Bartlett (1932)
“The War of the Ghosts”
Aim:
To investigate whether people’s memory for a story is affected by previous knowledge (schemas) and the extent to which memory is reconstructive.
Procedure:
- Bartlett asked British participants to hear a story and reproduce it after a short time and then repeatedly over a period of months or years (serial reproduction).
- The story was an unfamiliar Native American legend called “The War of the Ghosts”.
Results
- The participants remembered the main idea of the story (the gist) but they changed unfamiliar elements to make sense of the story by using terms more familiar to their own cultural expectations.
- The story remained a coherent whole although it was changed.
- It became noticeably shorter for each reproduction. Bartlett concluded that remembering is an active process.
- Memories are not copies of experience but rather ”reconstructions”.
Evaluation
- The results of the study confirm schema theory (and reconstructive memory), but it was performed in a laboratory and can be criticized for lack of ecological validity.
- Participants did not receive standardized instructions and some of the memory distortions may be due to participants’ guessing (demand characteristics).
- In spite of these methodological limitations, the study is one of the most important in the study of memory.