Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert.
Speaker 2: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We
Speaker 2: are heading into the vault for an older episode of
Speaker 2: the show. This is part two of the series that
Speaker 2: we did in May of twenty twenty three. This episode
Speaker 2: published on May fourth, twenty twenty three, Part two of
Speaker 2: the series on the game of telephone and related concepts
Speaker 2: about the oral transmission of information.
Speaker 1: All right, let's dive right in.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert.
Speaker 2: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And today we are
Speaker 2: returning with part two in our series on the Telephone Game,
Speaker 2: a children's game in which a secret message is passed
Speaker 2: along from one place to the next in a chain,
Speaker 2: until finally the original message and the message that emerges
Speaker 2: at the end are both announced, so everybody can see
Speaker 2: how the information was either preserved faithfully or horribly mangled
Speaker 2: by the passing from mouth to ear so many times now,
Speaker 2: if you have not heard part one of the series,
Speaker 2: I think this is a case where you really should
Speaker 2: go back and check that one out.
Speaker 1: First.
Speaker 2: We lay a lout of the groundwork for what we're
Speaker 2: talking about today in the first episode, but as a
Speaker 2: brief refresher, we talked about some of our memories of
Speaker 2: these games from childhood, and we also discussed a very
Speaker 2: famous and influential series of experiments from roughly a century ago,
Speaker 2: discussed in a book by the British experimental psychologist Frederick C.
Speaker 2: Bartlett called Remembering, a Study in Experimental and Social Psychology.
Speaker 2: That book came out in nineteen thirty two. Now, the
Speaker 2: experiments described by Bartlett in this book concerned what is
Speaker 2: called serial reproduction, which is very similar to the telephone game,
Speaker 2: but involves a written component. So basically, a person would
Speaker 2: be given a text to read, and this could be anything.
Speaker 2: It could be a transcription of a folk tale, it
Speaker 2: could be a newspaper article, a passage from a book, whatever,
Speaker 2: and then that person is allowed to read it several times,
Speaker 2: and then it's taken away, and then later they are
Speaker 2: asked to reproduce the text as accurately as they could
Speaker 2: from memory. Then that reproduction would be the text given
Speaker 2: to the next person in the chain, and they would
Speaker 2: do the best they could to reproduce that from memory,
Speaker 2: and so on down the chain for an arbitrary number
Speaker 2: of reproductions. Now, what Bartlett found in these experiments was
Speaker 2: that his text based version of the telephone game in
Speaker 2: most cases produced radical, profound alterations to the original story
Speaker 2: or message. And to read from his conclusion of that
Speaker 2: chapter quote, epithets are changed into their opposites, Incidents and
Speaker 2: events are transposed, names and numbers rarely survive intact for
Speaker 2: more than a few reproductions. Opinions and conclusions are reversed.
Speaker 2: Nearly every possible variation seems as if it can take place,
Speaker 2: even in a relatively short series. So I wanted to
Speaker 2: begin today by following up on Bartlett's work, which we
Speaker 2: talked about in the last episode, because it cast a
Speaker 2: very long shadow in the study of memory and cultural
Speaker 2: transmission of information. But obviously this book is from a
Speaker 2: very long time ago, so I wanted to see whether
Speaker 2: there were any more recent scientific reviews commenting on whether
Speaker 2: his work on serial reproduction has stood the test of
Speaker 2: time and or been successfully replicated. So I found a
Speaker 2: few papers. One was actually focused on Bartlett's repeated reproduction experiments.
Speaker 2: That's where the same person tries to recall a story
Speaker 2: or piece of information at different time intervals after being
Speaker 2: exposed to it, as opposed to the serial reproduction experiments
Speaker 2: where it's given from one person to the next. But
Speaker 2: this study did briefly address the other Bartlett experiments in
Speaker 2: the background section. This paper was ken Bartlett's repeated reproduction
Speaker 2: experiments be replicated by Bergmann and Rodeger in Memory and
Speaker 2: Cognition in nineteen ninety nine, and the authors say that
Speaker 2: quote serial reproduction can often lead to dramatic distortions in
Speaker 2: recall over repeated reconstructions of the event. Although rarely used now,
Speaker 2: this experimental technique was used in later studies with results
Speaker 2: generally confirming those of Bartlett. Psychologists interested in transmission of
Speaker 2: rumors use this technique among others. And then I found
Speaker 2: another study from more recent years. This was from twenty
Speaker 2: fourteen in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and
Speaker 2: Cognition by Rodigertte a'll called Bartlett Revisited direct comparison of
Speaker 2: repeated reproduction and serial reproduction techniques, and in their review
Speaker 2: the authors say in some virtually every experiment we can
Speaker 2: find using Bartlet's serial reproduction technique confirms his observation that
Speaker 2: social transmission of information is error prone and that the
Speaker 2: more links there are in the chain, the greater the
Speaker 2: probability of error. So, putting all this together, it looks
Speaker 2: to me like subsequent research may have found some differences
Speaker 2: at the margins, but for the most part, Bartlett's findings
Speaker 2: about the telephone game process have been confirmed. When you
Speaker 2: do this particular type of experiment where one person gets
Speaker 2: to read a story and then they're supposed to repeat
Speaker 2: it as accurately as they can from memory, and you
Speaker 2: go on and on, all the different kinds of changes
Speaker 2: that we talked about in the last episode are introduced.
