Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2: And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We are
Speaker 2: heading into the vault for an older episode of the podcast.
Speaker 2: This one originally published May second, twenty twenty three, and
Speaker 2: it's part one of our series about the game of
Speaker 2: telephone and related research on how information is transmitted orally.
Speaker 1: A Dame of telephone. All right, let's do it.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert.
Speaker 2: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and today we wanted
Speaker 2: to begin a series on the show talking about the
Speaker 2: telephone game. Many of you probably already know the general
Speaker 2: contours of a telephone game. Just in case anybody escaped
Speaker 2: childhood without playing this, describe how it often goes. So
Speaker 2: you might gather all the players in the room and
Speaker 2: arrange them in a line or in a big circle.
Speaker 2: We always played it in a circle at my elementary school.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, you played it in a circle too,
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And I was about to say, very much
Speaker 1: an elementary school sort of game. This would be where
Speaker 1: I remember playing it from.
Speaker 2: So you begin with a secret message. I think maybe
Speaker 2: often a teacher came up with the message, but I
Speaker 2: guess a kid could too. The main thing is not
Speaker 2: everybody gets to hear it at the beginning. The message
Speaker 2: can be a varying lengths or genres. Usually it was
Speaker 2: like a phrase or a sentence length, and for the
Speaker 2: purpose of some of the experiments we're going to look
Speaker 2: at later in this episode, it tends to get longer.
Speaker 2: It's like a full narrative length, and that's where you
Speaker 2: can start really seeing interesting things about how messages change
Speaker 2: across generations of retelling. But for the purpose of the
Speaker 2: kid game, yeah, it's often like a sentence. So let's
Speaker 2: say the phrase for our example is this sentence he
Speaker 2: learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature
Speaker 2: and because of it, the greatest in the universe. So
Speaker 2: somebody takes that message, they whisper it into the ear
Speaker 2: of the first player in the line, and then that
Speaker 2: player turns and whispers it back from memory as best
Speaker 2: they can to the next player, and then on down
Speaker 2: the line it goes. So each player is hearing what
Speaker 2: the other player's impression of the message was, and when
Speaker 2: it gets to the end, you reveal two things to
Speaker 2: the whole group, what the original message was and what
Speaker 2: final message emerged from the chain of players. Now, if
Speaker 2: you played this game with the man as a feeling
Speaker 2: creature message, and you played it with like a group
Speaker 2: of I don't know, twenty elementary school kids, I would
Speaker 2: imagine you'd end up with something radically different at the
Speaker 2: end than what you started with, maybe something about peeling potatoes.
Speaker 2: And then probably also, to be honest, if I remember
Speaker 2: how this went with kids, something about like it might
Speaker 2: end with the phrase and his head was made of
Speaker 2: poo poo or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Because any any group of school kids, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have some conscientious kids in there that are trying
Speaker 1: to contain and accurately reproduce the message. But you're also
Speaker 1: gonna have some distracted kids, and you're gonna have some troublemakers.
Speaker 2: But hey, hats off to the trouble makers, because in
Speaker 2: this case, you know, introducing weirdness to the message on
Speaker 2: purpose is half of the game. So there are several
Speaker 2: different ways that I think changes to the message are
Speaker 2: usually introduced in this form of the game. You know,
Speaker 2: whispering ear to ear among school kids. Number one is
Speaker 2: errors of hearing or speaking, So you might mistake a
Speaker 2: word in the message for a sound to like word
Speaker 2: like a man is a feeling creature might turn into
Speaker 2: something about peeling, and then that could be confusing, and
Speaker 2: then something about peeling potatoes.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: On down the line, you could of course have errors
Speaker 2: of memory forgetting what the second half of the sentence is,
Speaker 2: or forgetting particular word choices, you know, transforming a phrase
Speaker 2: into a kind of rough gist of the phrase instead
Speaker 2: of getting the words right. And then finally you just
Speaker 2: have deliberate changes. And concerning those deliberate changes, I think
Speaker 2: it's important to point out that ostensibly the purpose of
Speaker 2: the game is to see if you can preserve the
Speaker 2: message intact, but a lot of children playing lose sight
Speaker 2: of this goal and instead play with the goal of
Speaker 2: introducing the funniest or most entertaining variations on the original message. Because,
Speaker 2: after all, if you are playing in order to preserve
Speaker 2: the message as best you can, the sort of win
Speaker 2: condition the optimal outcome is also the most boring outcome.
