How to create a mind virus

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In our current consumer-led society what every entrepreneur wants to know is how to create a multi-million pound best seller. Paul Marsden, a DPhil student in GRCiSS, has come up with an idea that may just solve this quest. He has developed an online research tool that will help companies or individuals to design and promote successful products. The technique may be used to increase the 'infectiousness' of advertising and marketing campaigns through the development of 'mind viruses' that can trigger 'social epidemics' by making people believe that they want the product.

Paul's online research tool uses insights from 'memetics' to evolve ideas online. The term 'meme' was first used by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins argues that ideas, or memes as he calls them, are rather like genes; they are 'genes of meaning' that replicate too.

Paul likens this to a computer that has hardware and software. In humans, the genetic side is the hardware and the memetic side is the software. This software, or these memes, get loaded onto us through communication. Memes that happen to recombine in this process so that they can jump from mind to mind are successful; they are good memes because they are good at 'replicating'. It is 'survival of the fittest' with ideas; the good memes survive because they are combined in such a way that our minds notice them and pass them on, whilst weak memes die.

Paul says, 'The Christian church is a wonderful set of memes that has copied itself across countless minds and as it copies, the more it copies, by definition, the fitter it gets. All the other five million half-baked ideas that everyone has, that never manage to get out of your head and replicate inside someone else's head, they die.'

To develop a way of generating fit sets of memes, Paul used a well-established technique, the word association game, and put it online. By getting consumers to play this game, he identifies the subjective meaning of a brand and the emotions it evokes in people. The real power of the web is that it allows a large number of people to be involved, evolving a 'memetic map' of the idea that is robust. Anyone can log on to the web at www.ideaslab.net, where they are asked to give the words that they most associate with the concept of 'healthy living'. Words that come up repeatedly become strong associations with healthy living such as 'low fat', 'exercise' and 'natural', while those words that are just particular to certain individuals become weak and die. Paul can then use the network of memes to recombine and engineer new products and ideas that are full of fit memes and that are likely to be contagious. Paul describes this as a repetitive 'Darwinian 'survival of the fittest' selection process'.

The focus of Paul's doctoral research is, in fact, the opposite of these positive mind viruses. Having studied evolutionary theory as part of his first degree in sociology at Sussex, Paul went into marketing for a large pharmaceuticals company. But he finally became disillusioned with the way that marketing is carried out, realising that the power of Darwinian thinking was not used, and so he returned to develop his ideas at Sussex.

For his DPhil Paul has examined the negative effect of an infectious meme; people seem to 'catch' suicides like they catch colds: suicides lead to copycat suicides. According to research carried out in the 1980s, after a suicide is reported in the media the suicide rate rises significantly. The theory behind this is that media suicide stories are somehow contagious. Humans have evolved certain tendencies, like doing those things we feel positively about, copying people with high status, and copying people who are similar to ourselves. Therefore, when we are exposed to reports of suicides of people that we admire or are like us, or are portrayed positively, this can trigger suicide.

Paul used the memetic mapping technique to evolve a map that is representative of a population's associations around suicide to find out which words might help trigger suicides. The word 'escape' is, according to Paul, a very good example of this. 'Reports of suicides should avoid writing things like, 'John's suicide was a cry for help that allowed him to escape ...' because words like escape are associated with all sorts of positive associations, like holidays and freedom.' Knowing these associations, and working out which are positive and which are negative, means that recommendations can be made to journalists on words to be avoided when reporting stories on suicide.

Paul is currently working with American Express (Amex) to engineer a new financial product and will be presenting his work with marketing researcher Alix Beelaerts from Amex at the Market Research Society conference in Brighton next week.