Speaker 2: Now there might be some important caveats based on what
Speaker 2: the genre of the information is, and we can talk
Speaker 2: about that later in this episode, But for the most part,
Speaker 2: one of my big takeaways from this is we should
Speaker 2: all be very cautious about believing rumors, even if you
Speaker 2: trust that the person directly sharing the information with you
Speaker 2: is not a liar, because this is something people always
Speaker 2: say when you know, when you hear a rumor, people
Speaker 2: say like, oh, but Johnny, who told me this isn't
Speaker 2: a liar? Why would he tell me this if it
Speaker 2: wasn't true.
Speaker 1: M Yeah, that's a good point, though. I think the
Speaker 1: only example of rumors that you should take to the bank,
Speaker 1: the only example is going to be the of course,
Speaker 1: the eleven studio album by Fleetwood Mac, which absolutely holds up,
Speaker 1: no doubt about it.
Speaker 2: That's just secondhand news.
Speaker 1: There's also a track cook you also have the chain
Speaker 1: on there, so take that into account.
Speaker 2: I do love Fleetwood Mac, but I got to ding
Speaker 2: them for a false meteorological fact that they perpetuate in
Speaker 2: one of their songs with the statement the thunder only
Speaker 2: happens when it rains. That is not true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely incorrect. But to your point, Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: good point on rumors. Sort of like the dark side
Speaker 1: of this this phenomenon. I really like the idea of
Speaker 1: the storytelling element and the chain of storytellers within a
Speaker 1: given oral storytelling tradition or or what have you. Like.
Speaker 1: It made me rethink and reanalyze the role of the
Speaker 1: storyteller in a given culture. You know that with each
Speaker 1: transmission of this story you may lose so many great things,
Speaker 1: but you also may gain things. It's going to introduce
Speaker 1: new ways to make this content more agreeable with an audience.
Speaker 1: More beneficial to the audience, more entertaining, though at the
Speaker 1: same time also opening it up to further manipulation so
Speaker 1: that the message of the story could also be misused.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I mean this is noted I think by Bartlett himself,
Speaker 2: but also in many papers I was reading about this research.
Speaker 2: So the thing is that, yes, this should make us
Speaker 2: very skeptical of the objective accuracy of much of memory
Speaker 2: and of chains of information sharing between people, especially where
Speaker 2: the whole process cannot be reviewed with a fixed record,
Speaker 2: Because the crucial element of this here is that you
Speaker 2: only have to work with what the previous person told you.
Speaker 2: It's a totally different thing if like it's all done,
Speaker 2: maybe it's all done in writing or somehow it's all recorded,
Speaker 2: and you can go back and review what the story
Speaker 2: was at each point in its history. But for this
Speaker 2: type of information sharing, yes it should make a skeptical
Speaker 2: about objective accuracy in reproduction of the original. But this
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that the way people process information and serial
Speaker 2: transmission is bad. It just means that you shouldn't rely
Speaker 2: on it to get objective accurate accounts. It may not
Speaker 2: be good for that purpose, but it's good for other things.
Speaker 2: It's great for creating culture, for enlivening art and narrative
Speaker 2: across time, and making it always newly relevant, for maintaining
Speaker 2: friendship and social bonds, for teaching applicable lessons in everyday life.
Speaker 2: In fact, several papers I was reading pointed out that
Speaker 2: in fact, this combination of conservation and distortion of information
Speaker 2: at the same time through transmission from person to person
Speaker 2: could be viewed as metaphorically similar to the combination of
Speaker 2: conservation and distortion in biological evolution. Life can only exist
Speaker 2: on Earth where there is the appropriate balance of conservation
Speaker 2: and distortion of genetic information. So genetic traits are heritable
Speaker 2: and they're passed on from one generation of organisms to another.
Speaker 2: But species survive in a changing environment because they're able
Speaker 2: to adapt and evolve, and they're able to adapt and
Speaker 2: evolve when mutations distortions of that genetic information prove beneficial
Speaker 2: to them. Though it's interesting to note, I think that
Speaker 2: the error rate is probably much higher in the transmission
Speaker 2: of most genres of verbal information than it is for
Speaker 2: genetic information and organisms. Like in life, accurate transmission of
Speaker 2: genes is the norm and mutations are the exception. When
Speaker 2: we're telling stories to each other or repeating something we
Speaker 2: read in the newspaper to a friend. In that kind
Speaker 2: of verbal memory based transmission, mutations are much more than
Speaker 2: norm But at the same time, I think about how
Speaker 2: there I guess there is a higher survival tolerance there,
Speaker 2: Like a single harmful mutation can prove fatal to a bacterium.
