Getting Psyched About Memes in the Psychology Classroom

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Getting Psyched About Memes in the Psychology Classroom Getting Psyched About Memes in the Psychology Classroom

Lisa M. Kath

Gordon B. Schmidt

Sayeedul Islam

William P. Jimenez

Old Dominion University

, [email protected]

Jessica L. Hartnett

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Original Publication Citation Original Publication Citation

Kath, L. M., Schmidt, G. B., Islam, S., Jimenez, W. P., & Hartnett, J. L. (2022). Getting psyched about

memes in the psychology classroom.

Teaching of Psychology

. Advance online publication.

https://doi.org/10.1177/00986283221085908

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Psychology at ODU Digital Commons. It has been

accepted for inclusion in Psychology Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ODU Digital Commons.

For more information, please contact [email protected].

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM

Published in Teaching of Psychology at https://doi.org/10.1177/00986283221085908. This work is

licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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Getting Psyched About Memes in the Psychology Classroom

Lisa M. Kath

, Gordon B. Schmidt

, Sayeedul Islam

3, 4

, William P. Jimenez

, and Jessica L.

Hartnett

Department of Psychology, San Diego State University

Department of Organizational Leadership, Purdue University Fort Wayne

Department of Psychology, Farmingdale State College

Talent Metrics

Department of Psychology, Old Dominion University

Department of Psychology, Gannon University

Author Note

Lisa M. Kath https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1846-7250

Gordon B. Schmidt https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3461-6906

Sayeedul Islam https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9678-2742

William P. Jimenez https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1141-4631

Jessica L. Hartnett https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5928-8702

Online Supplemental Materials for this article are available on the Open Science

Framework (visit https://osf.io/njsuz/). We would like to thank Lynn Gagne for her input on

accessibility of memes for the visually impaired.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Lisa M. Kath, San Diego

State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, MC-4611, San Diego, CA 92182, United States. Email:

[email protected]

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 2

Abstract

Introduction: Internet memes are a ubiquitous part of internet culture and a common

communication tool among students. Because they are a good medium for expressing ideas and

concepts in a concise and fun manner, memes are a potentially valuable tool for teaching and

engaging students.

Statement of the Problem: Instructors may not know how to use memes in classroom

assignments or activities to support learning objectives.

Literature Review: Students finding or creating their own class-related content is an

empirically-supported way to enhance learning. Instructors can enhance learning by using

multimedia approaches (pictures/videos in addition to words), which is a good fit for the use of

memes. We include examples of ways that memes have already been used in psychology

classrooms.

Teaching Implications: Incorporating meme assignments or activities in the classroom could be

beneficial.

Conclusion: We describe how students can explain or generate memes that illustrate concepts

related to course material. Instructions and supporting information and resources, as well as calls

for research into the effectiveness of the use of memes in the classroom, are included.

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 3

Getting Psyched About Memes in the Psychology Classroom

Connecting class content to topics and formats that students already are familiar with can

enrich student learning and engagement (Purnama, 2017). To that end, educators have begun to

incorporate social media in class activities, such as having students use Pinterest for sharing

class-relevant content (Schmidt, 2016), learn how to network with LinkedIn (Gerard, 2012), and

receive content on Twitter and Facebook that reinforces core concepts (Blessing et al., 2012).

Memes are a major means by which students and others communicate on social media.

According to the American Psychological Association (APA, n.d.), an internet meme is “an idea

(e.g., a word or phrase, hashtag, hyperlink, picture, or video), usually rooted in popular culture,

that is widely popularized and distributed on the World Wide Web, for example, via social

networks, blogs, e-mail, and news sources” (Definition 1; for psychology meme examples see

“What Makes for a Good Meme” section below). Despite the popularity of memes among

educators from other disciplines (e.g., Underwood & Kararo, 2020; Wells, 2018), psychology

educators have yet to fully embrace using memes in the classroom. We believe psychology

educators are well positioned to consider and investigate the potential of memes to improve

student learning and engagement (e.g., Riser et al., 2020). In this article, we review some reasons

why using memes as class activities could be beneficial. In addition, we provide activity

examples that involve students engaging with memes to review and communicate about

psychology concepts.

