Yes we can! Ermahgerd. Occupy. I had a dream. Haters gonna hate. Tear down this wall! Gangnam Style. Drill, baby, drill.
We are constantly bombarded by memes in our daily lives. Some spontaneously flare up and then burn out as quickly as they appeared, while others stick around for decades. We hardly consider their presence, much less contemplate their possible influence on our lives.
Researchers in the emerging field of meme science are digging deeper, however, investigating how and why these sticky phrases or trends sink into our cultural psyche and subconsciously influence the way we process the world around us.
?Our goal is to introduce rigorous market research tools that have been developed for the corporate sector and apply them to the most pressing social issues in the world,? said Joe Brewer, co-founder of DarwinSF, a San Francisco-based company founded six months ago to help identify and spread memes that may influence significant global issues, starting with climate change.
Mr. Brewer and his co-founder, Balazs Lazlo Karafiath, aim to quantify the potential impact of a given climate change meme and then selectively promote its spread. If successful, they think they could creatively shift the way we think about and approach the problem.
Memes, they say, are the fundamental units of culture, like DNA. First coined in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a meme [pronounced meem] represents ideas, behaviors or styles that spread from person to person. It can be a trendy dance, a viral video, a new fashion, a technological tool or a catch phrase. Like viruses, memes arise, spread, mutate and die.
?Right now, everyone just pushes out Internet memes and other communication materials, hoping that these messages will somehow spread,? Mr. Karafiath said. ?We think getting a lay of the land beforehand may help us figure out how to reach a tipping point in the broad cultural context of climate change.?
To seek out that cultural context, Mr. Brewer and Mr. Karafiath draw upon techniques from epidemiology, cognitive science, systems theory and other disciplines to identify and understand climate change memes. They gather potential memes through interviews and from Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. Any bite-size mention of climate change they come across, from two or three words to a couple of sentences, enters their database. The hostile memes, or those that run counter to the message they wish to spread, are weeded out, and the rest are statistically analyzed and coded. This produces a meme map that is meant to connect any given meme to thousands of similar ones and indicate its sticking potential.
Once they identify those memes ? things like ?We are part of this world and must live accordingly? or ?A healthy economy is fundamentally linked with a healthy environment?? they plan to draw on a network of foundations and nongovernmental organizations to help promote the message. Ultimately, they hope to promote a sea of symbiotic memes delivering and reinforcing different versions of the same powerful message about climate change and the planet.
Of course, not all memes will resonate with every person who encounters it. Different people ? a conservative Christian from the rural Midwest, for example, versus a progressive atheist in Seattle ? will probably not take to the same memes, and the DarwinSF team plans to adjust its messages accordingly.
Recent research published in the journal Psychological Science reinforces this idea, suggesting that Americans? seemingly polarized takes on the environment can be bridged with an adjustment of language.
The study?s authors arrived at this finding after recruiting 300 participants and testing them to see how their political ideology influenced their outlook on the environment. Most of the participants were given persuasive pieces about climate change to read; roughly a third of the participants received a neutral description of the history of neckties.
The Op-ed versions approached climate change from one of two standpoints. Half described the ecological harm that humans are inflicting on the environment and included photos of slashed forests and barren coral reefs; the remainder contended that pollution violates the sanctity and purity of the earth, displaying images of pollution looming over a city and of a person drinking dirty water. Both messages ended on a positive note, indicating that the reader could act to help prevent this from coming to pass.
Self-described liberal participants, the researchers found, reacted about equally strongly to the environmental damage and the environmental sanctity messages. Self-described conservatives, on the other hand, showed about the same reaction to the environmental harm and the necktie story. In other words, they were unmoved.
But when it came to the sanctity message, the conservatives expressed disgust for the situation and support for pro-environmental legislation.
?We were able to persuade conservative participants to be supportive of environmental policy and care more about the environment in general,? said Matthew Feinberg, a postdoctoral candidate at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University and the lead author of the study. ?They were not only persuaded but almost as supportive as liberals when they perceived the environment as a moral issue.?
Mr. Brewer, who is familiar with Dr. Feinberg?s work, said, ?Engaging the public around issues of the sacred will be powerful for influencing the behavior of conservatives,? he said. Mr. Brewer and Mr. Karafiath hope to develop memes that variously target a broad swath of cultural contexts, whether from a national, political or demographic point of view.
?The realm of possibility is restrained by physical laws, but particular worldviews are only constrained by what people think,? Mr. Brewer said. ?To change what is possible is to change the beliefs that keep people from seeing pathways to solutions.?
He and Mr. Karafi?th invite readers to tweet #climatememe suggestions to them, post on their Facebook page or share potential climate change memes right here on the blog by submitting comments.
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