Speaker 2: But how does that work in the analogy for transmitting information.
Speaker 2: Is it possible that one memory error could kill a
Speaker 2: piece of information and prevent it from spreading further?
Speaker 1: I guess so, you know, like the example of the
Speaker 1: story of the ghost Battle the Ghost Warriors in the
Speaker 1: last episode. You know, like sometimes if certain details, certain descriptions,
Speaker 1: certain narrative choices are removed, like you can take the
Speaker 1: heart out of a particular story, a particular myth, and
Speaker 1: could impact the degree to which people want to pass
Speaker 1: it on or need to pass it on.
Speaker 2: That's a good point. Yes, This thing that Bartlett noticed
Speaker 2: where certain details this is he called the leveling process,
Speaker 2: where individualizing characteristics and stylistic details from a story are
Speaker 2: stripped out as they are reproduced by people who don't
Speaker 2: remember them because they deem them inessential, not realizing that
Speaker 2: the soul of the story lies in those details. The
Speaker 2: fact that those details are now missing could make the
Speaker 2: story so uninteresting to the person who hears it that
Speaker 2: they would never share it again. That's a good point,
Speaker 2: But wait a minute. I wanted to come back to
Speaker 2: something I started saying a minute ago, this thing about
Speaker 2: believing rumors, where people are often inclined to believe a
Speaker 2: rumor because they don't want to believe the individual person
Speaker 2: who shared the rumor with them is a liar. And
Speaker 2: I think that that is such a misguided mentality because,
Speaker 2: first of all, and less related to the experimental findings
Speaker 2: we're talking about here, the person who shared the rumor
Speaker 2: with you may not be a liar, but you know
Speaker 2: less about the person who shared the rumor with them,
Speaker 2: and who that person heard it from, etc. You can't
Speaker 2: usually inspect the entire chain of transmission, only the person
Speaker 2: you're directly getting it from. More relevant to today's topic,
Speaker 2: it's absolutely clear from these experiments that massive distortions of
Speaker 2: original source material can creep into human transmission chains, even
Speaker 2: when the person isn't a liar. When they're not trying
Speaker 2: to distort it, they're trying as best they can to
Speaker 2: accurately reproduce it. And that's in cases where the person
Speaker 2: is not personally invested in the subject matter, where they
Speaker 2: have no incentive to exaggerate, and they're just trying to
Speaker 2: reproduce the material as best they can. How much worse
Speaker 2: will things be in the real world? Will distortions be
Speaker 2: when like somebody is personally invested in the material, maybe
Speaker 2: in it presenting a certain way, when they do have
Speaker 2: incentives to exaggerate or otherwise distort the material, whether that's
Speaker 2: to maybe make it more entertaining, more impressive, more illustrative
Speaker 2: of a point they want to make, or whatever, and
Speaker 2: when they're not necessarily conscious of being scrutinized for accuracy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there are all these different types of unconscious
Speaker 1: chain an event, of course, intentional changes that can take place,
Speaker 1: and the result is that some details in the story
Speaker 1: or the rumor or what have you, some will change,
Speaker 1: some will remain, and there will also be a sharpening
Speaker 1: of things, you know, like an exaggeration. But what does
Speaker 1: it all mean? I was looking at a handful of
Speaker 1: papers discussing transmission chain experiments and the transmission of urban
Speaker 1: legends and other stories, which I thought seems like a
Speaker 1: really good area to look at because a lot of
Speaker 1: times urban legends, especially, I mean, we're not talking about literature,
Speaker 1: we're not talking about myths, where they often kind of
Speaker 1: come out of nowhere, and the way in which we
Speaker 1: pass them on sometimes feels more akin to like older
Speaker 1: oral storytelling traditions.
Speaker 2: Well, right, because the case with urban myths is you
Speaker 2: at least usually assume that they were created by many minds.
Speaker 2: You know, they're the product of this transmission chain, rather
Speaker 2: than say, being originally written down in a fixed form
Speaker 2: one person and then other people have tried to replicate
Speaker 2: it across time, though in fact there are variation, Like
Speaker 2: some urban legends do come from books. That's a funny
Speaker 2: thing that pops up occasionally, like it was originally a
Speaker 2: story somebody wrote that was published in a sci fi
Speaker 2: magazine somewhere, and then it got turned into an urban
Speaker 2: legend and morphed along along the chain.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And of course, speaking of the chain, we have
Speaker 1: to acknowledge the email chain of technology changes things. Technology
Speaker 1: ends up bringing us a scenario we're end up with
Speaker 1: things like pasta, creepy pasta and so forth, where it's
Speaker 1: something that is as the name alludes, to generally just
Speaker 1: copied and pasted, though sometimes there are augmentations made, and
Speaker 1: then of course everyone has received it, or at least
Speaker 1: in times past. I don't know if this is still
Speaker 1: a thing so much, but when a family member forwards
Speaker 1: you an email and it has some sort of perhaps
Speaker 1: an unbelievable quality to it, some sort of tall tail
Speaker 1: or urban legend at the heart of it. But nothing
Speaker 1: has changed except for the string of forwards that are
Speaker 1: at the top of it, where you can see all
Speaker 1: these people that have passed it on like a chain letter.