Speaker 2: It's like, oh wow, it's stayed the same the whole
Speaker 2: way around, okay, But the more catastrophic your failure, the
Speaker 2: more entertaining the game becomes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a lot of this comes back to the
Speaker 1: fact that children generally have a very unbalanced and honestly
Speaker 1: developing sense of humor. They don't realize that the true
Speaker 1: humor of the game comes out of an organic attempt
Speaker 1: to accurately reproduce the data, and that if you were
Speaker 1: to intentionally tweak it for entertainment's sake, you would have
Speaker 1: to do so with care, because if it drifts too far,
Speaker 1: if at the end it just becomes this, this, this, this,
Speaker 1: this spill of of of childhood obscenities, then it's it's
Speaker 1: not funny, it's it's meaningless. But it's still probably going
Speaker 1: to end in laughter for these children. I mean they're
Speaker 1: the audience after all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think genuine mistaken nonsense is the more deeply
Speaker 2: satisfying form of comedy. Then, you know, attacking on his
Speaker 2: head was made of poo poo to the end of
Speaker 2: the sentence. But you know, when you're a kid, you
Speaker 2: can't really resist, right. So I was thinking about, you know,
Speaker 2: my memories of playing this game, and we did play
Speaker 2: this game at my elementary school, and I was kind
Speaker 2: of wondering why we played it as children, I assume
Speaker 2: it was to teach us not to believe everything we hear,
Speaker 2: to give a kind of stern example about the pernicious
Speaker 2: power of rumors. But in my experience, kids always quickly
Speaker 2: figure out that the real point of the game is,
Speaker 2: like we said, to change the message on purpose to
Speaker 2: be more entertaining, or usually to be you know, more
Speaker 2: nonsensical or more scatological. The game works very differently if
Speaker 2: everyone isn't committed to trying to preserve the message intact.
Speaker 2: But then again, I guess you could say that even
Speaker 2: with people throwing scatological nonsense in the gear is just
Speaker 2: for fun, it still sort of works as a lesson
Speaker 2: about the real world fallibility of word of mouth transmission chains,
Speaker 2: because you know, the same thing happens there really in
Speaker 2: a less obvious and less immediate form. But when people
Speaker 2: retell a story or a rumor about their classmates, they
Speaker 2: also will often introduce details in order to make it
Speaker 2: more entertaining in their view on the retelling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I have to say that I don't remember
Speaker 1: any kind of lessons attached to being made to play
Speaker 1: this game in like elementary school or what have you.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of like, this is what we're doing.
Speaker 1: We're about to kill some time with a fun game,
Speaker 1: and you know, and then the game, of course, just
Speaker 1: descends into nonsense and childhood laughter, and that at some
Speaker 1: point the adults that are carrying this out realize that
Speaker 1: it's gone too far and we need to get these
Speaker 1: kids involved in something else. But yeah, as we'll be
Speaker 1: discussing on the show here, like, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of different ways you can crack this nut, a lot
Speaker 1: of different ways you can think about it. And I'll say,
Speaker 1: the other thing that comes to mind is that I
Speaker 1: can't help but make this connection between this game and
Speaker 1: humor based on intentionally mishearing something. M Yeah, this was
Speaker 1: really big in my family, to the point that I
Speaker 1: think it was a bit overdone and got a little
Speaker 1: annoying at times. And I don't know if that was
Speaker 1: us or if that meant for all I know, maybe
Speaker 1: it was fueled by everyone having played the Telephone game
Speaker 1: in school, Like maybe it teaches you that, hey, if
Speaker 1: you slightly mishear something, it becomes more fun and you
Speaker 1: can just sort of revel in that, you know, and
Speaker 1: why save the world when you can Save the Squirrel. Ha.
