Bartlett, Frederic Charles 1 Bartlett, Frederic Charles Introductory article Henry L Roediger, Washington University, St Louis, Missouri, USA CONTENTS Introduction Later contributions Biographical details Conclusion Remembering Frederic C. Bartlett (1886–1969) was a distin- came under the influence of W. H. R. Rivers, Cyril guished British psychologist who spent most of his Burt, and C. S. Myers. He obtained his doctorate career at Cambridge University. He is chiefly known with first-class honors in 1914, just as Burt decided to today for his book Remembering: A Study in Experi- leave Cambridge. Myers then offered Bartlett Burt’s mental and Social Psychology, which laid the foun- vacated position, so Bartlett stayed in Cambridge. dation for schema theory. The First World War and Bartlett’s INTRODUCTION Development Frederic C. Bartlett (1886–1969) was a distin- The First World War broke out soon after Bartlett guished British psychologist who spent most of took up his position at Cambridge. Most of Bar- his career at the University of Cambridge. He was tlett’s colleagues left to aid the war effort, but trained as an experimental psychologist and poor health prevented him from joining them. became the most prominent English psychologist However, the absence of people senior to him of his generation through the influence of his thrust him into the role of leading the psychological writings, his work on applied problems, and the laboratory. He threw himself into teaching and great students he trained who continued work in began writing a book based on his dissertation, his tradition. He is chiefly remembered today for although it would not appear for many years. his 1932 book, Remembering: A Study in Experimental Much of his research during this time focused on and Social Psychology, which laid the foundation for practical problems driven by the war, such as schema theory and pioneered the study of memory detecting weak auditory signals in noise (to help distortions. Bartlett was knighted in 1948 for his with the problem of detecting German submar- great accomplishments, which are described briefly ines). His war work eventually culminated in a below. book, The Psychology of the Soldier (1927). After the war, Rivers and Myers returned to BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS Cambridge and became Bartlett’s associates. How- ever, in 1922 Rivers died suddenly and Myers re- Early Life and Education tired, so Bartlett became director of the Cambridge Laboratories and built them into a research power- Bartlett was born in Stow-on-the-Wold, a small house over the years. In the 1920s Bartlett’s re- country town in Gloucestershire. His father was a search turned to social anthropology, an early successful businessman who made shoes and interest, and he wrote Psychology and Primitive Cul- boots, but the educational opportunities in town ture (1923). His international reputation expanded were slim. A severe illness when he was 14 years and he came to know distinguished psychologists old made it impossible for him to attend a boarding from around the world. school, so young Bartlett stayed in Stow and edu- cated himself with the aid of his family (his father REMEMBERING had a great library) and friends. He eventually took a distance course at the University of London and In 1932 Bartlett published his great book, which is settled on psychology, logic, sociology, and ethics still in print today. Remembering actually grew out as topics of study. He received an MA from London of his dissertation experiments begun in 1913, so in 1911 and continued to Cambridge, where he the gestation period was nearly 20 years. The book 2 Bartlett, Frederic Charles introduced a very different tradition for studying over repeated retellings caused the story ‘to be memory from the scientific methods of Ebbinghaus robbed of all its surprising, jerky and inconsequen- with their emphasis on careful control and meas- tial form, and reduced it to an orderly narration’ urement of memory in rather unnatural conditions. (p. 153 of the 1932 edition of Remembering). Bartlett Bartlett’s methods were casual, almost anecdotal, also referred to the ‘effort after meaning’ that oc- compared with those of Ebbinghaus, yet he un- curred in his perception and memory experiments, covered powerful truths about remembering that whereby people try to convert or recode elements reverberate through the field even today. Bartlett that are difficult to perceive or understand into tested people under fairly relaxed conditions and forms that can be comprehended. People try to his ‘data’ consisted largely of verbal reports with impose structure and order to understand the which he sprinkled his writing. (See Ebbinghaus, world around them, even when their experience Hermann) does not conform neatly to their prior categories. The early chapters of Remembering actually con- Bartlett wrote that ‘the most general characteris- sist of studies of perceiving. The great middle part tic of the whole of this group of experiments was of the book is directly concerned with memory. The the persistence, for any single subject, of the form of last section of the book deals with social and his first reproduction’, and the use of ‘a general anthropological factors in cultural transmission. form, order and arrangement of material seems to The general thrust of the book is to emphasize be dominant, both in initial reception and in subse- the constructive nature of cognition. Perceiving, quent remembering’ (p. 83). He named this general remembering, and all of thinking involve the indi- form that people use to encode and to remember vidual as part and parcel of the cognitive process. experiences a ‘schema’, a term now used through- For example, in perceiving an ambiguous stimulus out the cognitive sciences. A schema is a general that is briefly presented, one’s past background organization of a story of a typical event. So, for and experience determine what is perceived as example, many old films about the American wild much as (or even more than) the stimulus that is west follow a schema involving ‘good guys’, ‘bad presented. guys’, crisis, and resolution. The schema can aid Bartlett devised two methods to study remem- encoding and retention of details that are consistent bering: repeated reproduction and serial reproduc- with it, but details that do not fit may be forgotten tion. In his most famous work he read a native or distorted to fit the schema. In remembering The American folk tale, The War of the Ghosts, to his War of the Ghosts some English participants seemed British participants and then later tested their to use the schema of a fairy tale, a genre to which memories. This bizarre and supernatural story they were more accustomed. Some even tacked on was usually read twice, aloud. In the repeated re- a moral at the end of the story. production technique Bartlett would have his lis- The method of serial reproduction, the other teners recall the story after an interval of about 15 major technique Bartlett introduced, is like the chil- min. Next he would test their memory for the story dren’s game of rumor or telephone. One person at various later times, but with no further presenta- hears The War of the Ghosts (or is exposed to some tions of the story. Thus, repeated reproduction in- other material) and recalls it after a set period. This volves the same individual repeatedly reproducing person’s recollections are then read to a second the story, as the name implies. Bartlett’s interest person, who recalls it in turn. This second recall is centered on how people remembered the story then read to a third person for later recall, and so and how their memories would change over time on, through as many instantiations as desired. The and repeated retellings. changes in recall across repeated tests using the Not surprisingly, people remembered less about serial reproduction method are much greater than the story as time passed – their reports became those in repeated reproduction, although Bartlett increasingly short. Of more interest was the content thought the same types of memory processes of what they did remember and what these recol- were at work (but in greater force). The serial re- lections indicated about the workings of memory. production technique involves a human chain, and Besides becoming shorter, the stories became sim- if there were to be one weak link in the chain – pler, supernatural elements dropped out and other someone who was wildly inaccurate in recall – bizarre items would be reinterpreted. Bartlett then there would be no hope of a person later in called this process ‘rationalization’ because people the chain correcting the false memory of the mater- added material to explain unnatural elements, or ial because that person would never have been dropped them out altogether if they did not seem to exposed to the correct version. Reading through fit the person’s past experience. Rationalization the lengthy samples that Bartlett provided in Bartlett, Frederic Charles 3 Remembering (chapters 7 and 8) leads to agreement They also studied related topics such as the effects with his basic claims. The serial reproduction tech- of fatigue on performance. When Craik was tragic- nique was later championed by psychologists ally killed in an automobile accident two days studying the transmission of rumors. before the war in Europe ended, Bartlett felt the The serial reproduction technique also served, loss keenly, because the men had become best Bartlett believed, as a useful analogy for the way friends as well as close collaborators. information might be handed down from one gen- After the war, Bartlett applied notions of skill eration to another within a society or even for the learning to those of higher-order thinking, capital- spread of ideas from culture to culture.