Speaker 2: But if I don't forward this, I'm going to look
Speaker 2: in the mirror and see a ghost and it will
Speaker 2: kill me.
Speaker 1: That's right, in seven days. So one of the papers
Speaker 1: I was looking at was from Storytelling to Facebook by
Speaker 1: Alberto Rcibi, published in Human Nature in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: This particular paper utilized a registered online pair of studies,
Speaker 1: one using a traditional transmission chain set up, and the
Speaker 1: other asking subjects whether they would be likely to share
Speaker 1: a story on social media or with friends in a
Speaker 1: anonymous or attributed status.
Speaker 2: So I thought this was really interesting. So, if I'm
Speaker 2: understanding right, the author wanted to compare different types of
Speaker 2: information sharing in the modern era one is more like
Speaker 2: the experiments we've been talking about, where somebody has to
Speaker 2: pass along the story effortfully by like using their memory
Speaker 2: to retell the story as they understand it, like in
Speaker 2: the Bartlet experiments, versus the technology assisted passing along of
Speaker 2: a story passively in its original unaltered form. You know,
Speaker 2: you just click the button to share, so you're not
Speaker 2: actually changing it in that case, you are just deciding
Speaker 2: whether or not you want this same original piece of
Speaker 2: media to go to all of the people following you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So just some of the very quick sort
Speaker 1: of findings from this. First of all, negative content was
Speaker 1: both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more
Speaker 1: than its neutral counterpart.
Speaker 2: That should not be surprising based on all the studies
Speaker 2: of what does well online negative content works.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Next, threat related information was successful in transmission chain experiments,
Speaker 1: but not when sharing straight up. So that's that's interesting
Speaker 1: as well, and again kind of matches up with what
Speaker 1: we we tend to understand about, you know, why we
Speaker 1: pass something on, why we would we would tell someone
Speaker 1: a particular story. And then finally, information eliciting disgust was
Speaker 1: not advantaged in either which which is interesting.
Speaker 2: That's surprising to me. But okay, I.
Speaker 1: Guess you know some people. I guess maybe it depends
Speaker 1: on the population. Again, this is this is a small study,
Speaker 1: but it does seem like there would be individuals who
Speaker 1: are like, hey, I got a disgusting story I need
Speaker 1: to tell you listen to me. But but maybe other's
Speaker 1: not so much, or maybe it's like the disgusting thing
Speaker 1: that we might might be the thing we sort of
Speaker 1: focus on, Like, maybe it's ultimately something about it being
Speaker 1: negative or something about it being threat related that is
Speaker 1: more important to the transmission than merely the discuss Now,
Speaker 1: the author points out that content biases are strongest when
Speaker 1: memorization and reproduction aren't involved in the transmission of information,
Speaker 1: as in the telephone game and the traditional oral transmission
Speaker 1: of narratives. Now, another paper I was looking at pointed
Speaker 1: out some other great ideas related to this. It's titled
Speaker 1: serial Killers, Spiders and Cybersex, Social and Survival Information by
Speaker 1: us in the Transmission of Urban Legends by stubbards Field
Speaker 1: at All, published in the British Journal of Psychology in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen. Okay, oh y, that's great time. The authors
Speaker 1: point out that when we take in information and retell it,
Speaker 1: various cognitive selection pressures kick in to make sure it's
Speaker 1: maximally transmittable. This can alter structure, it can alter content,
Speaker 1: and transmissibility depends on three factors salience, accuracy of recall,
Speaker 1: and motivation to pass it on.
Speaker 2: Okay, so can you explain that.
Speaker 1: The way I was thinking about is in terms of like,
Speaker 1: all right, you've heard a good joke and you want
Speaker 1: to retell that joke. Why do you want to retell
Speaker 1: that joke? Is it good? Is it notable? Is it
Speaker 1: attention grabbing in any way? Can you actually remember the
Speaker 1: beats well enough to retell it? And then why are
Speaker 1: you retelling it? Is? Is it timely? Is it entertaining?
Speaker 1: Is it particularly cutting? Are you just trying to create
Speaker 1: a distraction? You know, dot sort of lift the mood.
Speaker 1: All of this matters without any of us having to
Speaker 1: actively check these boxes off in our head. We don't
Speaker 1: have to actually think like, all right, can I read?
Speaker 1: Because Lord knows, plenty of people launch into a joke
Speaker 1: without trying to, without making sure that they can actually
Speaker 1: retell all the necessary beats first. But also you're not
Speaker 1: necessarily you know, conscious of all of this. As you're
Speaker 1: about to retell.
Speaker 2: Something, the horse goes into the doctor's office has a
Speaker 2: long face. The horse says, why is my face like this?
