses attention on how beliefs acquire people. Some beliefs make adherents have more children, other beliefs bring better imitation by the children. Some beliefs lead adherents to persuade friends, and still other beliefs deter dropping out. When beliefs take an active role in acquiring new adherents, they become the particularly potent memes that I call Thought Contagions. Some beliefs induce retransmission better than others, and those are the ones that win out by spreading to wide prevalence. This line of study, known as memetics, has profound implications for beliefs about religion, sexuality, health, family, politics, abortion, and war. It also pertains directly to the myriad popular notions that keep skeptics' organizations busy all year long.
Memetics looks at measurable propagation parameters for beliefs. Plugged into equations developed specifically for memetics, they can be used to generate predictions and design experiments (Lynch, 1998). In this aspect, memetics goes well beyond the realm of ideological word games and into the realm of real science.
In comparison, the old focus solely on how people acquire beliefs tends to impair our vision of how beliefs really spread. It fosters a notion that misinformed people usually hold the beliefs they do because this is somehow in their interests, emotionally, intellectually, financially, and so forth. Even in recognizing the falsity of other people's myths, the prevailing wisdom says that those myths must still serve some useful purpose. Rather than questioning on a case by case basis whether beliefs actually serve their adherents, beliefs are simply assumed to play an adaptive function for us. Few people consider possibility of some myths evolving the ability to exploit host minds the way that computer viruses exploit host machines. The old view is a benign view that quietly tells us to not to bother with correcting other people's false ideas, for to do so might ruin the adaptive purpose those ideas are serving. In stark contrast to that old thinking, the new approach often finds beliefs taking root in millions of minds by acting as information viruses.
Consider the belief that you need to find a romantic partner of a "compatible" astrological sign. [ Note: More extensive and recent treatment of Astrology is online here. ] This notion causes singles who have it to raise the subject of astrological compatibility with each new potential partner, in order to determine compatibility. So the idea exploits human mating drives to get itself retransmitted. It is a "sexually transmitted belief," implicitly telling hosts to send copies of this idea to several potential partners before accepting anyone for further dating. That means people are manipulated to retransmit even though spreading the word is not their motive.
Resembling a paperless chain letter in some ways, the thought contagion also behaves in humans much as a computer virus behaves in computers. Though it does not erase its hosts' memory, it can make it harder to find a partner deemed "compatible" by arbitrarily narrowing the field. And like a sexually transmitted microorganism, astrology ideas parasitize human mating for their own reproduction. The meme gains so much prevalence in singles that the question "what's your sign" becomes cliché. It does so without helping anyone find a mate. Indeed, people who reject this meme find partners more easily. So the mateless population they leave behind contains an enriched concentration of singles held back by the restrictions that come from taking astrological compatibility seriously.
Professional matchmakers also play into the picture, but not in as direct a way as one would expect. Matchmakers who charge for using astrological methods compete with those who don't. But the astrologer matches by arbitrary criteria that produce dead-end courtships. Ironically, that causes customers to come back and pay for return visits. However, the matchmaker who succeeds in making sensible pairings looses customers more quickly, since more of them find satisfying relationships. These differences help the astrological service expand and take on new practitioners. It's another viral mechanism for astrological compatibility ideas to spread, not just despite their flaws, but because of their flaws.
Astrological memes spread by additional mechanisms that work even in the married population. Believers feel motivated to proffer horoscopes to anyone they care about, because a true believer really thinks that this can help someone make good plans. But horoscopes keep changing. So rather than causing hosts to attempt belief transmission just once, the astrological meme system makes its hosts proffer astrological advice to unbelievers again and again. The meme goes dormant for a short while, but quickly erupts into a new infectious stage as the "signs" and circumstances change. Analogies to the herpes virus come to mind. Still, the routes of thought contagion are many, and astrology demonstrates only a few.
