The Effect of Cultural Schemas on Memory (DP IB Psychology): Revision Note

The effect of cultural schemas on memory

• A schema is a mental representation of something

  • E.g., a schema for concrete, tangible things such as ‘cat’, ‘house’, ‘mother’ or for abstract ideas/concepts such as ‘freedom’, ‘jealousy’, ‘love’

• A schema holds all of the information that an individual has assimilated over the course of their life so far, obtained via direct personal experience

  • E.g., watching a TV series about school life or via contact with others

  • parents telling you about their experience of school

• Schemas may give rise to distorted memory

• When you experience an event either directly or indirectly it is usual for schematic activation to guide your understanding/expectation of that event

• The problem with having set and pre-determined schemas is that they can interfere with accurate recall

  • This happens when someone recalls an event not as it truly happened but as a result of schematic interference

    • Their schemas ‘got in the way’ of 100% accurate recall of the event (generally people are unaware of this happening)

• Schemas may lead to biased recall

  • E.g., you are in a pub and there is a fight. the police ask you what you witnessed and you say that one man was bleeding but in fact this is not true

    • Your schema for ‘fight’ added blood at the scene because it fits your schema for ‘fight’

• A cultural schema is assimilated via enculturation:

  • the products, influences, rituals, attitudes, habits and beliefs that someone builds up depending on the culture in which they were raised

• Cultural schemas may lead to incorrect and faulty recall of material which does not align with or fit into a person’s schema based on their own culture, as the following study demonstrates:

Research support for schema theory

Bartlett (1932)

Aim:

• To investigate the effect of cultural schemas on recall of a culturally unfamiliar story

Participants:

• 20 male students from the University of Cambridge in the UK

Procedure:

• Bartlett instigated a procedure known as serial reproduction

  • One participant read a Native American folk story called 'The War of the Ghosts'

  • This participant then reproduced the story in writing

  • This version of the story was then read to a second person

  • The second person then wrote his own version of the story

  • This version was then read to a third person

  • This third person then produced his own version of the story and so on

Results:

• Bartlett found that the resulting stories bore little similarity to the original Native American folk tale. The changes made by the participants included:

  • Omission

    • Key details were ignored or dropped, especially unfamiliar or unpleasant ones, e.g.,

      • Contorted face” or “black coming out of a mouth” were omitted

      • the central theme of ghosts fighting was often dropped, even though it was the story’s title

    • Omission reflected how some details did not fit with participants’ schemas (e.g., adult male views of war)

  • Assimilation and sharpening

    • Story details were changed to suit the participants’ own cultural schemas e.g.,

      • ‘canoes’ became ‘boats'

      • ‘paddling’ became ‘rowing’

      • a spirit wound was re-interpreted as a flesh wound

    • Participants added words such as ‘therefore’ and ‘because’ to make sense of events

  • Levelling

    • The story became shorter and simpler

    • The original text was approximately 350 words but the participants’ version was around 180 words

Conclusion:

• Cultural schemas contribute to the reconstructive nature of memory

• Memory is an active process in which pre-existing information and expectations may interfere with the accuracy and reliability of the memory

Evaluation of schema theory

Strengths

• Bartlett’s study was one of the first pieces of research to highlight the role of schema in reconstructive memory

  • E.g., two people who witness the same event may give very different accounts of what they have seen

• Bartlett’s procedure (serial reproduction) is replicable, which means that it could be repeated to check for reliability

Limitations

• Bartlett’s sample was small and limited to an elite demographic of university students who were all male, which makes the findings difficult to generalise

• Schemas are not easy to measure, as they are subjective and unique to the individual

Link to concepts

Bias

• Bartlett's study is, ironically, an example of culture bias with its sample of British undergraduate students based at Cambridge university

• The demographic of Cambridge students in the 1930s was overwhelmingly white, male, and from privileged, upper-middle to upper-class backgrounds

• Today the student body is more diverse and representative of different cultural groups, which means that Bartlett's findings lack temporal validity

Measurement

• It is possible that Bartlett's participants did not try very hard to recall exactly the War of the Ghosts story as it had been told to them

• They may have considered the research to be of low status (as it was not, on the surface, 'scientific')

• Bartlett himself was also rather careless when it came to controlling the conditions in which he conducted the study, leaving large gaps between some of the periods of serial reproduction and not implementing strict controls over the procedure