Speaker 2: I don't remember the rest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but still, it's like you're taking a joke
Speaker 1: or some other bit of information. If it ends with you,
Speaker 1: there's a reason, and if you pass it on, there's
Speaker 1: a reason as well. So the first and third factors here,
Speaker 1: salience and motivation, depend on social information bias and survival
Speaker 1: information bias. In other words, coming back to the joke
Speaker 1: or say an urban legend, does the thing you were
Speaker 1: passing on contain to any degree social information or survival information?
Speaker 2: Hmm okay, Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting to think about this because indeed, some
Speaker 1: of the memorable ideas out there, be they jokes, urban legends,
Speaker 1: or what have you, at least seem to have some
Speaker 1: sort of social revelation or commentary baked into them, and
Speaker 1: or some sort of information that seems to contain a
Speaker 1: lesson on how to survive in the world. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're not necessarily processing this. You're not thinking like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is a good urban legend. I can use this,
Speaker 1: This might save my life tomorrow. You might not be
Speaker 1: thinking that, but that could be like the reason that
Speaker 1: you're inclined to remember it.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of the jokes that people find
Speaker 2: the funniest are ones that make a playfully negative observation
Speaker 2: about general human nature. Yes, classic example, the two hunters
Speaker 2: in the woods they see a bear charging at them.
Speaker 2: One kneels down to tie his shoes. His friend says,
Speaker 2: why are you tying your shoes. You can't outrun a bear.
Speaker 2: The guy tying his shoes says, I don't have to
Speaker 2: outrun a bear, I just have to outrun you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So you can look at examples like this.
Speaker 1: There are also various parables and co EN's that really
Speaker 1: zing because they seem to reveal something about human nature. Likewise,
Speaker 1: you can also point to a lot of negative examples,
Speaker 1: things that contain disinformation or just hurtful ideas or stereotypes,
Speaker 1: but true or not, they seem to have some sort
Speaker 1: of social information. Now, on the survival information front, the
Speaker 1: first place my mind went to was the old urban
Speaker 1: legend of hey, don't flash your lights your car lights
Speaker 1: at another car that doesn't have its lights on, because
Speaker 1: you know what's going on. This is a murder gang initiation.
Speaker 1: There are gang members in that car. They're intentionally riding
Speaker 1: around without their headlights on, and if you flash your
Speaker 1: lights at them, you may think you're generally reminding them
Speaker 1: that they need to turn their lights on. They but
Speaker 1: know it'll be on and they will come and kill you.
Speaker 2: So this allegedly has survival information. You need to know this.
Speaker 2: If you don't know this, you could die.
Speaker 1: Right. It seems to be important on some level and
Speaker 1: then gets transmitted and passed on. It of course completely false.
Speaker 1: This was as an urban legend that began in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, has no truth to it, though at times
Speaker 1: got passed on by reputable and semi reputable sources. But again,
Speaker 1: it seems to have survival information inside of it, and
Speaker 1: therefore there's a stickiness to it.
Speaker 2: That makes sense.
Speaker 1: Okay, Now back to the paper itself. They conducted a
Speaker 1: very small study but found quote legends which contained social information,
Speaker 1: social type legends which contained survival information survival type, and
Speaker 1: legends which contained both forms of information combined type were
Speaker 1: all recalled with significantly greater accuracy than control material, while
Speaker 1: social and combined type legends were recalled with significantly greater
Speaker 1: accuracy than survival type legend.
Speaker 2: Well counterintuitive? Is it maybe that social and combined beats
Speaker 2: out survival. I am not really surprised by that, because
Speaker 2: I don't know what is the what is the juiciest
Speaker 2: type of information that if you hear a little snippet
Speaker 2: of you've got to lean in and find out more.
Speaker 2: It's gossip about people, it's you know, it's not people
Speaker 2: talking about life threatening situations. You might lean in and
Speaker 2: want to hear more about life threatening situations, But even
Speaker 2: more so, it's if you hear like, oh man, did
Speaker 2: you hear what Johnny said to say? And then like
Speaker 2: you have to hear the rest of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like the whole thing about gang members driving around
Speaker 1: in cars without their lights on. Yeah, there's the survival
Speaker 1: last aspect of it, certainly, But there is also at least,
Speaker 1: and I'm not I didn't look at any specific examples
Speaker 1: of the text. I'm just kind of remembering it. There's
Speaker 1: it's at least implied that there's some sort of social
Speaker 1: information about like reckless youth culture or punk gangs, or
Speaker 1: there's some sort of racial connotation to it. That's all
Speaker 1: just kind of baked into the idea. Even if they
Speaker 1: are not specific examples added in its transmission.
Speaker 2: Yes, like pings on a lot of different unhealthy fixations
Speaker 2: people might have.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I thought that was interesting. It also I
Speaker 1: would be interested to hear from listeners out there if
Speaker 1: they have other examples of the sort of like urban
Speaker 1: legend transmission. I think there's a lot to reveal in
Speaker 1: these examples.
