Find your soulmate: Memetic alignment for psychological profiling

This essay deals with the topic of how to find people with similar interests as you on social media based on memetic profiling in analogy to gene sequence alignments. In the last paragraphs however I propose a variant for Steemit although I wrote this article originally essentially about Pinterest, when I did not even know about Steemit. But the same principles apply.

Background

Imagine you’re on a social medium or even a dating site and you’re trying to find people who share the same interests as you do. Usually such sites have some fields where you can specify your interest, indicate what books or films you like etc. If the site has a good algorithm it might indeed search for an optimal alignment between your interests profile and that of others to identify potential friends or partners. However, not everybody takes the time to fill out such questionnaires and due to this lack of accurate input the results may be less good than you expect. 

There are however other sites, where people make electronic collections of their interests, such as Tumblr, Stumbleupon and Pinterest. Pinterest is a very interesting site for determining someone’s psychological profile. On Pinterest people make collections of images (including images with accompanying texts) of topics they are interested in or like. This is excellent for psychological profiling, because it gives a great visual overview of all interests in different categories a person might have.

If Pinterest could be improved and enhanced in its functionality so that you could compare the degree of overlap in pins you have with somebody else, in principle you could be able to find people who share a maximum of interests with you and who could be potential friends.

Memomes

In fact, your Pinterest collection is in a certain way your Memecard. Memes are elements of sets of beliefs, behaviours and ideas, which are typical for a certain cultural group and which can be easily spread among people. Religions for example are very strong memegroups or shared Memomes. But also a political or sportive affiliation can make that you belong to a certain memegroup.

Each idea category typical for such a memegroup can be called a meme, in analogy to a gene.

A Memome can then be considered to be a subject's complete set of memes in analogy to a complete genome.

In genetics if you want to determine the degree of similarity (homology or identity) between two organisms, you carry out a gene sequence alignment. (See image on top).

In analogy, an algorithm could carry out a “meme alignment” protocol on Pinterest. Each image shared by two different individuals can then get a score. The image in fact functions as a nucleotide in a gene.

Pinterest could improve such an algorithm by making standard categories in a cache memory (the users are not obliged to use these standard categories). A complete set of images belonging to a given category could establish a given meme. The degree of completeness of a given meme could also be weighted in attributing a score in the alignment protocol.

Thus Pinterest could be enhanced to generate a meme-profile for each “pinner” with a certain score of similarity with other people. It is likely that people with high scores of similarity with your profile also have images, that you as a user will like, and which you can add to further complete your collections.

In addition, you may actually stumble upon people who share a great deal of views and interests with you, which are likely to be potential friends.

The term “meme-alignment” is known in the gaming industry in a slightly different sense: gamers choose what “meme” they want to belong to (e.g. “evil” vs. “good”). But your Pinterest profile in fact shows what type of meme you belong to if such an algorithm could be added.

Noteworthy, just like modern genetics has been enhanced with epigenetics (which inter alia corresponds to molecular modifications such as methylation to certain nucleotides and histone proteins), pins do contain epimemetic information in the form of comments that can be added by the pinner. Whereas when you re-pin somebody else’s pin, you cannot change the image, you can however change the accompanying comments. Just like epigenetic information is not necessarily inherited, epimemetic information need not be inherited either.

This Pinterest-type of memetic alignment for psychological profiling cannot only find application in dating sites or social networks; it can also find an application in psychology or recruitment. It may actually give a more nuanced reflection of someone’s character than the traditional DISC red, yellow, green, blue character typing (developed by W.Marston ) used in corporate organisations with a management culture.

DISC   Image source: http://eqevents.com.au/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people/  

As a psychological or recruitment test a person could be given a set of images and be allowed to pick and categorise these with a Pinterest like tool. This not only gives a good idea of the subject’s preferences, but also shows his or her ability to ontologically categorise and create categories, as well as the speed with which such a classification is arrived at. Conversely, such tools could provide young people with accurate propositions for professions they might like in online profession tests.

Rohrschach inkblot. Image from Wikipedia

It could even be used in criminology as an alternative to the famous Rorschach inkblot test, in which subjects have to relate their perceptions relating to the inkblot they see.

In short, a memetic alignment tool based on iconic set similarities in a tool as Pinterest has a great potential in a variety of fields, from dating sites to criminology.

I now also have an idea how we could adapt this for Steemit. If we could monitor on what type of articles people vote in conjunction with the Tagsonomy I proposed in a previous post. Thus it will be possible for each category to see which people like the same type of articles as you do and this way one can create a voting profile. Percentages of voting identicity could be indicated when you visit someone's profile, which already gives a good hint whether you like the same stuff or not.

If you liked this article please upvote or even better also resteem it. 

Suggestions and comments are welcome. 

Image on top source: http://www.panspermia.org/