sure what is meant by a meme then we must carefully distinguish learning by imitation from other kinds of learning. Psychology traditionally deals with two major types of individual learning (i.e. learning by an individual animal or person) – classical conditioning and operant conditioning. In classical conditioning, originally studied by Pavlov with his salivating dogs, two stimuli become associated by repeated pairing. My cat has probably learned to associate certain sounds with food-time, the sight of certain cats with fear, the sound of rain with ‘not a nice day to go out’, and so on. Just as I have learned to freeze at the sound of a dentist’s drill (and I still do, even though I have been given anaesthetics for the past 25 years!), and to relax with pleasure at the sound of the ice going in the gin and tonic. You could say that in classical conditioning some aspect of the environment has been copied into a brain, but it stops with that brain and cannot be passed on by imitation.
Operant conditioning is when a behaviour made by an animal is either rewarded or punished and therefore either increases or decreases in frequency. Skinner famously studied this kind of trial and error learning with his rats or pigeons in cages, pressing levers to obtain food. My cat probably learned to use the cat door by operant conditioning, as well as better ways of catching voles. She also learned to beg that way. At first she made feeble attempts to get her nose up to where I was holding the dish.Then, in a process called shaping, I progressively rewarded her for ever neater and neater begging, finally hiding the dish behind my back and saying ‘Hup’. And in case you think this is unfair treatment of a small weak animal by a large and powerful one I should point out that she has successfully trained me to leave my desk to come and stroke her when required.
Skinner also pointed out the similarity between operant conditioning and natural selection – some behaviours are positively selected and others weeded out. In this way learning can be seen as an evolutionary system in which the instructions for carrying out behaviour are the replicators. Several selection theories of learning and of brain development have been proposed but as long as the behaviours cannot be passed on to someone else by imitation then they do not become memes and the selection is not memetic selection.
Much of human learning is Skinnerian and not memetic. Whether consciously or not, parents shape their children’s behaviour by the way they reinforce them. The best reward for children is attention, and rewards work better than punishment. So if parents pay lots of attention to their children when they are behaving well, and act uninterested when they scream or have tantrums, then behaving well is simply in the best interests of the kids and they will do it. Parents who do everything for their children end up with dependent children, while those who expect their children to find their own games kit, and leave them to reap teacher’s wrath if they are late for school, end up with children who take responsibility for themselves. You may think you taught your daughter to ride a bike but in all probability you just bought the bike, provided encouragement, and trial and error did the rest. There is not necessarily anything memetic in all of this (apart from the idea of riding a bike at all). Much of what we learn, we learn only for ourselves and cannot pass on.
In practice, we can probably never tease out those things we have personally learned by imitation from those we have learned in other ways – but in principle the two are different. We know lots of things that are not memes. Some authors, however, imply that virtually everything we know is a meme (e.g. Brodie 1996; Gabora 1997). Brodie includes operant conditioning, and indeed all conditioning, as memetic. Gabora goes even further and counts as a meme ‘anything that can be the subject of an instant
Operant conditioning is when a behaviour made by an animal is either rewarded or punished and therefore either increases or decreases in frequency. Skinner famously studied this kind of trial and error learning with his rats or pigeons in cages, pressing levers to obtain food. My cat probably learned to use the cat door by operant conditioning, as well as better ways of catching voles. She also learned to beg that way. At first she made feeble attempts to get her nose up to where I was holding the dish.Then, in a process called shaping, I progressively rewarded her for ever neater and neater begging, finally hiding the dish behind my back and saying ‘Hup’. And in case you think this is unfair treatment of a small weak animal by a large and powerful one I should point out that she has successfully trained me to leave my desk to come and stroke her when required.
Skinner also pointed out the similarity between operant conditioning and natural selection – some behaviours are positively selected and others weeded out. In this way learning can be seen as an evolutionary system in which the instructions for carrying out behaviour are the replicators. Several selection theories of learning and of brain development have been proposed but as long as the behaviours cannot be passed on to someone else by imitation then they do not become memes and the selection is not memetic selection.
Much of human learning is Skinnerian and not memetic. Whether consciously or not, parents shape their children’s behaviour by the way they reinforce them. The best reward for children is attention, and rewards work better than punishment. So if parents pay lots of attention to their children when they are behaving well, and act uninterested when they scream or have tantrums, then behaving well is simply in the best interests of the kids and they will do it. Parents who do everything for their children end up with dependent children, while those who expect their children to find their own games kit, and leave them to reap teacher’s wrath if they are late for school, end up with children who take responsibility for themselves. You may think you taught your daughter to ride a bike but in all probability you just bought the bike, provided encouragement, and trial and error did the rest. There is not necessarily anything memetic in all of this (apart from the idea of riding a bike at all). Much of what we learn, we learn only for ourselves and cannot pass on.
In practice, we can probably never tease out those things we have personally learned by imitation from those we have learned in other ways – but in principle the two are different. We know lots of things that are not memes. Some authors, however, imply that virtually everything we know is a meme (e.g. Brodie 1996; Gabora 1997). Brodie includes operant conditioning, and indeed all conditioning, as memetic. Gabora goes even further and counts as a meme ‘anything that can be the subject of an instant
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