Speaker 2: Well, speaking of urban legends, I also wanted to talk
Speaker 2: briefly about a study I was looking at that concerned
Speaker 2: urban legends and folk tales. And so this was by
Speaker 2: ost at All published in the journal Memory very recently
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty two, and the title was the Serial
Speaker 2: Reproduction of an Urban Myth revisiting Bartlett's schema theory. So
Speaker 2: the title makes reference to Bartlett's schema theory. This is
Speaker 2: an idea proposed by Bartlett that memory is more accurate
Speaker 2: when it conforms to what he called our schema, meaning
Speaker 2: a sort of an existing body of knowledge and expectations
Speaker 2: that we use to help store memory efficiently and make
Speaker 2: sense of the world. And so according to this theory,
Speaker 2: not all information is distorted at the same rate the
Speaker 2: author's right quote. According to the logic of Bartlett's schema
Speaker 2: theory remembering should, in relation to certain kinds of material,
Speaker 2: be relatively reliable, and so the authors here investigate the
Speaker 2: reliability of Bartlett style serial reproduction chains by modulating two
Speaker 2: different variables. First of all, whether the original information fits
Speaker 2: with the subject's familiar cultural schema or not, and whether
Speaker 2: the audience of their retelling was understood to be quote
Speaker 2: lean or strict. And I thought both of these variables
Speaker 2: were interesting because they both came up in Bartlett's discussion
Speaker 2: of his own work. One of the things he was
Speaker 2: testing with the famous example of that story, the War
Speaker 2: of the Ghosts, which again this is when we discussed
Speaker 2: in episode one. This is a translated adaptation of a
Speaker 2: Native American folk tale that in its original form is
Speaker 2: we found very haunting and beautiful and interesting, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't conform to common expectations of storytelling that might be
Speaker 2: expected by a Western audience. And thus Bartlett featured it
Speaker 2: because he thought that these differences in storytelling conventions and
Speaker 2: the subjects lack of familiarity with the cultural context of
Speaker 2: the story would make it more difficult for them to
Speaker 2: remember and reproduce it accurately, and that did seem to
Speaker 2: be the case. But here the authors of this study
Speaker 2: wanted to actually compare that directly with a much more
Speaker 2: culturally familiar story, and in this case they chose the
Speaker 2: vanishing hitchhiker. Rob Do you know the vanishing hitchhiker tail?
Speaker 1: Oh, I don't know. Is this the one? Or the hook? No?
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no not the hook? A hook is a
Speaker 2: good one too, the vanishing hitchhiker. There are a lot
Speaker 2: of different variations, but usual contours are the same. So
Speaker 2: maybe there is a man driving along a lonely highway
Speaker 2: at night and he sees a hitchhiker, a woman who
Speaker 2: appears to be in distress. She's asking for a ride.
Speaker 2: Walking on the side of the highway. She asks him
Speaker 2: for a ride, He picks her up. They have a
Speaker 2: brief conversation as he drives her to the address she
Speaker 2: asks for, and then when he arrives, he turns to
Speaker 2: find she has vanished entirely from the car. And then
Speaker 2: he later often compares his story with somebody else He
Speaker 2: tells this, you know, he's like. He gets home and says, oh,
Speaker 2: you wouldn't believe it. I picked up this woman to
Speaker 2: give her a ride home, and then she disappeared completely,
Speaker 2: and then the person he's talking to says, I've driven
Speaker 2: her home as well. She also disappears from my car.
Speaker 1: Oh nice, nice, nice. So this is like an automobile
Speaker 1: age sort of take on the classic ghost story where
Speaker 1: you find out after the fact that this mysterious person
Speaker 1: who vanished is a frequently occurring ghost exactly. Now.
Speaker 2: It might have earlier analogs, but I think most people
Speaker 2: would interpret this as like a twentieth century folk tale.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, clearly involves the car, the hitch hiker.
Speaker 1: It's new for a new age.
Speaker 2: So the authors of the study, first they did a
Speaker 2: pilot study to compare these two stories, the War of
Speaker 2: the Ghosts and the Vanishing hitch Hiker within to determine
Speaker 2: how schema friendly these two stories were in the cultural
Speaker 2: setting of the experiment, which was twenty first century college undergrads.
Speaker 2: I believe in the UK, So again always testing with
Speaker 2: the college students, but okay, you know, you at least
Speaker 2: want to find out among the general population that is
Speaker 2: being tested in this study, how familiar would these two
Speaker 2: different types of stories be. And familiarity here doesn't just
Speaker 2: mean like have you heard this story before? They measured
Speaker 2: it along a bunch of different variables, and those variables
Speaker 2: were familiarity of the setting, what the readers perceived to
Speaker 2: be the logical structure, the clarity of the structure, how
Speaker 2: understandable the events in the story were, and how conventional
Speaker 2: the language was. So I think this is generally a
Speaker 2: good way of approaching it, finding a bunch of different
Speaker 2: ways of scoring, like when a person in the study
Speaker 2: encounters a particular story, how out of their element do
Speaker 2: they feel? And perhaps not surprisingly, participants here rated the
Speaker 2: Vanishing Hitchhiker as much more familiar along these dimensions than
Speaker 2: the War of the Ghosts. No surprise there, and so
Speaker 2: they tried to do the serial reproduction experiments like Bartlett
Speaker 2: did with these two different stories, and in line with
Speaker 2: their hypothesis, they found that while participants in the experimental
Speaker 2: portion of the study came up with enormous distortions while
Speaker 2: attempting to transmit the War of the Ghosts, they produced
Speaker 2: comparatively very accurate copies from memory of the Vanishing Hitchhiker.