Speaker 1: It's instantly funny, but it easily gets out of hand
Speaker 1: if you just keep going back to that. Well.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a common genre of joke on Mystery Science
Speaker 2: Theater three thousand to take a kind of mumbled, hard
Speaker 2: to hear Lyne and say, wait a minute, what did
Speaker 2: he say about cheese?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I mean it's a great way to just tweak
Speaker 1: something a little bit, create something that's minimally counterintuitive, something
Speaker 1: that has just the right level of absurd. Again, assuming
Speaker 1: a child is not, you know, doing this just willy nilly,
Speaker 1: just drive things a little bit off the road into
Speaker 1: the realm of humor. Yeah, it's an easy way to
Speaker 1: get there.
Speaker 2: For other variations on the basic idea of the game,
Speaker 2: I was looking around and I came across one thing
Speaker 2: I'd never played or even heard of before. But there
Speaker 2: is apparently a variation called apologies for the name of this.
Speaker 2: I don't know where this comes from, but it is
Speaker 2: called Eat Poop You Cat. And it's the same as
Speaker 2: the telephone game, except you play it on a piece
Speaker 2: of paper, and at each stage of transmission you alternate
Speaker 2: back and forth between text and drawing, which I think
Speaker 2: is a fantastic idea. So you start with a text message,
Speaker 2: the first person has to represent that as a picture,
Speaker 2: and then the next person has to translate that picture
Speaker 2: into text, and then back to a picture, then back
Speaker 2: to text, and so on and so I think in
Speaker 2: that format, especially because at the end you have a
Speaker 2: written document of each stage of transmission that everybody can
Speaker 2: inspect and enjoy it. That sounds like a much more
Speaker 2: satisfying version of the game.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree, terrible title, that makes it a little
Speaker 1: difficult to research online. But yeah, I'd not heard of
Speaker 1: this one. Yeah, same concepts of going back and forth
Speaker 1: between drawings and written sentences rather than depending on a
Speaker 1: chain of whispers. Not sure about its origins, but I
Speaker 1: did notice that it's listed on board game Geeks due
Speaker 1: to its popularity as a party game, but not because
Speaker 1: it's like a typical board game or card game or
Speaker 1: something of that nature. It's just like a party game
Speaker 1: of parlor game, and it seems to be popular, though
Speaker 1: I'd never heard of it before. Now there are a
Speaker 1: lot of additional alternate names for the Telephone Game. In fact,
Speaker 1: some of you might have gone into this episode wondering, well,
Speaker 1: what is the telephone game. What are they talking about?
Speaker 1: A lot of the names for what we're talking about
Speaker 1: here do and seem to involve the technological metaphor of
Speaker 1: the telephone, though at this point I guess it's increasingly
Speaker 1: an outdated metaphor an outdated reference. We might need to
Speaker 1: explain what a telephone is, because we're not talking about
Speaker 1: a tiny pocket computer. We're talking about ultimately allusions to
Speaker 1: like mid twentieth century telephones.
Speaker 2: One of the early sources that I was reading about
Speaker 2: a version of this game, which I'll get into later
Speaker 2: in this episode, referred to it as a variation on
Speaker 2: the quote Russian scandal. I've never heard of that name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll come back to that in just a minute.
