Meme-Brained: How Shallow Culture Creates Shallow Understanding

Many of our online interactions center around sharing memes. Friends on social media, message boards, and group chats can now go days communicating with each other through nothing but snappy images, emojis, reaction GIFs, short clips, and recycled inside jokes.

We’re all familiar with memes in our everyday life. They are one of the smallest units of cultural exchange on the internet, because they can often communicate complex ideas in a fast, visual, and entertaining way.

While memes can be funny, clever, and insightful, they also have the potential to lead to shallow and superficial ways of understanding our world, especially when they become the primary way we learn new information.

It’s not uncommon for people to get the majority of their news nowadays through memes while casually scrolling social media. We read a sensationalist headline and – at most – respond 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 when we don’t realize it, they can shape our beliefs and map of reality. When memes become the default way we learn new information, we risk becoming “meme-brained” – only interpreting reality on a superficial and reactive level, without ever diving into details or nuance.

First let’s explore the key psychological characteristics behind internet memes.

The Psychology Behind Internet Memes

According to new research in communication psychology, internet memes are often:

• Humor-focused – They are intended to make us laugh, including memes that touch on negative subjects and use dark humor. Like most humor, memes help create emotional distance from serious subjects.
• Foster in-group identity – Memes can reinforce tribal identities, meaning you have to be part of a certain group to “get” the meme. This can cultivate a sense of belonging among online communities, but it can also lead to increased polarization between in-groups and out-groups.
• Caricatures – They are simplifications of people, situations, and reactions. Typically, memes require avoiding nuance, details, and outside context to be effective, otherwise they dilute the original message (see simple vs. complex communication).
• Replicability – One defining feature of memes is that they must be easy to replicate and share with others. Memes are units of cultural exchange. When this exchange intensifies between opposing groups, it can evolve into a “meme war.”
• Context collapse – Memes are capable of being recontextualized across different situations. If you browse through common meme templates, you can probably recall many times when these memes have been adapted to varying social, cultural, and political perspectives.
• Low reputational cost – Sharing memes is a very “low-risk, high-reward” activity. The upside 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 viewpoint or sentiment that we want to share with others. This includes both in-group/out-group signaling (“I’m on your team” or “I’m not on your team”), as well as more subtle or hidden messages such as “dog whistling” (where people express controversial views that only those “in the know” will pick up on).
• Hermeneutic resources – Memes aren’t just jokes; they grow into mental frameworks for how we interpret 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-Brained: The Rise of Reactive Thinking

In our fast-paced visual world, our perspective of reality is becoming increasingly “meme-driven.”

Overconsumption of memes can begin to distort our perception of reality and our ability to think clearly, especially when we only see and respond 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 have a bad information diet when they refer to their online feeds as “brain rot,” “content slop,” and “doomscrolling.” Many agree that social media is making them both dumber and more negative.

If memes were to be placed on the information pyramid, they’d be considered one of the lowest types of information in terms of educational value, next to gossiping, rumors, and cartoons.

Of course, political cartoons in newspapers have been used for centuries as ways to satirically poke fun at current events. Memes serve a similar function. However, only receiving your news through memes would be like a newspaper where every page is filled with nothing but cartoons. It’d be entertaining, but it likely wouldn’t give you a sufficient view of what’s really going on in the world.

Additional research published in Social Media + Society shows how memes can train our minds to compress complex situations into instantly recognizable emotional templates: hero vs. villain, cringe vs. based, winner vs. loser, NPC vs. enlightened thinker. Public figures are turned into cartoon characters, sometimes directly referencing pop culture: “This person is like Darth Vader/Voldemort!” Memes incentive us to strawman opposing arguments, simplifying them to the point of absurdity to get our point across.

While memes can rally people within your group, they can also be divisive and have a backfire effect among people outside of your group. Studies demonstrate how memes can often feed into political polarization and social conflict, so they may not be as effective for “winning people over” to your side as they are for signaling where your loyalty is.

Memes Are Symbolic Shortcuts, They Can’t Replace Rational Thinking

According to the cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, memes would be considered a part of System 1-type thinking: automatic, fast, instinctual, and intuitive pattern recognition. This is in contrast to System 2-type 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 (it’s an unconscious response), while System 2 thinking helps you solve a math equation or choose what college to go to (it takes more conscious effort).

A primarily meme-brained diet activates our System 1 thinking, but neglects our System 2. Instead of taking time to reflect on further information, details, or context before forming a judgment, our brains search for the fastest symbolic shortcut available.

Memes activate our knee-jerk reactions. When we become meme-brained, political conflicts get reduced to fandom wars, historical figures become reaction images, culture gets compressed into bite-sized content, and serious moral questions get flattened into recycled internet archetypes and one-line jokes.

In the right doses, memes are harmless fun. Used carelessly, memes close the door to dialogue instead of opening it. In a world with growing social divisions and an abundance of information pollution on the internet, it’s important now more than ever to monitor our consumption of memes and how they influence our psychology and worldview.

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