The Meme Machine

THE ALTRUISM TRICK 163
reasons too. It is those reasons I now wish explore.
A meme that gets into a meme-fountain will do better than one that only gets
into meme-sinks. We can guess who the meme-fountains are. Indeed, many
experiments in social psychology show who is most often emulated. Powerful
people (and people who dress in the trappings of power), people perceived as
experts, and people in authority, are all examples of ‘imitate-the-successful’. All
these people are more likely to get others to do what they say or to accept their
ideas; as salesmen, advertisers and politicians have long known. In discussing
the ‘power button’ Brodie (1996) suggests that TV shows use large cars, guns,
and flashy clothes to gain more air time and so promote their kind of memes.
Fame spreads memes, as when television and film stars are watched by millions
of viewers, so changing the fashions in clothes, speech, smoking or drinking,
cars, food and lifestyle. But not everyone is powerful, and there are other kinds
of meme-fountain. For example, we are more likely to be persuaded by
someone we perceive as similar to ourselves, and a clever sales trick is to mirror
the actions of the potential buyer or to pretend to having similar beliefs or
hobbies (Cialdini 1994).
I have already suggested that one way to spread memes is to behave
altruistically, and I now want to consider some of the consequences of this less
obvious way of becoming a meme-fountain. First, altruistic behaviour spreads
copies of itself – so making us more altruistic. Second, altruism helps to spread
other memes – so providing a trick that memes can use to get themselves copied.
Altruism spreads
Let us consider just the copying of altruistic behaviour itself. Imagine two
different memes (or sets of memes). One is a set of memes for helping your
friend when she is in trouble – whether it is giving her a lift when her car breaks
down or listening to her troubles when her boyfriend leaves her. The other is a
set of memes for ignoring what your friend needs. These are behaviours that can
be copied from one person to another and so they must be memes. Note that I
use the phrase ‘a meme for something’. This is potentially dangerous because it
might be taken to imply that there is a particular instruction explicitly stored
somewhere in a brain which tells the person to help their friend – and this can
easily be made to look ridiculous. This interpretation is not necessary, however.
All that is necessary is to assume that people imitate aspects of each other’s