Speaker 2: And I thought that was very interesting. It would seem
Speaker 2: to validate some part of the scheme of theory, the
Speaker 2: idea that stories that fit more in the box of
Speaker 2: our cultural expectations, are remembered and preserved more accurately and
Speaker 2: more easily than stories that somehow don't fit our expectations
Speaker 2: or don't behave in familiar ways that are easy for
Speaker 2: us to understand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's interesting. I mean also can't help but think that,
Speaker 1: like the basic hitchhiker scenario, the experience of picking up
Speaker 1: a hitchhiker, I guess it's something that I mean a
Speaker 1: lot of people have never done this, maybe even more
Speaker 1: so today, but you've seen it in movies, you've seen
Speaker 1: it heard it in stories. So the basic scenario is
Speaker 1: pretty much like culturally intact. And then this is a
Speaker 1: supernatural twist on that that you know, I guess it
Speaker 1: doesn't particularly have survival information or social and information. To
Speaker 1: go back to that earlier study, I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: implied that the ghost is harmful, but it's like there's
Speaker 1: something about the everyday quality of it, like you're saying,
Speaker 1: like it's very relatable. It's relatable to this reality of
Speaker 1: modern life.
Speaker 2: So this is totally a tangent off of what we're
Speaker 2: talking about. But I would almost say that there is
Speaker 2: somehow implied social and survival information in any ghost story.
Speaker 2: Even though it's hard to express what that social or
Speaker 2: survival information is, it might have something to do with
Speaker 2: proof of the afterlife. You know, something about life after death,
Speaker 2: and the experience of any ghost has some kind of
Speaker 2: inherent survival type value to us, and ghosts are usually
Speaker 2: understood to have some kind of message to the living,
Speaker 2: which has a kind of gossip or social information quality
Speaker 2: to it. At least that's my take.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I guess you could also make an argument
Speaker 1: that the hitchhiker was not what they seemed, they were
Speaker 1: a ghost. This is basically just a supernatural twist on
Speaker 1: the hitchhiker was not what they seemed, which could arguably
Speaker 1: have survival and social commentary within it right in a
Speaker 1: more mundane way, like you know, you know that there's
Speaker 1: some sort of criminal threat there or something or some
Speaker 1: sort of unknown that one should be wary of. And
Speaker 1: this is just taking a mundane threat and transforming it
Speaker 1: into a supernatural threat on some level. Because you don't
Speaker 1: what a ghost in your car, you don't know what's
Speaker 1: gonna happen.
Speaker 2: They might get ectoplasm on your passenger seat.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they might scare you. I mean We've all heard
Speaker 1: enough ghost stories that don't involve automobiles to know it
Speaker 1: can go any number of ways. Your hitchhiker vanishes, you
Speaker 1: finally pull over the gas station, and then bam, hook
Speaker 1: on the outside handle of the car.
Speaker 2: That's a good twist. At first it's a ghost, she vanishes,
Speaker 2: but then she reappears with a hook.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Okay, but here's another interesting twist on what they found
Speaker 2: in this study. So remember the first variable was, you know,
Speaker 2: does familiarity with the story, whether the story fits in
Speaker 2: the box of your cultural expectations, does that affect how
Speaker 2: well you can remember and transmit it. Answer is yes,
Speaker 2: it does. If the story fits in the box, it's
Speaker 2: easier for you to remember and transmit it. The other
Speaker 2: thing is does the implied audience of the story matter.
Speaker 2: They were testing the hypothesis that a listener understood as
Speaker 2: strict in terms of expecting accuracy would produce more accurate
Speaker 2: recall than one understood as lenient. So the way they
Speaker 2: did this was, on one hand, they said, okay, reproduce
Speaker 2: this story for a friend. Here's the story for you
Speaker 2: to memorize. Now you need to reproduce it and tell
Speaker 2: it to a friend. Second option is reproduce this and
Speaker 2: tell it to a police officer. Well, that changes a lot, yes,
Speaker 2: And they found this did indeed matter for one type
Speaker 2: of story more than the other. So they say recall
Speaker 2: was better for a strict audience than a lenient audience.