Another kind of meme that spreads by frustrating its own host is the fad diet. Permanent changes in lifestyle, including food composition, are known to give lasting weight control for most people. But counterproductive fad diets manipulate their hosts to do more retransmitting by causing recurrent cycles of crash reduction and slow regaining. Each sudden thinning provokes onlookers to ask "how did you do it," which brings on explanations of the diet scheme to a new listener. Yet when the crash diet ends, the pounds come back, leading to new sudden weight losses and new rounds of questions about how to do it. This gets the crash diet memes propagated more often than the memes of people who achieve lasting results. After all, those who actually achieve lasting results are eventually regarded as genetically thin. So they are not asked for weight loss advice while the chronically struggling are. As with astrology, the commercial practitioners also play a part, as those weight loss businesses that attain only temporary results can win more repeat customers. Because those businesses grow and open new shops, their memes spread with them.
Diet memes are no special case when it comes to beliefs advancing their own propagation in ways that harm one's health. Most people want to spread the news of a good medicine to friends and loved ones who need it. Yet the memes of homeopathy have a built in mechanism for subverting our good intentions toward the transmission of bogus cures. When someone is persuaded to make trial use of a truly homeopathic drug, it increases the symptoms of the disease. Yet the meme set also tells adherents that more dilute preparations are the most potent. So after getting worse from taking the concentrated drug, the patient tries a more dilute preparation. With less of the toxic effect, the patient naturally feels better. Unfortunately, this spurious improvement convinces the patient that homeopathic medicine has helped. That, in turn, dupes the patient into persuading other sick people to try the method later on. The contagion keeps homeopathy in constant circulation even though truly helpful therapies are available for most diseases.
Memetics applies to much more than the down to earth ideas about partner compatibility, weight control, and curing disease. The belief that alien space ships have been seen by humans on earth demonstrates several other thought contagion principles. Contagious rumors about "flying saucers" were already spreading in the 1940's. These "alien spaceship" ideas were so fascinating that believers kept thinking about them. And people do tend to talk about things they are thinking about, if it's not too personal. Moreover, hosts of these memes realize that they will receive rapt attention from any one to whom they re-tell their stories.
Because most people crave social attention, the typical adherent retells the story often enough to cause rapid propagation. Vast numbers of newly exposed listeners are susceptible, too, owing to the emotional appeal of ideas that friendly aliens would visit, and the implication that a grand future awaits humanity. Eventually, the memes propagated widely enough to catch the interest of book authors, TV reporters, UFO entrepreneurs, etc., who joined in re-telling the story for the business or professional advantage. As people with the most to gain from telling attention-getting stories, they also made a concerted and biased search for scraps of "evidence" (McAndrew, 1997). Putting their messages out by these media greatly accelerated the rumors by centralized communication. It also accelerated friend to friend propagation by giving the average believer a more convincing and professional way to tell others.
When setbacks arose, such as the government's denial of a spaceship crash in Roswell, natural selection had its own way of getting around it. Many people would have simply dropped the spaceship sighting memes. These people would have stopped thinking about it frequently or viewing the story as a good way to win themselves social attention. So the prosaic stories would have enjoyed very little replication. But those who distrusted the government's denials of a spaceship crash would have retained all the original re-transmission drives, and kept on re-telling the story. This means they would also retell their explanations for why the government told the truth the first time and lied the second time. Helping the whole process along were numerous people who profit from selling stories.
To keep thrilling stories credible and reject deflating evidence, the dishonest ones and their publishers would have moved more deliberately to conspiracy theories. They would do so both in forming their ideas and choosing which ones to transmit. Meanwhile, honest professionals who believed the prosaic account often chose not to write about it, regarding it as a "non-story." So ironically, the official denials of a spaceship crash caused a contagion advantage for government conspiracy and cover-up versions of the Roswell story. More forceful government denials have favored the evolution of still more intensely conspiratorial Roswell memes. In other words, refutation-resistant strains of the Roswell myth had started to emerge in the form of grand conspiracy memes.
