The Effects of Memes on Perceptions and Decision Making

Much commentary focuses on social media videos and articles as a source of misinformation. Yet image macros—memes—are a commonly encountered “information spreader” on social media. Although memes are ubiquitous, they are often dismissed as not having much influence on behavior. Yet memes may have unrecognized effects on a viewer’s cognition. Applying fuzzy-trace theory, we conducted two experiments to identify how memes convey the underlying meaning of information to social media users (i.e., the “gist”). In Experiment 1, participants read articles covering popular social media news topics as typically displayed on a Facebook news feed. We found “authentic” memes online that correspond to each article’s topic, either refuting or supporting the article’s position. Participants were randomly assigned to view no memes, memes supporting the articles, memes refuting the articles, or deconstructed memes. Participants answered questions about hypothetical decisions (e.g., would you let your dog play with an unleashed pit bull) and perceptions (e.g., pit bulls are dangerous). Results indicate negative memes refuting information were more effective in influencing a viewer’s decisions and perceptions. Experiment 2 presented short narratives explaining the underlying meaning of the same memes used in Experiment 1. Perception and decision-making results replicate across both studies, suggesting that neither individual images nor meme text alone accounts for the effects. Rather, it is the juxtaposition of image and text forming a complete meme yielding gist inferences that influence decisions and perceptions. Memes appear to readily yield individuals’ inferences about bottom-line meaning that they subsequently use on decision-making and perception tasks.