At this moment, an untold number of TikTok videos are being sent without commentary to an untold number of group chats. The videos might remind the senders of their mom, their spouse, their high-school best friends. They might strike the recipients as charming—or as smartphone pollution. The meme-sharing never stops.
People have been sending one another memes nearly as long as the web has been worldwide, gathering amusing bits of internet ephemera and texting, emailing, or sharing it on social media with their loved ones. Before it was TikToks and Instagram Reels, it was I Can Has Cheezburger? links posted to Facebook walls. (Even before the internet existed, people engaged in meme-sharing-like behavior: your grandma clipping articles from the newspaper that she thought you might like, for instance.)
As communication goes, sending a meme is one of the lowest-lift—one might even say laziest—ways to stay in touch. It’s barely a step above not saying anything at all. But a surprisingly large body of research on meme-sharing has found that it can serve an important function in relationships and bring people closer together.
According to Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, sending memes can be a form of “pebbling”—a term that he, appropriately, saw on social media. It refers to a behavior among gentoo penguins, in which they present potential mates with carefully selected, shiny pebbles. Among humans, giving the gift of a carefully selected, shiny meme can be a mating behavior, too, or a platonic one.
[Read: The meme that defined a decade]
“These aren’t trivial gestures—every pebble is a bid for connection,” Grant writes in his new book, Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World. Clicking “Share” on a funny Instagram post is hardly on the level of inviting a friend to dinner, as bids for connection go. But neither is it nothing. At minimum, it’s a way of checking in and reminding someone of your relationship. Nicholas Brody, a communication-studies professor at the University of Puget Sound, told me that in unpublished data from his research, he’s found that the most common reason people said they sent memes was just to convey “I’m thinking of you” to the other person.
But for many, the meaning can be deeper than that. People really tend to curate what they send to whom, experts told me, picking and choosing the pebbles that they think the other person will like. For me, cat videos go to my husband, Lord of the Rings memes to certain friends, nostalgic posts about emo music to different friends, posts about literary drama to my writer friends. This is a way of creating and reinforcing a shared reality, one study on the interpersonal use of memes found, a sense that we are both on the inside of the specific microculture that is our relationship. (Even those who aren’t meme-sharers themselves do this in many other ways, through inside jokes and private language.) Memes work well for this purpose because they “are so nuanced, and have so many different layers of cultural references and relational meanings,” Brody told me, “that they only really have a lot of power when we already feel really close to somebody.” Indeed, his research shows that people mostly send memes to people they know well—to romantic partners and close friends.
The best-case scenario is that a meme opens a door to further sharing. For instance, Grant told me that he recently sent a friend from high school a post of a funny prank he saw—not only because he thought they would appreciate it, but because they themselves were pranksters when they were young. The post launched them into reminiscing about how they used to mash bananas into the door handles of a friend’s car in high school. Rachel Peng, an assistant professor of digital advertising at Louisiana State University, told me that she was inspired to research meme-sending because of her own experience with social anxiety. “Sometimes I send memes,” she said, “to start a conversation. Or sometimes I don’t know what to say but I also want to keep the conversation going.” And even though people tend to use memes most with their nearest and dearest, her research has found that they might be even more beneficial among acquaintances. When you’re just getting to know someone, taking the time to pick out something that reminds you of them is a bigger gesture—even more so if it sparks more back-and-forth.
[Read: Forgive the bad texters]
But what if the meme receiver doesn’t respond with fond reminiscences? Some Instagram DM threads become wildly lopsided: one person sending meme after meme, the other hearting no more than every tenth one. That sort of thing could be annoying. “There is such a thing as spamming people with random junk from the internet,” Grant said. But if the memes are lovingly curated, it could still be a net positive for the relationship, even if the meme receiver just chuckles privately without responding. “If we both get the joke, it’s still a bit like a little moment of connection, right?” Peng said.
“One of the key things in relational maintenance is that we want assurances that this other person values our friendship and our relationship just as much as us,” Brody added. But “it doesn’t always have to be a meme for a meme.” Just remember that if your friend sent you 15 memes in a day, it means they thought of you 15 times that day. So drop them the occasional lol or heart emoji just to show you’re thinking of them too.