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STUDY: Bartlett (1932) - The War of the Ghosts

Background
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 reproducing 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.

Aim
The aim of his study was to investigate how memory of a story is affected by previous knowledge.

Specifically, he wanted to see if cultural background and unfamiliarity with a text would lead to distortion of memory when
the story was recalled. Bartletts hypothesis was that memory is reconstructive and that people store and retrieve
information according to expectations formed by cultural schemas.

Procedure
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.

1. 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.

2. Leveling: The story also became shorter with each retelling as participants omitted information which was seen as
not important.

3. 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.

Furthermore it was found that participants:
added detail and/or emotions.
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.

Discussion/Evaluation
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 exact 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 Ebbinghauss study.
The methodology used in the study was not rigorously controlled. For instance, some participants were asked to
recall the story a few minutes later, some hours later, some days later. Therefore TIME may have been a key factor.
Participants did not receive standardized instructions, so some of the distortions could be due to participants
guessing or other demand characteristics.
Bartletts 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.

The War of the Ghosts The Story Used by Bartlett for his Serial Reproduction Study

One night two young men from Egulac went down the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then
they heard war-cries, and they thought: Maybe this is a war-party. They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes
came up, and they heard the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they
said:
What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going u p the river to make war on the people.

One of the young men said: I have no arrows.

Arrows are in the canoe, they said.

I will not go along. I might get killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you, he said turning to the other, may go
with them.

So one of the young men went, but the other returned home. And the warriors went up on the river to a town on the other side of
Kalama. The people came down to the water, and they began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one
of the warriors say: Quick, let us go home: that Indian has been hit. N ow he thought: Oh, they are ghosts. He did not feel sick, but
they said he had been shot.

So the canoes went back to Egulac, and the young men went ashore to his house, and made a fire. And he told everybody and said:
Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight, many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were
killed. They said I was hit and I did not feel sick.

He told it all and then became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became
contorted. The people jumped up and cried. He was dead.