Bartlett's War of the Ghosts Study (AQA GCSE Psychology): Revision Note

A study of reconstructive memory

Schemas

• A schema is a mental representation (a packet of stored knowledge) built from an individual's pre-existing ideas, beliefs and concepts about people, places, events, ideas etc

• Schemas are useful as they let us process new information quickly by fitting it into what we already know

  • e.g. you know what to do in a restaurant you've never visited because you have a 'restaurant' schema

• The problem with schemas is that they can interfere with accurate recall:

  • Memory is reconstructive – when we recall an event we rebuild it rather than replay it, and schemas fill in the gaps

  • Details that don't fit the schema may be left out, changed, or replaced with what the person expected to see

    • e.g. recalling books on the shelves of an office when there were none

  • The result is that someone recalls an event not as it happened but as their schema says it 'should' have happened, i.e. schemas give rise to distorted memory

• Cultural schemas are built from the shared knowledge, customs and expectations of the culture a person grows up in

  • Material which does not fit a person's cultural schema is likely to be recalled inaccurately

  • When faced with unfamiliar terms or ideas, people tend to replace or re-frame them using more familiar reference points

• Bartlett (1932) investigated the effect of cultural schemas on recall using a story from an unfamiliar culture

Bartlett (1932): War of the Ghosts

• Aim: To investigate the effect of cultural schemas on the reconstructive nature of memory

• Sample: British participants, mostly students at the University of Cambridge

• Procedure: Bartlett used repeated reproduction:

  • Participants read The War of the Ghosts, a Native American folk tale, twice

  • After about 15 minutes they wrote down as much of the story as they could remember

  • They were then asked to recall the story again at increasing intervals – days, weeks, months and in some cases years later

  • Bartlett compared each reproduction with the original story to track how the story changed over time

• Results: With each reproduction the story drifted further from the original until it bore little resemblance to the Native American folk tale. The changes fell into three main types:

  • Omission – unfamiliar or unpleasant details were left out:

    • the ghosts, central to the story, were soon dropped

    • 'something black came out of his mouth' was omitted

    • the contorted face of the dying man was omitted

  • Assimilation (rationalisation) – unfamiliar details were changed to fit the participants' own cultural schemas:

    • 'canoes' became 'boats'

    • 'paddling' became 'rowing'

    • 'hunting seals' became 'fishing'

    • the supernatural wound was re-interpreted as an ordinary flesh wound

  • Levelling – the story became shorter and simpler as detail was lost:

    • the original story was around 330 words; later reproductions were around 180 words

  • Participants also tended to reorder events and add explanations so that the story made more sense to them

• Conclusion: Cultural schemas contribute to the reconstructive nature of memory:

  • Memory is not a passive process in which events are recorded and replayed like a camera

  • Memory is an active process in which pre-existing knowledge and expectations shape what is stored and recalled, reducing its accuracy and reliability

Evaluation of Bartlett’s war of the ghosts study

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

• This study has good validity as it reflects how memory may be distorted by schematic interference in real-life

Weaknesses

• This is very dated research:

  • University students in the UK today are much more aware of wider multicultural issues (such as Native American folklore) than they were in the 1930s

• It is unclear as to whether the memory distortions were the product of schematic interference or individual differences such as:

  • poor memory generally

  • lack of attention

  • personal learning styles (some people are visual learners for example so an aural task would not suit them as much as viewing a cartoon of the story)