Bartlett War Of Ghosts

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Key study: Bartlett (1932) War of the ghosts
Introduction
One of the leading researchers in memory before Bartlett was the German psychologist
Ebbinghaus (1885) who tried to study pure memory and forgetting rates by learning nonsense syllables and then reproduce them. Bartlett (1932) developed a different approach to the study of memory when he asked people to reproduce an unfamiliar story they had read. Bartlett found that people changed the story to fit into their existing knowledge. He argued that memory is an active process rather than a passive tape-recording of experience as suggested by Ebbinghaus.

Procedure
The aim of his study was to investigate how memory of a story is affected by previous knowledge. He wanted to see if cultural background and unfamiliarity with a text would lead to distortion of memory when the story was recalled. Bartlett’s hypothesis was that memory is reconstructive and that people store and retrieve information according to expectations formed by cultural schemas.
Bartlett performed a study where he used serial reproduction, which is a technique where participants hear a story or see a drawing and are told to reproduce it after a short time and then to do so again repeatedly over a period of days, weeks, months or years. Bartlett told participants a Native American legend called The War of the Ghosts. The participants in the study were British; for them the story was filled with unknown names and concepts, and the manner in which the story was developed was also foreign to them. The story was therefore ideal to study how memory was reconstructed based on schema processing.

Results
Bartlett found that participants changed the story as they tried to remember it - a process called distortion. Bartlett found that there were three patterns of distortion that took place.
Assimilation: The story became more consistent with the participants’ own cultural expectations - that is, details were unconsciously changed to fit the norms of British culture.
Leveling: The story also became shorter with each retelling as participants omitted information which was seen as not important. Sharpening: Participants also tended to change the order of the story in order to make sense of it using terms more familiar to the culture of the participants. They also added detail and/or emotions. The participants overall remembered the main themes in the story but changed the unfamiliar elements to match their own cultural expectations so that the story remained a coherent whole although changed.

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© John Crane & Jette Hannibal, InThinking www.tok-inthinking.co.uk 1

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Discussion
Remembering is not a passive but rather an active process, where information is retrieved and changed to fit into existing schemas. This is done in order to create meaning in the incoming information. According to Bartlett, humans constantly search for meaning. Based on his research Bartlett formulated the theory of reconstructive memory. This means that memories are not copies of experiences but rather reconstructions. This does not mean that memory is unreliable but rather that memory can be altered by existing schemas.
The study was performed in a laboratory and can be criticized for its lack of ecological validity although it used naturalistic material rather than nonsense material as was used in
Ebbinghaus’s study. The methodology used in the study was not rigorously controlled.
Participants did not receive standardized instructions, so some of the distortions could be due to participants’ guessing or other demand characteristics. Bartlett’s study was important at the time in that it pointed towards the possibility of studying cognitive processes like memory scientifically and the research resulted in support for schema theory and the theory of reconstructive memory, which have been useful theories in understanding human memory and social cognition. Bartlett is now recognized as one of the first cognitive psychologists.
Reference
Bartlett, F. (1932). Remembering: A study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
For further study http://www.ppsis.cam.ac.uk/bartlett/index.html The Bartlett archive at Cambridge http://www.ppsis.cam.ac.uk/bartlett/TheoryOfRemembering.htm A chapter on remembering

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© John Crane & Jette Hannibal, InThinking www.tok-inthinking.co.uk 2