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

A study of reconstructive memory

• Bartlett (1932) was interested in investigating the effect of cultural schemas on recall of a culturally unfamiliar story

  • A schema is a set of pre-existing ideas, beliefs and concepts an individual has about people, places, events, ideas etc. which means that schemas may give rise to distorted memory

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

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

    • schemas ‘get in the way’ of 100% accurate recall of the event

  • 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

  • When faced with unfamiliar terms or information, people tend to insert or re-frame such information with more familiar reference points and terms Bartlett’s study was conducted as follows:

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

• Sample: 20 male undergraduate students from the University of Cambridge in the UK

• Procedure: Bartlett used serial reproduction:

  • The first participant read the Native American folk story, The War of the Ghosts

  • The first participant then reproduced what they could remember of the story in writing

  • This written recall was then read to a second participant

  • The second participant then wrote their own memory of the story which was then read to a third participant

  • The third participant then produced their own version of the story and so on

• Results: The participants’ stories bore little similarity to the original Native American folk tale.

• The changes made by the participants included:

  • Omission: Key details of the story were ignored or missed out:

    • particularly unfamiliar or unpleasant details such as a contorted face or black coming out of a mouth were ignored

    • participants even omitted the key idea that ghosts were fighting which is surprising as this is the title of the story

    • ghosts as key figures in the story were soon dropped from the re-telling of it

    • details such as a contorted face were omitted

  • Assimilation and sharpening: Story details were changed to suit the participants’ own cultural schemas:

    • ‘canoes’ became ‘boats’

    • ‘paddling’ became ‘rowing’

    • details such as a ‘spirit wound’ were re-interpreted as a flesh wound

  • Levelling: The story became shorter - the original story was approximately 350 words and the participants’ version was around 180 words

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

  • Memory is not a passive state in which events are recorded like a camera

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

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)