Started back in 2020, the private Facebook group has already amassed over 170k members, sharing memes and other relatable content daily. Considering that roughly 62% of the global population nowadays—a number that grew from 6% in the year 2000—are internet users, there ought to be people who can imagine themselves in, or have actually been in, situations the group’s content covers.
Similarly to liking people who are similar to us, we tend to enjoy content we can relate to as well. Life consultant for personal, professional, and corporate consultations, formally retired from clinical psychology, Dr. Leon Seltzer explained why that is: “If a person can't personally relate to a subject being written or talked about—or if an activity is one they know little about and have never shown any interest in—they'll feel alienated from it. It will leave them disappointed and disengaged. On the contrary, if they relate positively to some topic, if it feels vital or exciting to them, they'll be motivated to get involved in it, to take it on.”
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When it comes to liking similar people, professor of psychology and chair of the psychology department at Albright College, Gwendolyn Seidman, Ph.D., pointed out that it is important to distinguish actually having a lot in common (known as actual similarity) and believing to have a lot in common (perceived similarity).
In an article for Psychology Today, Dr. Seidman suggested that the less information we have about a person, the more actual similarity affects us liking them. For example, learning that a person has similar interests as you do boosts liking them as you have nothing else to base your impression on without having actually met them.
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Based on previous research published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Gwendolyn Seidman, Ph.D., suggested that there are several reasons similarity increases liking. For instance, meeting people with similar views or virtues makes us more confident about those views or virtues. Moreover, having something in common with others might make us think positively about them, in a way making us feel more positive about ourselves.
Liking those who are similar to us is also related to the self-expansion theory, which states that people benefit from spending time with others by gaining knowledge and experiences. “Even though a dissimilar person would be more likely to actually provide new knowledge and experiences, research has shown that people are more likely to see self-expansion opportunities when interacting with someone who is similar, rather than dissimilar, to them,” Dr. Seidman pointed out.
Dr. Leon Seltzer also emphasized to Bored Panda that people benefit from learning from those around them. “Growing one's interests and developing new skill sets is experienced by most people as rewarding. Biochemically, what's fresh and novel enables them to secrete dopamine, and that's an unconscious incentive to engage in what before was unprecedented for them.”
“To put it simply, we're made that way,” he added. “Despite our capitalistic, competitive, dog-eat-dog culture, most people would (if only secretly) prefer to cooperate rather than compete. Liking to work together and play together are in our DNA. So playing Monopoly or Uno will be more fun and self-affirming than, say, playing Solitaire.”
In addition to gaining knowledge from people around us, we receive an abundance of information from the digital world as well. It might not always be memes, but internet content has arguably enabled us to learn and share more, according to Pew Research Center’s data.
It revealed that in 2014, the vast majority (87%) of internet users in the US agreed that it has improved their ability to learn new things. Back then it was estimated that by 2015, Americans would consume 1.7 trillion hours of traditional and digital media—a projection based on the 5% annual growth in the amount of information and media in people’s lives between the years of 2008 and 2013. “That is an average of 15.5 hours of media per person per day of 30 different kinds of media in video, print, audio, and gaming formats,” the report reads in part.
Considering how much of online content is memes, it is arguably safe to say that we might learn a thing or two from them. Not only learn, but use them to share information as well. Covering ‘The surprising power of internet memes’, BBC pointed out that they are more than puns hidden in a humorous combination of texts and visuals; they can also be tools for self-expression, connection, social influence and even political subversion.