These exercises go beyond the instructor adding a meme on a PowerPoint slide

(something many of us have done!); they involve students explaining or creating memes. This

article begins with a theoretical foundation, followed by a brief description of the nature of

memes and how they have been used in educational contexts. We then describe examples of how

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 4

memes can be used in psychology classrooms and cautions in use, including ways these activities

could be elaborated on, and empirically studied.

Theoretical Foundation

Some instructors include content-relevant memes in their lecture slides (Reyes et al.,

2018), and there is some evidence that using memes in that passive way could be beneficial.

According to a review of the science of learning through multimedia, including pictures in

learning materials can engage students’ visual memory pathways to support the movement of

knowledge into long-term memory (Mayer, 2008). Moreover, Mayer summarized experimental

research demonstrating that including relevant images alongside written content (compared to

words alone) and adopting a conversational (rather than formal) style in lesson delivery is highly

beneficial for learners. Drawing from this research, it is possible that tying memes to essential

course material and presenting them in a conversational manner may enhance memes’

educational effectiveness for improving student learning outcomes.

Students are often the passive consumers of memes both within and outside of the

classroom. By having students find/explain or create memes, the present activities go beyond the

practice of just including memes in lecture slides. These activity examples help students

consider, in a more mentally engaging way, what class content means and how it can be

explained in a concise and memorable manner. What students learn about a topic must be

distilled to its essential nature for inclusion in a meme, rather than a memorized definition. These

more active ways of using memes in the classroom may be reflected in higher levels in Bloom’s

taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). We also connect explaining and creating memes in

relation to the learning outcome categories described by Kraiger et al. (1993).

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 5

There is educational value in having psychology students find or create their own class-

related content. For example, rather than just passively watching instructor-chosen videos,

students can actively co-create learning experiences with each other and the instructor by finding

and sharing relevant content (Schmidt, 2016; Tyler et al., 2009). Such experiences create a

learning environment in which students are actively involved in determining how class concepts

connect to real-world content (Schmidt, 2016).

Recently, educators across a variety of disciplines have used memes in the classroom—

for example, to teach economic concepts, build students’ critical thinking and literacy skills,

enrich medical students’ learning in an online physiology class, and even prepare students for a

chemistry final exam (see Engel et al., 2014; Harvey & Palese, 2018; Subbiramaniyan et al., in

press; Underwood & Kararo, 2020; Wells, 2018). Psychology is starting to join in, with memes

used within psychological statistics lectures as “bell ringers” to start classes on an engaging note

(Peters, 2018). Moreover, memes have been used with anecdotal success across different

universities’ psychology classes with varying numbers of students: a psychological statistics

class in Toronto (Metz, 2020), an introductory industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology class

in North Carolina (McGonagle, 2020), a developmental psychology class in Pennsylvania

(Conry-Murray, 2019), a general psychology class in Oregon (Kleinknecht, n.d.), a work and

organizational psychology class in Dresden, Germany (Dörfel, 2020), and a psychological

statistics and research methods course in Virginia (Katz, 2021). Although some teaching

interventions are best suited for a particular subdiscipline or classroom size, meme assignments

have been well received in a variety of classroom settings. Such assignments are flexible enough

to be used across the psychology curriculum. There are typically two main types of meme

assignments: meme explanation and meme generation.

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 6

Meme Activities: Two Ways

Having Students Explain Memes

One approach to using memes in a class activity is to have students explain how existing

memes are connected to class content (Metz, 2020). Research suggests that asking students to

generate explanations helps them learn (VanLehn et al., 1992). Students can be directed to social

media accounts that are publicly accessible and asked to select a meme relevant to the course

content. Next, students can be instructed to explain the meme in their own words, connecting the

meme to content covered in class. Sample assignment instructions and some places to look for

psychology-related memes are available in this paper’s online Open Science Framework (OSF)

project (see Kath et al., 2022a). In the context of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl,

2001), this exercise would fall under the analysis category. In the context of Kraiger et al.’s

(1993) taxonomy of learning outcomes, this exercise would be a demonstration of a cognitive

learning outcome.