Speaker 1: There are still other names that invoke snail mail, just
Speaker 1: traditional mail, gossip, or listening. Though there is one major
Speaker 1: name for this alternate name for it that's worth mentioning
Speaker 1: because it actually is the primary name for this game
Speaker 1: in many areas. In fact, if you look up the
Speaker 1: Telephone game, say just a quick Google search or something,
Speaker 1: you will find that say that the Wikipedia article, for example,
Speaker 1: is not about the Telephone game. That is not the
Speaker 1: title of the entry. The title of the entry is
Speaker 1: Chinese Whispers. Now I have to admit that, yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: never heard of Chinese whispers. I'd only heard of the
Speaker 1: Telephone game. And I was a bit and I was
Speaker 1: a bit surprised and a bit worried when I saw
Speaker 1: that in the United Kingdom, in Australia and in New Zealand,
Speaker 1: this is the primary name for it. And I was
Speaker 1: afraid that there is going to be something at least
Speaker 1: xenophobic in the tradition here. And it's interesting that it's
Speaker 1: not an antiquated name for the game in these regions
Speaker 1: as well. For instance, there are plenty of academic papers
Speaker 1: that I ran across from twenty twenty three even that
Speaker 1: use this terminology, where it's sometimes dealt with directly as
Speaker 1: a concept, like some of the papers will be referring
Speaker 1: to in a bit, and other times it's used as
Speaker 1: a metaphor for something or just a snappy title. Now
Speaker 1: what does this mean? Where does it come from? Well,
Speaker 1: the primary explanations I've run across focus on the idea
Speaker 1: of it being a mashup of whispers themselves being difficult
Speaker 1: to understand. Again, that's how the game kind of works,
Speaker 1: and this idea of the Chinese language, being from a
Speaker 1: Western standpoint, arguably difficult a difficult language to learn. However,
Speaker 1: I've also seen sources acknowledge that this could at least
Speaker 1: be misinterpreted as referring to as a language that is
Speaker 1: pure confusion or something along those lines, and of course
Speaker 1: this would be very xenophobic way of approaching things. There
Speaker 1: also seems to be some level of influence from the
Speaker 1: ideal of Cold Wars and espionage here, which again is
Speaker 1: particularly fair, as Junte Huang points out in Chinese Whispers
Speaker 1: published in Verge Studies in Global Asians from spring twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: The term became popular mid twentieth century, and other Cold
Speaker 1: War influenced and unnecessarily nationalistic names for the game include
Speaker 1: Russian scandal, Russian gossip, and Russian telephone Now interesting. The
Speaker 1: author also points to a pair of thought experiments linked
Speaker 1: or possibly linked to the Telephone game that I think
Speaker 1: are probably worth mentioning here. One stems from American scientist
Speaker 1: Warren Weaver, who lived eighteen ninety fourth through nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: who apparently in a nineteen forty seven letter to MIT's
Speaker 1: Norbert Weiner, commented on a translation problem and communication problem
Speaker 1: writing quote. It is very tempting to say that a
Speaker 1: book written in Chinese is simply a book written in
Speaker 1: English which was coded into the Chinese code. Of course,
Speaker 1: this is not exactly how it works. You know, we
Speaker 1: discussed linguistic differences on the show before in translations, but
Speaker 1: I think that's part of what Weaver was getting at here.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's not sort of a universal meaning key
Speaker 2: where all languages can just be endlessly coded in and
Speaker 2: out of each other. That a language, a message in
Speaker 2: a language, brings its own peculiarities, and any translation is
Speaker 2: always an approximation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think this is perhaps more visible to
Speaker 1: people today with access to various online translation tools, like
Speaker 1: you don't have to toy around with those much to
Speaker 1: realize that you lose something. And in fact not unrelated
Speaker 1: to the telephone game. I remember pretty early on when
Speaker 1: these translation tools began to become available for some language translations.
Speaker 1: One thing you could do is you could take a
Speaker 1: phrase like say I don't know a line from Shakespeare
Speaker 1: translated into say Spanish or German, and then translated back
Speaker 1: into English. Now do you get your perfect example back again?
