April Fool’s Day

The first of April is traditionally known for pranks and hoaxes. This is a great day for collectors and curators of spoof news that sucker us in.

Most of these made-up stories are harmless fun, thought up for the day. Some are broadcast, such as the Spigetti tree joke, or found on the internet, but most are told person-to-person. Some are rehashed year after year.

Is there a structure to this that memetics can learn from? Well, on the face of it, it is a chance to laugh at our own (and others) gullability and creativity. There is a mash up of deliberatly improper reasoning to such hoaxes. In Toulmin’s framework, there is some element of fact along with something fictional whereby together they result in some plausable conclusion. That is, where the fictional component is not known to have been creativly introduced into the argument, then it misleads the claim to be believed. Secondly, the claim would be remarkable in a “man bites dog” kind of way.

For the joker, part of the fun lies in finding a fictional yet possible grounds or warrant that leads to a remarkable yet plausable conclusion, then relating the tale to someone who is unlikely to descern the fake element, thereby believing the story. When the truth emerges, usually when the joker comes clean, and the hoax is revealed as patent nonsense, then we can laugh at our foolish lack of scrutiny.

Perhaps so, and April the first you would expect such nonsense. The real takeaway for memetics is that of the ease of construction of erronious conclusions, even if not intended as a joke, and that remarkable plausability having greater fitness than that of a more mundane truth given the effort of fact checking.