Having Students Create Memes

Another approach to using memes is to put the focus on students creating memes of their

own based on course content (Conry-Murray, 2019). Sample assignment instructions and some

information on how to make memes is included on OSF (see Kath et al., 2022b). In the context

of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), this exercise would fall under the

synthesis category because students are creating a new product that summarizes a key concept in

a concise, humorous manner. In the context of Kraiger et al.’s (1993) taxonomy of learning

outcomes, this exercise would be a demonstration of a skill-based learning outcome related to

scientific communication skills.

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 7

What Makes for a Good Meme

Creating memes is a challenging task that involves identifying a concept, choosing a still

image or GIF that matches the concept, and writing captions. Literat and van den Berg (2019)

note that the perceived value of a meme depends on the target population. For example, I-O

psychology-related memes are geared towards practicing I-O psychologists and current/former

students of the subdiscipline. In an introductory I-O psychology course, it is typical to cover

reliability and validity issues associated with unstructured employment interviews (see Campion

et al., 1998). The widespread use of unstructured interviews rather than structured interviews is

disheartening to most I-O psychologists. This concept will be used to describe how memes can

be created to convey this point.

One thing that has been noted as a key ingredient to a successful meme is having a

“certain inside-joke quality” (Hellyer, 2015, para. 5). To create a meme using this concept, it

would be helpful to know both the facts (structured employment interviews are preferable to

unstructured ones) and frustration associated with the topic, because both help create that inside-

joke quality. Thus, the topic fits with the target audience (Literat & van den Berg, 2019), and the

person crafting the meme then needs to present it in a way that is culturally meaningful to the

target audience. For example, successful memes often depict content from popular TV shows

(e.g., The Office) or movies (e.g., The Avengers) or universally-recognized content, such as cute

cats and dogs or relatable facial expressions. The appropriate image and text help make a meme

salient to the audience.

There are several meme templates that could be chosen to illustrate the concept of using

standardized interview questions for all candidates. One such template comes from the movie

Spider-Man: No Way Home and depicts fellow Avengers Wong and Doctor Strange

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 8

(https://twitter.com/iopsychmemes/status/1438472934578966534). Wong, depicted in the meme

as an I-O psychologist, says, “Please don’t make up questions when you interview people,” to

which Doctor Strange, depicted as the hiring manager, replies, “Fine, I won’t.” In the next frame,

Wong leaves through a portal, and in the last frame, Doctor Strange winks at the camera,

implying he has no intention of following Wong’s instructions. Another option is to choose a

popular template of Robert Downey Jr., with his hand on his chest, eyes closed, mouth slightly

open, and a look of relief on his face (https://www.instagram.com/p/B8OfN0GAz_4/). Above the

picture is the caption: “When interview questions are used consistently across candidates to

reduce bias.” This template highlights a benefit of using structured interview questions, which is

that they reduce bias. Both of these images represent people or characters the target audience is

likely to know, and the meme templates are ones people may have, in fact, seen before. Thus,

there is a cultural familiarity and relevance (see also Cautions section below).

The two aforementioned memes are good quality because they highlight information that

I-O psychologists know and acknowledge a point of shared frustration. Because memes must be

short and witty, getting the wording “just right” is both challenging and important. Further, to see

a superhero and/or actor communicating this concept is humorous because of the contrast with

one’s image of an I-O psychologist (i.e., nerdier than Wong or Robert Downey Jr.).