Speaker 2: People did remember better when talking to the cop, but
Speaker 2: this only really applied to one of the story, So
Speaker 2: recall was more accurate when talking to the cop for
Speaker 2: the familiar story the Vanishing Hitchhiker, but recall seemed to
Speaker 2: be equally bad for the War of the Ghosts. The
Speaker 2: having a strict cop listening to your recounting did not
Speaker 2: really improve recall for the story that was more difficult
Speaker 2: to remember anyway, which I don't know. I guess you
Speaker 2: could interpret that multiple ways. But that makes me wonder if, well,
Speaker 2: you know, when you're talking to a friend, it signals
Speaker 2: you're you're probably just not putting that much effort into
Speaker 2: being strictly accurate in reproducing a story, even when in
Speaker 2: cases when you could be, so the case with the
Speaker 2: familiar story that's easier to reproduce, but when you're trying
Speaker 2: to reproduce an unfamiliar story that doesn't really fit with
Speaker 2: your schema it is, it's sort of impossible to do
Speaker 2: even if you're putting that extra effort.
Speaker 1: In Yeah, I mean, I guess in speaking to a
Speaker 1: police officer about your ghost story, did something about it
Speaker 1: should be actionable, right, Like, even if it's not a
Speaker 1: ghost story, Like, if you're telling a police officer about it,
Speaker 1: it must be because you want the police to do something.
Speaker 1: And therefore that I guess could impact your attention to
Speaker 1: details and so forth.
Speaker 2: But anyway, at the end today, I wanted to come
Speaker 2: back to something we talked about earlier in the episode,
Speaker 2: which has emphasize my feeling that there are two sides
Speaker 2: to the coin and they're both true. One is that
Speaker 2: serial reproduction of information between people, you know, information passing
Speaker 2: along the grapevine between people should not be relied upon
Speaker 2: as representing what that information was accurately at the beginning.
Speaker 2: You just should not trust that. And at the same time,
Speaker 2: you should not think about serial reproduction or transmission chains
Speaker 2: as they occur in human culture as bad. It's part
Speaker 2: of what culture is and it provides a lot of
Speaker 2: good things. It provides a lot of the entertainment and
Speaker 2: the learning and the spice of life, even if it
Speaker 2: does not objectively accurately usually preserve the information from the
Speaker 2: beginning of the chain.
Speaker 1: See. This is all great stuff that I think should
Speaker 1: have been included in the elementary school telephone games that
Speaker 1: does so many of us play.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't know, I mean, it kind of is
Speaker 2: all there. Like the game, you recognize that the message
Speaker 2: doesn't make it to the end intact, so you get
Speaker 2: a lesson there like, oh, don't believe everything you hear.
Speaker 2: But also the game is fun and the fun comes
Speaker 2: from the failure.
Speaker 1: Fail and distort. This is how you amuse yourself. This
Speaker 1: is the lesson to the telephone game I get. But
Speaker 1: it is really revealing. Like I said, I just didn't
Speaker 1: think about it much when I was a kid playing
Speaker 1: this game. But yeah, when you looking at these studies
Speaker 1: and discussing, you know, the out effects of transmission of
Speaker 1: rumors and myths and legends, urban legends, et cetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really gets fascinating.
Speaker 2: Another thing I was thinking about was how when we
Speaker 2: talk about rumors, I feel like we still often have
Speaker 2: an understanding of this being entirely word of mouth, just
Speaker 2: like one person talking to another and then that person
Speaker 2: talking to the next person. But it seems to me
Speaker 2: the much more common route of rumors today involves some
Speaker 2: kind of media in between there. So it may go
Speaker 2: like a word of mouth from one person to the next,
Speaker 2: and then to the internet to a written form, and
Speaker 2: then somebody reading that piece of information on the Internet,
Speaker 2: and then telling somebody in person, and then them posting
Speaker 2: on the internet and reading it. So you're also having
Speaker 2: these media changes back and forth that are not really
Speaker 2: showing up quite so much in at least any of
Speaker 2: the experiments we've looked at, because all of them either
Speaker 2: went you know, they either go entirely oral or entirely
Speaker 2: text based.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point. I should also just remind
Speaker 1: everyone probably don't go to the police with your ghost story.
Speaker 1: I'm just maybe exceptions to that rule, you know, use
Speaker 1: your best judgment. But it's also hard for me to
Speaker 1: get past that idea of just like I think I
Speaker 1: saw a ghost, bet I called the police.
Speaker 2: I disagree. I think you should only call the police
Speaker 2: with your ghost story.
Speaker 1: Hmm, agree to disagree.
Speaker 2: I'm kidding. Do not call nine one one and tie
Speaker 2: up the phone lines with your ghost story.
Speaker 1: Yes, tell a friend, tell a close friend. All right,
Speaker 1: We're gonna go ahead and close out this episode, but
Speaker 1: we'll be back on Tuesday. So you know, hey, keep
Speaker 1: writing into us because on Mondays we do listener mail
Speaker 1: and then we do our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Speaker 1: On Wednesdays we do a short form Monster Factor Artifact episode,
Speaker 1: and Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just
Speaker 1: talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2: Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
Speaker 2: would like to get in touch with this with feedback
Speaker 2: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 2: for the future, or just to say hello, you can
Speaker 2: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 2: dot com.
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