In this post
It is stated that Bartlett came up with his idea of ‘War of the Ghosts’ whilst playing Chinese whispers when he noticed how quickly information changed in line with what people expected to hear or what was familiar to them.
Aim
Bartlett aimed to find out how individuals stored meaningful information and how stories were passed on from one person to another, which is something known as ‘serial reproduction’.
Procedure
Bartlett asked 20 participants (who were students) to read the ‘War of the Ghosts’ story, as he knew it would be unfamiliar to them. It was a story based on Native American culture that would be strange to people from Western cultures because it contained supernatural concepts and its structure was quite unusual.
Bartlett asked the participants to tell the story as though it were Chinese whispers, so participant A told participant B, participant B told participant C and so on. This was done over various periods of time, as Bartlett was also interested in how the memory of the story would alter over time. Therefore, participants were asked to repeat the story after a few hours, days, weeks or even years.
Results
Bartlett found the following:
- The story became shorter the more it was reproduced (down from 330 words to 180 after about seven reproductions)
- The story became more coherent, as participants tried to override its original, strange construction
- The story became more in line with conventional Western culture and aspects of the story were completely changed (such as ‘hunting seals’ became simply ‘fishing’)
- The longer the gap between reading the story and reproducing it, the more it was transformed
- Participants appeared to amend the story to fit in with their own personal frame of reference.
Conclusion
Bartlett concluded that memory is reconstructive and that people will actively amend information in order to make it fit in with their own personal schemas and beliefs.
Strengths of the study
- This experiment was one of the first to look into the construct of complex memories, it therefore led to much more research within this area
- Bartlett carried out his research many times using the same procedure and found similar results each time – this means that the results are reliable
- It provides good evidence for reconstructive memory.
Weaknesses of the study
- As the story was not familiar, it is not representative of the type of information most individuals would usually be asked to remember as part of everyday life
- Bartlett only used 20 participants; this means that his sample size was very low and not representative of the population in general
- It is argued that the instructions given to participants were not clear and therefore they guessed when recalling the information; this is known as ‘demand characteristics’
- The research was carried out in a laboratory, therefore it could be argued that it lacks ecological validity, i.e. it is not representative of a real-life situation.
