Scaring others for fun and profit
We humans are astonishingly bad at making decisions because fear gets in the way. Fear is often itself triggered by uncertainty, a condition the brain hates to find itself in, and so the brain will accept information that resolves the uncertainty, even if it is profoundly untrue. Fear makes memes stick. Fear is part of our everyday lives: we dread the suicide bomber, we choose organic foods, we avoid vaccinating our children, and we recoil at the thought of the paedophile lurking round the corner, and we take actions which carry a higher probability of a more mundane disaster – for example, you are more likely to kill your child as you drive him to school than you are to lose him to a paedophile.
Of course, this has to be fear linked to our own experience, as that is all our nonconscious brains know. If we have no direct experience of lung cancer, our brains can cheerfully ignore all the warnings and statistics in the world, and instead yearn for the pleasure that a cigarette brings.
We will look in the next chapter at how memes can be used to build brands and to market products but for now I hope you can also see how memes can be tacked onto irrational fears in order to sell. I don’t think anyone would claim that this behavior is at all creditable, but it happens all the time and I think there is some merit in pointing out how it works so you can develop immunity to it.
So in order to scare others for fun and profit:
- Discuss the consequences of a Very Bad Thing (such as terrorism, autism, and cancer) regardless of how improbable the consequence is – your audience will fixate on how terrible the outcome could be without weighting the chances of it happening;
- Quote an authoritative-sounding source about the Very Bad Thing, especially one backed by some pseudoscience, and most people won’t (or won’t know how to) investigate whether the research is trustworthy, if the paper said what you claim it did, or even if there was any evidence for your claims at all;
- Use scary numbers: Gardner cites a manufacturer of ‘parental control’ software who advertised that their product would protect against the 50,000 paedophiles prowling the ‘net, and who had said that one in five children had been solicited for sex. He demonstrated that this figure had no validity and that the incidence of sexual solicitations of young children by much older men was pretty close to zero;
- Or you could use tragic but misleading examples: the media often run articles on the incidence and heart-rending consequences of Very Bad Things, for example breast cancer in young mothers (see Burke et al (2001)). Only 3% of women who contract breast cancer do so when they are under 40 years of age, but you’d never guess that from the newspaper reports;
- Finally, quote trends, not values: another lovely example from Gardner (quoting Stewart (2003)) is the ‘epidemic’ in childhood cancer. Shout it from the rooftops: the incidence of cancer in children rose by 25% between 1975 and 1990! But be sure to omit the actual incidence figures, which are around 0.015%, and don’t mention that the survival rates have doubled in the same period – just quote the 25% figure if you want to get people agitated.
Now you may think I need to switch to decaf, but so many of the memes we run are false, and only got accepted because fear overwhelmed us. The media (at least in the US and UK) seem to be increasingly ruled by the principle that it is OK to increase ratings by scaring the audience witless, but this damages our society and our mental health – more on this in chapter 11. And as for politicians, I will leave the final word in this section to H.L Mencken, who wrote in 1918 ‘the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary’.
Memes which invoke emotions increase the chances of their sticking. It doesn’t really matter whether the memes are surrounded by the love and concern of a parent or whether the memes invoke fear, anger and loathing, the imprinting process is the same.