The fact that many government officials do engage in misconduct and cover-ups adds credibility to such memes, especially in an age of media exposés. Moreover, military officials actually did cover up a top-secret espionage scheme involving helium-filled spy balloons that crashed in Roswell in 1947--the event that apparently started the Roswell story in the first place (Korff, 1997). The involvement of a secret spy balloon also caused officials to speak evasively about just what happened in Roswell, lending further credibility to conspiracy theories. Such conspiratorial memes also have a built-in self-preservation mechanism: any one arguing against the meme is easily dismissed as a victim or a party to the conspiracy. Conspiracy and cover-up memes also imply that the "ordinary" believer must play the key role in spreading news, because the "authorities" will not. This gets the average believer to engage in more retransmission efforts, which links high infectiousness to the great tenacity of the meme. In the process of spreading the Roswell conspiracy theory, adherents also spread a surreal view about a ruthlessly conspiratorial government-a meme that has further ramifications for society.
After years of natural selection, the "fittest" Roswell spaceship memes combine the high levels of transmissivity, receptivity, and longevity that form a hugely prevalent thought contagion. Private skeptics have joined in debunking the Roswell story, but even they have not completely quelled the myth. The problem is similar to attacking bacteria with successively stronger antibiotics: resistant strains develop, and out-propagate the non-resistant strains. Although skeptics' refutations do make a big difference in meme prevalence, we also see the emergence of multi-refutation resistant UFO memes. Still, as with doctors treating bacteria, skeptics should not regard this as cause for diminished effort.
By the time of the Heaven's Gate incident, the Roswell UFO myth propagated into recombination with an ancient belief in the apocalypse. That apocalyptic idea came to Marshal Applewhite by way of Christianity, where it co-propagated with an entire system of memes since very early times. One part of the early meme set said that unbelievers would go to hell, which motivated them to "save" anyone they cared about. Another meme told them to love their neighbors enough to care about saving them. And the imminent apocalypse meme informed them that believers must hurry up and "save" the unbeliever before time ran out. Memes forbidding unreproductive sex lead adherents to raise more children. The memes reinforced each other's propagation by spreading as a combined set, and continue to do so today. Indeed, so many memes contribute to transmissivity of this package that it is now an exceedingly contagious system.
Such memes have much more effect if taken very seriously. So a belief in taking Hell, apocalypse, and all sorts of other Biblical ideas quite literally is now another potent meme spreading widely with the package. This contagious package also gives propagation to a wide range of old tribal stories, such as the six day creation and Noah's Ark. And the meme for taking the whole package very seriously means taking all of those stories seriously. Hence we have a memetic understanding of what is really propelling the resurgent movement to adopt creationist pseudoscience in high school biology courses. The irony, of course, is that evolutionary memetics scientifically explains the phenomenon of militant creationism.
One of the most spectacular illustrations of the harm done by infectious pseudoscience came early this century in the form of the Nazi thought contagion. [ Note: More extensive and recent treatment of Nazism is online here. ] Consider what it would have been like to find yourself eating lunch with several people, one of whom was openly voicing Nazi ideology. The Nazi sounds angry and threatening. He believes himself and his "race" to be victims of enormous crimes and he expresses opinions that his opponents must be ruthlessly and violently defeated. You don't believe a word he says, but do you speak up? For most people, the answer was (and still is) "no." You just do not want to get into a heated argument with an angry man who feels that his enemies should be killed, and who belongs to an armed movement that established a violent reputation early on. So the Nazi intimidates the non-Nazi into keeping his ideas to himself, and into granting more speaking time to the Nazi. This not only favors the spread of Nazi memes, but it also blocks the spread of non-Nazi memes. Besides feeling intimidated from arguing directly against Nazi ideas, unbelievers can also feel intimidated into leaving Nazis unopposed in offering leaflets or inviting people to political rallies. In other words, Nazism advanced its own propagation by provoking adherents into suppressing alternative ideologies.
