Memes that aren’t there

The human brain is a meme-recognition machine. It has been an evolutionary advantage to overreact to what ‘looks like’ a tiger moving in the bushes, even if that means sometimes seeing tigers where there are none. Humans prone to Type I error (false positive) outlived those exhibiting Type II error (false negative): mistakenly seeing a tiger when there isn’t one has very little consequence, but missing a tiger when there is one could mean death. This tendency to see patterns that aren’t really there led us to anthropomorphism – attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities like animals – which appeared in the art of early humans 40,000 years ago. As this coincided with the emergence of more systematic hunting practices, it’s hypothesised this practice allowed hunters to identify empathetically with the animals they hunted in order to better predict their movements. “To know your enemy, you must become your enemy” – Sun Tzu.

Early religions were heavily anthropomorphic, assigning human form, characteristics and behaviors to deities, a misfiring of our meme-recognition machinery in a vain attempt to make sense of the world around them. Traditional fables from around the world included proud lions (Aesop’s fables), clever rabbits (the Panchatantra) and trickster spiders (Akan folklore). Anthropomorphism forms the basis of many of our most popular stories to this day, in works as diverse as Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Pixar’s success in the box office is partly driven by asking what would happen if toys, monsters, cars, and other inanimate objects had human-like feelings. Most of this is harmless fun, but it can have strange evolutionary consequences. For example cats do not ‘meow’ in the wild, they learned that sound – as close as they can get to a baby crying – gets our attention so we’ll give them what they want. Frequently animal charities receive more donations than human-related alternatives, (we project our best qualities onto our pets, and none of our sins) which makes no sense from a genetics point of view. This meme-recognition mechanism frequently misfires, with people seeing images of dogs in clouds, faces on the surface of Mars, or Virgin Mary in their grilled cheese sandwiches: a phenomenon called Pareidolia.

Our (related) tendency to see patterns in random data – Apophenia – is why conspiracy theories are so prevalent. Evolution has fine-tuned us to watch out for threats, whether real or imagined. Click on the wrong recommended video on YouTube and you go down the rabbit hole. Confirmation bias means you’ll start seeing examples of the topic everywhere, making you believe it more through the mere exposure effect. Once a belief becomes central to your identity, disconfirming evidence actually causes you to believe it more, to protect your ego from attack. The endowment effect means a belief is more likely to take hold if you partially had a hand in researching it. This is why for example Betty Crocker instant cake mixes ask you to add an egg (rather than just including powdered eggs), and why furniture retailer IKEA makes you put the furniture together yourself (rather than delivering it already built). Solving the puzzle gives our brain a shot of dopamine – the Eureka effect – and increases memory retention. Sophisticated bad actors know this, which is why the most popular online conspiracy theorist groups like Q-Anon, tell you to “do the research”, and “follow the breadcrumbs” rather than tell you their theory directly. Of course the clues they’ve given lead you to the conclusion they wanted you to have, but you feel like it’s yours. It’s “guided apophenia” at internet scale, with real world consequences like the riot at the U.S. Capitol. Our brains evolved to solve prehistoric problems, leaving them susceptible to modern manipulation.

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