During the 2014 summer, a new viral phenomenon has invaded social networking platforms and a tidal wave of videos showing people dumping a bucket of iced water on their heads from different countries and corners around the world sprouted everywhere on the internet. The original rules are quite simple yet not necessarily explicit in many occasions where media outlets post videos related to the Ice bucket challenge. First, Get challenged: either by friends, relatives or even co-workers who ask you to do the challenge; then Accept the challenge: you have 24 hours to accept the challenge by filming yourself in a continuous footage where you start by showing your acceptance and then pouring ice water on your head; then Pass on the message, by naming at least three more people you want to challenge and don’t forget to mention the website ALSA.org, the target of the donation. According to many sources, Pete Frates a former Bostonian College baseball player has originally promoted this challenge to promote donations for ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) patients. But when worldwide famous people get involved such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Ethel Kennedy in the story, the challenge has captured bigger attention from media which further fueled its virality in social networking.

The interesting fact about the Ice Bucket Challenge, both from psychological and anthropological perspectives, is its dynamic evolution over a short period of time. First, the lack of real contributions to help financially ALS patients has drawn criticism toward the challenge by accusing the online movement for its slacktivism. Consequently, slight modifications of the original rules have been made to cope with these criticisms. For instance, if you don’t want to dump ice water on your head you may donate $100 to help ALS patients. Or if you accept the challenge, you still need to donate a reasonable amount of money but with no more than $10. Later videos have combined the challenge with genuine donations. An MND report from Australia is a good example revealing that to date over $2,500,000 has been raised for MND research in Australia. Progressively we have witnessed a significant shift in the focus of the original message that went hand in hand with current events in the world during July and August 2014. Besides the handful of the so-called “fails” that either intentionally or accidentally served funny purposes, other contents of the new variants of the viral video were reported such as: the Trash Bucket Challenge to protect the environment; the Rice Bucket Challenge as a remainder of global hunger issue, the Sand Bucket Challenge to promote water preservation in dry regions in the world instead of wasting of big amount of water as displayed in the original videos; the Rubble Bucket Challenge to promote awareness about the war on Gaza; the Bullet Bucket Challenge created by Oralando Jones for promoting civil rights in the wake of the recent events in Ferguson, and the list is long.

The “buzz effect” deciphered

A recent study published in 2013 showed for the first time the presence of a brain region activated in relation with successful contagious “buzz” from the influencer’s but not the message receiver’s perspective. The authors presented their participants with different potential television pilot ideas while they recorded their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The participants’ task consisted simply in imagining themselves as evaluators of the pilots before making recommendations to the “producers”. Their findings showed that persons more able to spread their own ideas to others generated greater “mentalizing-system” activity prior to the message spread. Another interesting fact is that brain regions associated with the spread of an efficient message overlap with the brain’s reward system. The latter was also known to be associated with influence effects. The first persons who launched the Ice Bucket Challenge online movement probably underwent a deep mentalizing process before coming up with the original version. The trickery of the buzz as a result of this mentalizing process also likely solicited the reward system of the brain of both the influencers and the receivers. Indeed, the key-word “challenge” is assumed only when someone is expected to perform in a very particular situation. More importantly, this same person has to be aware that s(he) is undergoing an evaluation.

The polymorphism of online viral phenomena

The recent development of the social networking platforms has magnified the speed at which new ideas can spread in the world. The catalyst effect of social media platforms has been shown in many occasions such as the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Arab uprisings. Yousri Marzouki and Olivier Oullier suggested a framework called Virtual Collective Consciousness (VCC) to account for the online collective mindset of individuals driven by the same credo, goals and motivations in order to achieve actions that will ultimately be witnessed by a worldwide audience. The catalyst effect of social media offers a fast-paced way for social and behavioral scientists to track significant changes within a very narrow time window that otherwise will take a long period to happen.

What is surprising in the ice bucket challenge is the very quick transformation of the original version into many different versions to fit various purposes. The cognitive anthropologist, Pascal Boyer stated the following: “Cultural memes undergo mutation, recombination and selection inside the individual mind every bit as much and as often as (in fact probably more so and more often than) during transmission between minds. The Internet meme is the Web 2.0 version of this culturally transmitted unit of imitation. The alteration over time may create better as long as worse versions of the original one.

To draw an analogy from biology, certain animals, like Panda bears who only eat bamboo shoots, survive by specializing to an extreme extent to a certain environment whereas other species, like crows for instance, survive by becoming generalists and eating almost anything. Similarly, certain ideas survive and spread because they appeal to many people for the same reasons while other ideas have the property of being polymorphic and they adapt to many people for various reasons. Contrary to what happens in biology however, ideas do not evolve through a process similar to natural selection. Evolution in biology results from the combination of random mutations and differential survival and reproduction whereas ideas are actively transformed and adapted by humans to fit certain purposes. For instance, when the Ice Bucket Challenge is transmitted between individuals, certain features, like the purpose can easily change but certain core features, such as the fact of challenging other persons, cannot because they are essential to the spread of the idea. If one of the core ideas was to change during the process of transmission, then it would likely revert back to its original state in the future because the core features of the challenge form what Dan Sperber has called a cultural attractor. What controls the success and polymorphism of ideas then is the amount of shared knowledge and intentions between people. This explains why networking platforms are now at the center of virulent ideas, because they group together individuals that are physically distant yet psychologically close. We have documented in a previous article a compelling case of Internet meme polymorphism that happened in 2013 in Tunisia with the Harlem shake dance. The focus of present article is to understand the underlying psychological mechanisms of the fast growing polymorphism associated with the Ice Bucket Challenge case that we have witnessed in the last two months.

What is the current knowledge in psychology can tell us about such polymorphism?

Numerous studies dealing with opinion distortion and rumors base their arguments on a classic work conducted at the beginning of the last century by the behavioral psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett in his influential 1932 book “Remembering”. He described the serial transmission of information in order to measure the evolution over time of details’ retention. He showed to his first subject a picture of an owl and asked him/her to draw a few seconds later the same picture after it was removed. Then he showed the drawing of the first participant to the second one who was instructed to reproduce it few seconds after it was removed and so on. After no more than twenty rounds, the owl showed in the first picture turns into a cat in the final produced drawing. Since this seminal study, it is now assumed that distortions from the original message are a typical feature when social channels get involved which is the case with social networking. The Harlem shake or the Ice Bucket Challenge cases are genuine proofs of these massive online distortions.

The following picture depicts a descriptive model to predict the longevity and the virality of an Internet meme as a function of its polymorphism rate and the complexity of mentalizing process it undergoes. Thus, an Internet meme that went through complex and various mentalizing processes is more likely to exhibit a strong polymorphism. Accordingly, the polymorph meme virality will peak very quickly and its capacity for transformations and distortions will harm its longevity compared to a unimorph message. It is also highly plausible that the polymorphism emerges from online collective mentalizing that thrives once a VCC is formed around the original meme.

As suggested by the model, there could be a continuum between these processes but even with a highly polymorph meme such as the Ice Bucket Challenge there are many elements preserved, which [a]make it possible for the meme to be identified as the “same meme”, and [b]trigger similar interpretation in most receivers (e.g. it is painful, voluntary, is for a cause, shows moral values, shows determination, requires prior celebrity, etc.). On the other hand, the dimensional description of the model (mentalizing * plasticity) we provided here allows us to reflect upon whether these two dimensions are orthogonal. For instance, did mentalizing – as a way to predict what others will find highly relevant – require also constraining to some extent their interpretation or providing them with cues towards one interpretation?