this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
555 points (96.5% liked)
Memes
207 readers
357 users here now
Memes! A way of describing cultural information being shared. An element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
founded 5 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Cool. People don't reliably act rationally, though.
People do, practically by construction of the term. Rationality is the social norm. Irrationality is typically defined as some variant of mental disorder.
Rational patterns of behavior are critical to an individual's health and well-being. They're also patterns that can be observed, extrapolated, and exploited. So you'll often see an individualistic rational action (for instance, fleeing from danger) manipulated by a malicious actor (for instance, someone shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater) in order to achieve a large scale negative result (a stampede or crowd crush).
You can point to a crowd crush and conclude "Everyone in that crowd was irrational" when no single individual did anything at any given moment that didn't make sense from their point of view.