Meme, in vocational psychology dictionary

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Dictionary of Vocational Psychology

Meme

Memes are elements of a culture communicated through imitation or other nongenetic means. Dawkins (1976) coined the term, and Brodie (1996) and Blackmoore (1999) provide extended discussions. Within and across individuals, memes serve as the means of storage, replication, and transfer of ideas and complexes of ideas that are relevant to and active at the level of culture. Memes thus act as a bridge between the individual and the larger social structures that encapsulate him or her (see Carson & Lowman, 2002). Although simple memes may reflect a single idea, they more frequently form a complex association of ideas, or meme-complexes, but the term meme can be used to refer to either a simple or complex meme. Blackmore argues that memes are integral to consciousness.

Memes may exploit various person-level traits and other resources in order to replicate themselves across individuals. Carson and Lowman provide the only treatment thus far that applies the concept of memes to vocational psychology, arguing that many general "traits" considered important for vocational psychology--such as identity, creativity, entrepreneurship, leadership, and various "values"--may in fact be memes, and not traits at all. For example, they suggest that creativity-related memes may be more likely to copy themselves into individuals with particular personality traits (high on openness and its various facets such as aesthetics, ideas, and fantasy) and interests (artistic). Once a creativity meme has ensconced itself in such an individual, that meme might serve to activity and increase performance of behaviors that rely on particular abilities (such as cultural literacy, ideational fluency, associational fluency, and expressional fluency), which would in turn increase the likelihood of the transmission of the meme to others.

If indeed memes exist as such (and that issue is not settled), and if identity, creativity, leadership, and similar constructs are memes (rather than, say, traits), then memes would be extremely important for vocational psychology, because it is precisely constructs of this sort with which vocational psychologists are most concerned.

Websites of interest

Meme Central. Brodie's (author of Virus of the Mind) site. http://www.memecentral.com/

Memetics papers on the web. Huge list.

What's a meme? From Principia Cybernetica Web.

Alt.memetics. Old site (last update, 1997) but with nice introduction to the area.

Review of Blackmore's The Meme Machine. From The Complete Review.

Christianity Meme Website. On how Christianity is a complex meme. http://www.christianitymeme.org/

References