The infected self: Revisiting the metaphor of the mind virus

Abstract

The idea that units of culture may act as a virus controlling some of the perceptions and actions of individuals has been the subject of considerable controversy since proposed by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. This debate has occurred in the absence of a defined mental viral structure or a target body upon which such viral structures may act. This article develops a paradigm in which the self is understood as such a body upon which future research into “mind viruses” may be undertaken. Possible mechanisms for mind-viral transmission are discussed. Criteria for defining a mental virus are used to examine evidence of possible mind-virus contagion in suicides, suicide cults, terrorism, and religion.

Investigating the Effects of Misinformation as Infopathogens: Developing a Model and Thought Experiment

“…Finally, another support for the analogy is a growing number of papers advocating psychological inoculation (Van Der Linden 2022;Roozenbeek et al 2022), confirming inferentially that there must be an information agent against which the inoculation is applied. In the sense of content (especially digital) "going viral", the concept aligns with that of a "mind virus" (Robertson 2017), and because viral content may also comprise non-harmful memes (Brodie 2009), the term infopathogen is used in this study. Criteria for a psychological definition of an infopathogenic infection have been developed (Robertson 2017).…”

“…In the sense of content (especially digital) "going viral", the concept aligns with that of a "mind virus" (Robertson 2017), and because viral content may also comprise non-harmful memes (Brodie 2009), the term infopathogen is used in this study. Criteria for a psychological definition of an infopathogenic infection have been developed (Robertson 2017). These criteria can be summarized as follows: (i) a deleterious, unplanned, and observable change in an individual; (ii) the disruption of normal cognitive feedbacks governing volition, distinctness, continuance, productivity, intimacy, social interest, and emotion; (iii) appropriation of the individual's resources to activities that spread the infopathogen; and (iv) uncharacteristic changes in emotional attachments.…”

Graphing the Self: An application of graph theory to memetic self-mapping in psychotherapy

“…Recognizing the notion of a mind-virus as proposed by Dawkins (1976Dawkins ( , 2006, Brodie (1996), and Dennett (1995) has been criticized as tautological (Boyd & Richardson, 2000;Burman, 2012;Gabora, 2004), Robertson (2017b) outlined conditions by which the metaphor of a mind virus could be useful avoiding such concerns. He argued the self may be understood as a corporeal body upon which structures that metaphorically act as viruses, may be understood.…”

Implications of a Culturally Evolved Self for Notions of Free Will

“…Despite the subjects’ expectations, interpretations of the commandments showed considerable variation with little evidence of consensus. It is possible that our human ancestors were reliable replicators of culturally learned memes as postulated by Blackmore (1999) , but “non-autistic modern humans have either a diminished ability to do so, or they have additional mental attributes interfering with this more primal replicative function” ( Robertson, 2017 , p. 357). As we shall see, this change could have occurred relatively recently.…”