Speaker 1: Does it give you exactly what you put in no,
Speaker 1: you end up losing something in the translation and retranslation,
Speaker 1: and you can have some sort of telephone game esque
Speaker 1: fun that way.
Speaker 2: Whenever online translation first became a thing, I don't know
Speaker 2: if that was Babbelfish or babbel dot com or whatever
Speaker 2: it was, we thought it was absolutely hilarious to run
Speaker 2: Metallica lyrics. They're about ten layers of translation and what
Speaker 2: came out was solid.
Speaker 1: How does that still hold up, you think, or have
Speaker 1: the translation tools improved or changed over time? I don't know.
Speaker 2: I was actually just trying to do it now and
Speaker 2: something wouldn't work, and I mean it was like it
Speaker 2: was too close in the end. Maybe there's some AI
Speaker 2: detection of like, oh, it looks like you're trying to
Speaker 2: translate Metallica lyrics. Let's shape that a little bit closer
Speaker 2: to the original.
Speaker 1: All right now. Another example that this author brings up
Speaker 1: is this idea that was presented by philosopher John Cyril
Speaker 1: born in nineteen thirty two, the concept of the Chinese room.
Speaker 1: Some of you may be familiar with this. The Chinese room,
Speaker 1: in this thought experiment, is a cell that contains quote
Speaker 1: baskets of Chinese characters and a rule book correlating those
Speaker 1: symbols to symbols on Chinese texts, texts that are going
Speaker 1: to be passed to a single human occupant of the room,
Speaker 1: like by you know, sliding them under the door. The
Speaker 1: single human occupant of this Chinese room does not know Chinese,
Speaker 1: but again these texts are passed under the door to them.
Speaker 1: They take these texts, they compare the symbols to the
Speaker 1: rule book, and then they get the response symbols out
Speaker 1: to build a response, a string of responses that are
Speaker 1: then passed back under the door.
Speaker 2: I would say, with the Chinese room thought experiment, the
Speaker 2: particular use of Chinese as a language as is not
Speaker 2: important to the experiment. It could be any language unknown
Speaker 2: to the person in the room.
Speaker 1: Right right, and so hung it up by saying quote.
Speaker 1: Although his Chinese interlocutories outside the room consider these strings
Speaker 1: to be clever responses to their inquiries, the prisoner actually
Speaker 1: has no idea of the meaning of the texts he
Speaker 1: has produced. The scenario proves. Cyril argued that a machine
Speaker 1: cannot think, just as the prisoner does not know the
Speaker 1: meaning of the Chinese texts, so it's meant as a
Speaker 1: means of refuting the idea of say strong ai that
Speaker 1: reproduces human thought.
Speaker 2: Now, we could spend a whole series of episodes debating
Speaker 2: the validity of the Chinese room thought experiment, and in
Speaker 2: fact it has come up on the show before. But yeah, basically,
Speaker 2: I think cyl is trying to assert that there's something
Speaker 2: that goes on when a human is thinking that we
Speaker 2: call understanding, meaning when a human manipulates symbols, they have
Speaker 2: some deeper recognition of what those symbols mean that has
Speaker 2: validity to the whole of existence. Whereas in this experiment,
Speaker 2: this is what he considered a machine that can you know,
Speaker 2: like a like a chat GPT type machine, one that
Speaker 2: can manipulate text and then spit out text that seems
Speaker 2: to make sense. He says, Ultimately, it is a machine
Speaker 2: manipulating symbols without actually understanding them. There's a ton of
Speaker 2: back and forth between philosophers about like what it actually
Speaker 2: means to understand, whether a human could truly be said
Speaker 2: to understand, whether what we're doing is fundamentally different or not.
