The War of the Ghosts

When Bartlett followed Ebbinghaus’s lead and tried to carry out further experiments using nonsense syllables, the result was, so he reported, ‘disappointment and a growing dissatisfaction’. Instead, he chose to work with ordinary prose material that ‘would prove interesting in itself ’ — the kind of material that Ebbinghaus had, in fact, rejected.

Bartlett used two basic methods in his experiments:
Serial reproduction, similar to the game of ‘Chinese Whispers’. One person passes some information to a second person, who then passes the same information to a third, and so on. The ‘story’ that reaches the final person in the group is then compared with the original.

Repeated reproduction is where someone is asked to repeat the same piece of information at certain intervals (from 15 minutes to a few years) after first learning it.

The most famous piece of prose Bartlett used to investigate recall is a North American folktale called The War of the Ghosts:

One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war cries, and they thought: ‘Maybe this is a war-party.’ They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up to them. There were five men in the canoe, and they said:

‘What do you think? We wish to take you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people.’ One of the young men said: ‘I have no arrows.’ ‘Arrows are in the canoe,’ they said. ‘I will not go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not know where I have gone. But you,’ he said, turning to the other, ‘may go with

15

You are your memory

them.’ So one of the young men went, but the other returned home.

And the warriors went on up the river to a town on the other side of Kalama. The people came down to the water, and they began to fight, and many were killed. But presently the young man heard one of the warriors say: ‘Quick, let us go home: that Indian has been hit.’ Now he thought: ‘Oh, they are ghosts.’ He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot.

So the canoes went back to Egulac, and the young man went ashore to his house, and made a fire. And he told everybody and said: ‘Behold I accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many of our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked us were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick.’

He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried. He was dead.

Bartlett chose this story because it does not relate to the English narrative culture of his participants, and appears to be disjointed and somewhat incoherent to Anglo-Saxon ears. Bartlett anticipated that these features of the story would exaggerate the transformation as his participants attempted to reproduce it.

As an example, here is one attempt by someone repeating the story for the fourth time, this time several months after first hearing it:

Two youths went down to the river to hunt for seals. They were hiding behind a rock when a boat with some warriors in it came up to them. The warriors, however, said they were friends, and invited them to help them to fight an enemy over the river. The elder one said he could not go because his relations would be so

16

Memory

anxious if he did not return home. So the younger one went with the warriors in the boat.

In the evening he returned and told his friends that he had been fighting in a great battle, and that many were slain on both sides. After lighting a fire he retired to sleep. In the morning, when the sun rose, he fell ill, and his neighbours came to see him. He had told them that he had been wounded in the battle but had felt no pain then. But soon he became worse. He writhed and shrieked and fell to the ground dead. Something black came out of his mouth. The neighbours said he must have been at war with the ghosts.

From his experiments, Bartlett concluded that people tend to rationalize material that they are remembering. In other words, they try to make it easier to understand the material, and modify it into something they feel more comfortable with. Bartlett’s own description of what was happening is as follows:

Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organised past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentary cases of rote recapitulation . . .

In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that people often find their memories to be somewhat unreliable, or that the accounts of two different people who have observed the same event may be somewhat different.

After considering two of the most influential figures in experimental memory research, we now turn to a consideration of more contemporary methods and findings.