Finer Points for Application/Adaptation

Grading

You may choose to grade memes on a credit/no credit basis, with a quick glance to

determine a basic level of clarity/accuracy, but you may wish to create a more detailed grading

scheme. Obviously, defining good performance is a key component of identifying grading

criteria. To help students think about what constitutes good performance on a meme creation

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 9

assignment, you can simply ask them to share thoughts about what makes for a good meme or a

bad meme, assuming you have good attendance and robust discussion among your students. You

may discuss who the intended audience is for the meme: Are you hoping students will evaluate

or incorporate some scientific communication skills so that the concept would be understood by

those without specialized training (as one of the authors did when assigning meme creation to

graduate students)? Or is it simply enough that the instructor and classmates are able to

understand and enjoy the meme?

One way to review others’ efforts and reward those who are exhibiting good performance

on a meme creation assignment would be to identify the top few memes from the class and

submit them for peer voting, as suggested by Marshall and colleagues (2021). You could also put

students into small groups to review each other’s memes and provide feedback for improving

them, as a way of honing communication skills.

If the learning objective includes scientific communication skills, then a recent paper by

Chew and colleagues (2020) could prove very useful. They present a typology of communication

contexts that connect with Goal 4 in the APA’s (2013) guidelines underscoring the development

of effective communication skills for the undergraduate psychology major. Their Table 3 (see

Chew et al., 2020, p. 301) outlines a rubric for grading on clarity, coherence, mechanics, APA

style/formatting (not applicable for memes), and content/source (which is typically not included

in memes themselves). This rubric could also be applied to explanations of memes or other

written assignments submitted alongside the meme.

Memes could also be used as part of a quiz or exam, but care would need to be taken to

ensure that the meme was accessible across various cultures, experiences, and abilities. For

example, some memes work best when the viewer has experience with the pop culture element

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 10

depicted. Other memes may rely on colloquialisms that are not easily understood by non-native

English speakers. For these reasons, we recommend that instructors stay away from using memes

in high-stakes assessments until the meme has been pilot tested with the target student audience

for its broad accessibility (a bit more on this issue is discussed below in Cautions).

Adaptations

In addition to being a stand-alone activity, the meme activity can be used in conjunction

with other written exercises. For example, asking students to include a relevant meme with a

submitted written exercise could help students learn about a particular topic more effectively.

The meme could act almost as a summary or abstract of the topic.

The best memes that students create could even be featured in future semesters of the

course. Memes from a previous semester could be presented as a “sneak peek” of what students

will learn later in the semester. Seeing a meme that a student from a previous semester made

might pique interest in a topic to follow. Then, once the topic has been covered, the meme could

be shown again, at which point students should be able to understand (and explain) the meme.

Memes from previous semesters could also be used at the end of a concept’s presentation to

summarize/reinforce the concept. Because memes are highly visual and concise, they could serve

as a memory aid for students (Mayer, 2008).

Cautions

One important caution to consider would be ensuring that this activity was accessible to

those with visual impairments. Memes posted on social media may lack the alternate text

necessary to make the graphics accessible (Greenspan, 2020). We recommend consulting guides

for how to make memes more accessible (e.g., Gleason et al., 2019), talking with your

university’s student disability services office, and/or checking in with your students with visual

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 11

impairments about the potential for accessibility issues with memes to make sure the assignment

works for all of your students.

Another caution to consider is that memes often depict human beings. As such, we

encourage psychology instructors and students to “remember the human” (see Shea, 1994, p. 35)

in their memes. For example, journalists (e.g., Hess & O’Neill, 2017) and scholars (e.g.,

Sobande, 2021) have observed non-Black individuals’ excessive use of reaction GIFs

depicting

Black individuals—an example of digital blackface, which is “the act of inhabiting a black

persona [and] employing digital technology to co-opt a perceived cache or black cool” (Jackson,

2017, para. 10). Such behavior is disturbing because it appropriates and dehumanizes the

experiences of Black individuals, whose emotional expressions are being used for humor (Outley

et al., 2021). Non-Black individuals’ overuse of memes such as “Oprah’s ‘You Get a Car’” (n.d.)

or “Sweet Brown / Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That” (n.d.) perpetuates stereotypes portraying

women of color as overly emotional (Hess & O’Neill, 2017) and, often, can amount to acts of

digital racism (Sobande, 2021). Psychology instructors and students should be aware of these

issues when creating and sharing memes depicting individuals. To quote Dr. Lauren M. Jackson