Speaker 1: Again, though for our purposes, Chinese language is not really
Speaker 1: part of the whole scenario and really won't be something
Speaker 1: we're dwelling on moving forward. But if you are interested
Speaker 1: in the topic of Chinese language and technology, there's a
Speaker 1: great book that came out several years ago, The Chinese Typewriter,
Speaker 1: a History by Thomas S. Mulaney. We had him on
Speaker 1: the show interviewed him about the book and the topic,
Speaker 1: So go back and find that in the archives if
Speaker 1: that's what you're interested in. But coming back to the
Speaker 1: telephone aka Chinese Whispers, Yeah, I'm going to keep calling
Speaker 1: it the telephone game. I have seen some sources online
Speaker 1: that steer people away from referring to it as something
Speaker 1: like Chinese Whispers or Russian gossip, or whatever the case
Speaker 1: might be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've only ever known it as the telephone game.
Speaker 2: I think that's what basically everybody in the US at
Speaker 2: least calls it.
Speaker 1: A more accurate name, though, especially for children, might be
Speaker 1: Goofy Whispers.
Speaker 2: I think now, I think you could argue about what
Speaker 2: is actually learned or revealed from the version of the
Speaker 2: game we described at the beginning, by having kids sit
Speaker 2: in a circle and whisper a message in each other's
Speaker 2: ears around the chain. But variations on the telephone game
Speaker 2: have actually been used in scientific research in psychology studies
Speaker 2: going back over one hundred years at this point and
Speaker 2: have been very influential. So there are variations on telephone
Speaker 2: game experiments that have sometimes been called serial reproduction experiments
Speaker 2: or transmission chain experiments. Serial reproduction is very influential in
Speaker 2: the history of psychology for understanding a number of different
Speaker 2: phenomena communication, cultural transmission, and memory. Serial reproduction experiments were
Speaker 2: famously crucial to the work of the British psychologist Frederick
Speaker 2: Charles Bartlett often written as F. C. Bartlett, who was
Speaker 2: a professor at Cambridge University. But Bartlett discussed serial reproduction
Speaker 2: experiments in his very important nineteen thirty two book Remembering
Speaker 2: a Study in Experimental and Social Psychology that was all
Speaker 2: about phenomena of memory. So serial reproduction was one of
Speaker 2: two major techniques that Bartlett studied. The other was called
Speaker 2: repeated reproduction, and the difference was, like this repeated reproduction,
Speaker 2: you would ask a single person to try to remember
Speaker 2: an original piece of information and reproduce it over and
Speaker 2: over at different intervals of time. So rob I might
Speaker 2: give you a story like a text to read that's
Speaker 2: a folk tale or a newspaper article, or a description
Speaker 2: of an event, or a passage from a book, anything,
Speaker 2: I'd ask you to read it several times, and then
Speaker 2: I would ask you to write it down from memory
Speaker 2: five minutes later or an hour later, a week later,
Speaker 2: a year later, two years later, and see how well
Speaker 2: you could remember it. But also, maybe most importantly, what
Speaker 2: are the patterns of changes that you observe when you
Speaker 2: do this with lots of people. That to me is
Speaker 2: a very interesting question. Are there consistent differences what tends
Speaker 2: to change when a memory fades over time? Serial reproduction
Speaker 2: is a very similar experiment, except you add in the
Speaker 2: telephone game element. So one person's attempt to remember the
Speaker 2: text becomes the next person's study material, their text to memorize,
Speaker 2: and then their attempt to reproduce it becomes the next
Speaker 2: person's study material. And you do this on down the
Speaker 2: chain with lots of different people, with lots of different
Speaker 2: types of text, to see what sorts of trends emerge. Now,
Speaker 2: the goal of the repeated reproduction experiments was to sort
Speaker 2: of study how people remember the same event over time.