The conspiracy memes in Nazi ideology added to the level of Nazi anger, which in turn strengthened its capacity to intimidate non-hosts into silence. But conspiracy memes also helped the Nazi dismiss contrary beliefs as products of the "conspiracy," and the people who held them as either coconspirators or unwitting conspiracy victims. This conferred a dropout prevention advantage to Nazism. It also added stigma to the silencing effects that Nazism had on non-Nazis. Conspiracy ideas would have made non-Nazis feel further deterred from expressing their own beliefs by the possibility of being regarded as coconspirators with Jews and other "inferior" groups. Easily created and hard for most people to disprove, the Nazi conspiracy memes thus intensified the thought contagion.
But Nazi memes also tell their hosts that the fate of the world depends on spreading the ideas, and that the Aryan Nazi is far more qualified than anyone else to spread their ideas. This justified crimes against anyone who stood in their way, including the murder of people who opposed them politically. And murdering non-hosts again tends to raise the relative prevalence of the Nazi memes, at least in the short run. But less extreme actions, such as defaming or bodily attacking political opponents and disrupting their public presentations also helped Nazism spread long before their rise to power (Noakes and Pridham, 1983). A desire to confiscate wealth from Jews and others added financial aspects to the motives for re-transmitting Nazism and sabotaging other political movements.
Nazi ideology also contained intensely nationalistic memes from the outset. This did, of course, give the movement an emotional appeal--a factor easily seen by pre-memetic analysts. Yet a nationalistic emotional appeal was better adapted to some population sectors than others.
The sector to which it was most adapted was the large contingent of defeated World War I veterans. And while attracting the war's "losers" might normally seem disadvantageous in expanding the movement to society at large, these particular "losers" were the men most capable of violence and intimidation. So their presence in the movement greatly amplified the memetic package's ability to propagate by intimidating non-hosts into silence. The German Communists, in contrast, were poorly adapted to spreading among nationalistic veterans--and thus exhibited less ability to spread by scaring unbelievers into silence.
Some memetic precursors that eventually combined into Nazism spread for similar reasons. Anti-Semitism has its origins in the memetic evolution of Christianity (Goldhagen, 1997). Yet the extreme forms of anti-Semitism and nationalism, because they inspired anger, also gained propagation advantages by intimidating non-adherents into silence. Once the specifically racist forms of anti-Semitism arose through biological pseudoscience, they also tended to spread by realizing a new form of intimidation that was not possible for earlier anti-Semitism: anyone who challenged the new racist anti-Semitism could be branded as possibly having "Jewish blood," with all the horrible social implications that this would hold for the racial anti-Semite. For those who did not consider themselves Jewish, it was therefore much easier to leave racial anti-Semitism unchallenged--giving it another transmission advantage. Indeed, an insecure desire to "prove" to oneself and others that one's blood was not "tainted" may have unconsciously motivated racial anti-Semites to voice their opinions more intensely and often This adds still more transmission advantages to racial anti-Semitism over other anti-Semitisms.
As the proto-Nazi thought contagions of extreme nationalism and racial anti-Semitism spread to hundreds, thousands, and millions of people, the odds increased that one of those infected would have exceptional oratorical skills. And the memes themselves, by arousing such intense passions, tended to intensify the oratory that eventually flowed from Adolf Hitler.
But while extreme "master race" nationalism and racial anti-Semitism enjoyed all these propagation advantages, they also had an inherent tendency to incite their adherents into war after spreading enough to control an entire country. This immediately limited and set back the movement in countries forced into alliance against Germany. And the intensity of passions arising from the Nazi meme set were so great that Hitler could not resist going to war on multiple fronts. This slated him and his movement for military defeat. So the memetic forces that gave rise to the "Führer's" movement happened, in this case, to bring on a drastic fall in host population. The defeated and disillusioned adherents dropped out en masse. At reduced levels, the Nazi, proto-Nazi, and neo-Nazi thought contagions are still there, replicating, mutating, and waiting for conditions to again favor a full epidemic-perhaps in a different country. As an example of how pseudoscience kills, these memes call into focus the need for widespread education in memetics and critical thinking.
