The Psychology of GIFs

We bring you the final installment of this guest blog series authored by Laura Ligouri, executive director & founder of the neuroscience and psychology nonprofit, Mindbridge.

GIFs have captured our imagination like nothing else. In many respects GIFs have become a kind of internet shorthand, depicting complex emotions in a single click and encompassing cultural concepts with lightning speed. GIFs have become so popular that Giphy boasts a user share rate of more than 7 billion per day. So what’s with all the hype? Why have GIFs taken the internet by storm and—perhaps more importantly—why should we be using them with just about everything we do?

First, let’s establish some brain basics:

• Visual processing within the brain takes place approximately 60,000 times faster than the way our brains process text.
• We will prefer a moving image to a static one.
• We will prefer a moving image with a person to a moving image of a landscape.

GIFs draw our eye because they capitalize on the way in which our brain evolved to see motion and prioritize faces. Our mind’s eye anticipates progressive movement, where one movement leads to the next. However, within the looped animated photo of a GIF, the next movement never takes place, locking our attention in anticipation of something that never comes into being.

But there’s more than simply capturing our attention. There’s capturing our hearts.

In an aptly named presentation at the 2014 Association for Computing Machinery conference, “I Have So Many Feels!” Elli Bourlai and colleagues detailed the extraordinary way in which GIFs easily encapsulate our emotional landscape. Whether it’s joy, sadness, disgust, or shock, GIFs quickly express our feelings far better than a 280 character tweet could. What’s the saying? A picture is worth a thousand words? 

Within the consumer realm, this knowledge has been put to good use, intentionally implanting GIFs into consumer campaigns in order to effortlessly influence, and in many cases upgrade, the emotional state of social media users (Rúa-Hidalgo, et al., 2021). Consumers’ unconscious response to the GIFs increases the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.  

For social and political issues, the landscape can become far more complex. Media and communication strategists must work within conditions that often hinder effective communication, conditions such as attempting to convey complex information in brief spans of time or working to provide mobilizing or motivating content within a polarized environment. What are strategists to do? GIFs might provide part of that answer.

Three core aspects of GIF popularity that directly support progress

#1 – Humor

Persuasion can be understood as an act or process of presenting arguments to move, motivate, or change your target audience. Motivation is different. Motivation is what’s needed in order to bring about change. And to bring about that change, many organizations turn to facts as a means by which to persuade their audience.

But there’s just one problem. Facts don’t often work. (Check out this nifty article that takes an in-depth look at exactly why that’s the case.) So what are we to do when we really need to present facts? How do we gain people’s attention when the typical viewer scrolls through enough content to match the height of the Statue of Liberty? Or sustain that attention with dry statistical material once we’ve got it? Yes, you guessed it. GIFs.

A 2015 State of Marketing report noted how companies, like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, paired GIFs with survey findings in order to add elements of humor and culturally relatable reactions to their key points. This helped to convey complex material while helping their readers stay engaged with the content.

Sometimes we need to communicate an idea, action, or event that is emotionally charged and where engaging in a negative emotional response might risk derailing the intended effect altogether. Here communicators can also leverage the humor inherent in many GIFs as a kind of buffer to the negative emotional reaction. A 2015 article by Kugler and Kuhbander entitled “That’s not funny! But it should be” details the ways in which humor not only functions as a means by which to reduce negative emotional responses to difficult stimuli, but can simultaneously serve as a form of memory enhancement, helping viewers to remember your content longer than engaging in a negative emotion alone.

#2 – Belonging

Of course, there’s nothing quite like a GIF to access pop culture in a single click. GIFs have an ability to compare one situation to a completely different one, yet still draw a relatable meaning. I present to you an example:

We internalize GIFs like this one because on an emotional as well as cognitive level we self-identify with them. Perhaps they represent an aspect of our past (in this case The Muppet Show) or our identity that is meaningful for us. Instantly we establish a connection to others who also share that sentiment and in doing so feel a sense of belonging, both to the image as well as to each other.

Of course there can be a downside to this as well.

The ease in which GIFs can encapsulate culture and take on the latest trend can also serve to isolate folks not in the know. Sometimes images used within GIFs speak to a very specific knowledge set, creating something of a backfire effect from belonging to exclusion. Conversely, accessing imagery specific to a target audience could highlight your communication as sensitive to the likes and dislikes of that population. In sum, it is important to consider the images you are using and the way in which they may (or may not) signal belonging.

#3 – Ease of production

Compared to texts and still images, GIFs can compress a lot of information into a small, easily shareable form of media. They are also relatively easy and inexpensive to create, making them the perfect companion for an organization that must move swiftly with the political landscape.

AND user beware. (You knew there’d be a catch, right?)

The speed with which GIFs can be made also make them susceptible to other societal processes where stereotyped, prejudicial, or discriminatory imagery can quickly become embedded in the name of a trending topic. An extraordinary number of GIFs currently exist online promoting what has been termed “Digital Blackface,” described by Jardin Dogan, M.Ed., Ed.S., a counselor and educator specializing in Black mental health as “when non-Black people use the images and voices of Black individuals to explain emotions or phenomena.” In this case, the images perpetuate negative stereotypes of members of the Black community, contributing to racial harm within the United States. As with all methods of communication or the development of media campaigns, it’s worth pausing and considering the ways in which images and taglines might inadvertently impact members of marginalized or vulnerable populations.

Go get your GIFs

As Richard Yao, manager for strategy & content for IPG Media Lab writes, “GIFs will be around as long as social media and messaging apps continue to dominate our digital interactions.” And for good reason. GIFs charge into our cognitive landscape and capture our emotions like no other. There is a vast landscape of opportunity here for advancing progress should we choose to tap into this resource. However, as with all things, do so intentionally stopping to consider who might be included, excluded, or unintentionally harmed through the production of your images. After that, let the humor guide the way to a brighter tomorrow.