(2017) in a Teen Vogue op-ed:

Now, I'm not suggesting that white and nonblack people refrain from ever circulating a

black person’s image for amusement or otherwise . . . . There’s no prescriptive or

proscriptive step-by-step rulebook to follow, nobody’s coming to take GIFs away. But no

digital behavior exists in a deracialized vacuum. We all need to be cognizant of what we

A reaction GIF is “a GIF of someone or something (such as a celebrity or an animal) that is sent or posted in reply

to something (such as a text message or a social media post or comment) and that typically depicts and expresses a

reaction” (Merriam-Webster, n.d., Definition 1).

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 12

share, how we share, and to what extent that sharing dramatizes preexisting racial

formulas inherited from “real life.” (para. 6)

Implied in the quote above is that concerns about digital blackface and other racially insensitive

depictions should be balanced with concerns about lack of representation of underrepresented

individuals.

Finally, it is helpful to remember that some of these memes are connected to cultural

experiences that may make it difficult for students and/or instructors with different cultural

backgrounds to fully appreciate the memes that are created from a U.S. cultural perspective.

Most memes are designed to leverage fairly universal facial expressions or situations. In fact,

meme images posted from a U.S. cultural lens have been translated into other languages for

sharing (e.g., Arabic [https://twitter.com/OmarAlbaraidi/status/1471501433249812482], Malay

[https://twitter.com/DrAliziAlias/status/1469570763694829571]), indicating that they have the

possibility of translating across cultures. Nevertheless, we suggest that when you use memes in

the classroom, you give your students choices. In the “Having Students Explain Memes” activity,

McGonagle (2020) allows her students to choose a meme related to the course content, which we

think reflects best practices for this assignment. This allows students not attuned to the U.S.

cultural context to pick a meme that is more universally appreciated. In the “Having Students

Create Memes” activity, students will naturally gravitate towards meme templates that they

understand and appreciate. Taken together, we encourage instructors to discuss issues of

accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of meme assignments in their classes.

Need for Empirical Research

There is a paucity of research on memes in the psychology classroom. One notable

exception is Riser et al.’s (2020) study incorporating meme creation in a lifespan development

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 13

course. Over the course of three years, four courses were given a traditional APA-style research

essay (n = 190), and four courses were given a scientific meme writing assignment (n = 216).

The meme assignment was of equal difficulty as the traditional writing assignment, based on

grades assigned to the experimental and control group; however, more students turned in the

meme assignment (99.1%) than the traditional writing assignment (93.4%), which is an

indication that it may have been more engaging. Students reported that they appreciated having

the opportunity to share their knowledge through the meme on their social media accounts and

felt positive emotional responses to engagement from their social media community members.

Qualitatively, students also reported greater knowledge in scientific literacy and application

skills. Although the focus of Riser et al. (2020) was a lifespan development course, we can see

the value of meme assignments in other courses.

We encourage more researchers to investigate the effects of meme evaluation and

generation on learning outcomes. For example, because memes involve translating psychology

concepts for a new audience, it seems possible that meme creation could increase concept

retention, which could be tested with an experimental research design. In addition, research on

how faculty use memes in their courses currently would provide a baseline knowledge of how

pervasive memes are in the classroom. The use of memes in lectures should also be studied as

this approach is commonly used by faculty to improve slide design and presumably student

engagement.

Conclusion

In sum, we believe that meme assignments can be a fun and memorable way to encourage

students to spend extra time thinking about course concepts in a unique way. Memes are

ubiquitous on the internet these days, and as such, memes may be leveraged as powerful learning

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 14

tools. We often want our students to be able to not just regurgitate concept definitions, and

memes can make them think about how these concepts can be illustrated for others. We think

memes can be a powerful tool in our student engagement toolkit. By asking students to be active

participants in explaining or generating short, powerful ideas, instructors can help students distill

knowledge into an easily shareable form.

MEMES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY CLASSROOM 15

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