Many of us have held high hopes that the information age would solve the problems of superstition and misinformation. Yet ideas as regressive as Nazism are now spreading by the Internet. And new thought contagions have recently emerged to exploit our new ways of communicating.
An entire class of email thought contagions has sprung up around the theme of a mythical computer virus that arrives by email. These false warning letters tell us never to open messages with titles such as "join the crew," lest our entire computers be destroyed by a virus. The real "host computer" is the human brain, and a population of brains interconnected by the Internet provides the susceptible growth medium for a pandemic of thought contagions. Early strains arose by mutation and selection: Someone wanted to stop a chain letter called "Good Times" with rampantly spreading instructions to delete the "Good Times" message. They used a false virus warning as the rationale for deleting the chain letter, and stumbled upon the formula for a much worse thought contagion in the process. The original was not really planned as a hoax, but indeed as an anti-hoax.
What makes these memes particularly contagious is that they tell believers that anyone who has their email is a likely source of infection unless warned against opening certain messages. Naturally, many recipients feel strongly motivated to send the warning on to everyone who has their email address, making the meme spread rampantly. What we now need to recognize when we receive one of these mailings is that the prior recipient gave it to us because the message manipulated them to do so.
More importantly, we need to recognize that what makes a meme contagious is not always truth-contingent. People would spread the message regardless of whether there ever was a dangerous email that could be identified by its subject heading. Similarly, astrological compatibility memes would spread even if the supposed compatibilities were randomly redone and introduced into a new population. The UFO memes have an identifiable contagion mode that does not depend on actual spaceships. Apocalyptic religion memes spread time and again without the world ending. Recognizing these non-truth contingent routes of thought contagion is a first step toward protecting us and others from purely viral information. People learn to safeguard their computers once they learn the concept of computer viruses, and a similar benefit awaits from educating people about memetic thought viruses. Hence we have a good reason as skeptics for spreading a basic knowledge of memetics. But the reasons for joining skeptics' and memetics methods go beyond this.
In combating tough biological contagions, scientists are learning that a combination of therapies is often the most effective. A germ may evolve resistance to drugs used one at a time. Yet when several drugs target different facets of the germ's machinery, the germ often looses the battle. So we need to keep using the brilliant lines of debunking already developed in the skeptics' community. Such standard debunking is essential to explaining that a belief is wrong, and indeed why it is wrong. We also need to continue teaching the critical thinking skills essential to recognizing unsound thoughts. But for a more multi-pronged treatment, we also need to show victims of infectious delusion how they are being used and harmed as transmission vehicles for false beliefs. In other words, we need to provide not just a debunking of those delusions, but also the memetic explanation of why thought contagions were contracted in the first place. In doing so, we will also help answer the lurking question of how so many millions could all be wrong about something such as astrology or Roswell. This is a point that most people want to see answered in order to feel secure about parting with familiar delusions. In other words, using memetics in a combination therapy for delusion goes beyond the benefit of countering fallacy with double force: it counters more of the root causes for irrational belief.
Spreading a basic knowledge of memetics will thus play an important part in advancing healthy skepticism in a world of pseudoscience and superstition. In effect, memetics provides the mental tools for a completely new way of mounting an immune reaction to irrational thought contagions. By adding memetic explanations to existing forms of debunking and critical thinking, we achieve a unique new "combination therapy" for those infectious delusions that we have battled since time immemorial. By distributing this combination therapy to all quarters of the population, we will immensely improve the information health of society.
References
Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goldhagen, D. 1997. Hitler's Willing Executioners. New York: Vintage Books.
Korff, Kal, 1997. "What Really Happened at Roswell" Skeptical Inquirer (21)4: 24-30.
Lynch, A. 1996. Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society-The New Science of Memes. New York: Basic Books.
Lynch, A. 1998. "Units, Events, and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution." Journal of Memetics 2(1): http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/lynch_a.html
McAndrew, J. 1997. The Roswell Report: Case Closed. New York: Barnes and Noble Books.
Noakes, J., and Pridham, G. 1983. Nazism 1919-1945. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. ]
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