Speaker 2: You know, how well do people remember something that happened
Speaker 2: to them a year ago or several years ago, or
Speaker 2: remember something they read from a year ago and what
Speaker 2: tends to change. But the goal of the serial reproduction
Speaker 2: study the telephone game version, was to study the effects
Speaker 2: of the social transmission of information through word of mouth
Speaker 2: in culture or through memory of written sources in culture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is fascinating. On one hand, I can't help
Speaker 1: but think, like with repeated reproduction, you know, we kind
Speaker 1: of engage in this all the time, different people trying
Speaker 1: to remember what happened in a movie. We can always
Speaker 1: go back and look at the movie, and in many
Speaker 1: cases we will go back and look at the movie
Speaker 1: and see what actually happened, or trying to remember what
Speaker 1: happened in the book. There's still that primary source. But
Speaker 1: it makes me think of Fahrenheit four fifty one towards
Speaker 1: the end of that, the Ray Bradbury book, where a
Speaker 1: book about books being banned, books being burnt, and the
Speaker 1: books then having to be committed to memory and then
Speaker 1: passed on as an oral tradition again, which means that
Speaker 1: you open it up to serial reproduction errors, which I
Speaker 1: always found kind of fascinating. Like on one level, I
Speaker 1: remember as a young reader of the book, I was like, oh, no, well,
Speaker 1: they can't possibly truly memorize I don't know, moby dick,
Speaker 1: and then pass it on like how like this seems
Speaker 1: like this is such a feat of memory, and then
Speaker 1: realizing well, they couldn't possibly keep it all intact. Something
Speaker 1: would change, and this would be a process of these
Speaker 1: of a literature becoming oral tradition again within these people
Speaker 1: that are keeping the books alive until some sort of
Speaker 1: regime change can happen and they can all be put
Speaker 1: back on paper again.
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting because I think in that kind of scenario,
Speaker 2: what these experiments tend to show is that the original
Speaker 2: form of the story would be lost. There would be
Speaker 2: radical changes introduced through attempts to serially reproduce, especially a
Speaker 2: long text over time, but the people reproducing it would
Speaker 2: introduce their own literary flourishes to it, So it would
Speaker 2: essentially become no longer the original work of Herman Melville,
Speaker 2: but sort of a product of a serial reproduction culture.
Speaker 2: So it would have elements of the original story in it,
Speaker 2: but it would have elements added in along the way,
Speaker 2: some of which get reproduced pretty faithfully and some of
Speaker 2: which fade away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of interesting to think about this in
Speaker 1: terms of remakes of movies, because sometimes it feels more
Speaker 1: like a telephone game. What does John Carpenter's The Thing
Speaker 1: have to do with the Thing from another world versus
Speaker 1: the short story was based on. Other times, things feel
Speaker 1: more like serial reproduction, where someone's like, Okay, this new
Speaker 1: adaptation is going back to the original source material and
Speaker 1: not the most recent film or TV adaptation of the material.
Speaker 2: Though interestingly, there are very different mechanisms in play there,
Speaker 2: because it is assumed that a big issue with the
Speaker 2: loss of fidelity in serial reproduction is memory, right, people
Speaker 2: failing to remember certain elements of the story, and that
Speaker 2: failure of memory causes them to either just omit something
Speaker 2: or to substitute something else. In the case of remakes,
Speaker 2: it's you know, it's choices made for some reason. Presumably
Speaker 2: they can always consult the original source. So there all
Speaker 2: the changes are, you know, and his head was made
Speaker 2: of doo doo or whatever, deliberate changes because the person
Speaker 2: thought it would be more entertaining this way or more
Speaker 2: marketable or whatever.
Speaker 1: True.
Speaker 2: True, though it's very interesting how One of the things
Speaker 2: we'll get into this in a bit. One of the
Speaker 2: things revealed in Bartlett's research is that some changes that
Speaker 2: we would interpret as not just failures of memory, but
Speaker 2: as real editorial changes to a story do creep in
Speaker 2: even when people are just faithfully trying to reproduce it.
Speaker 2: We unconsciously make editorial changes to narratives.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's fascinating to break into that and see
Speaker 1: what changes are more likely to be made, why we
Speaker 1: make them, etc.
Speaker 2: Now, I thought it might be good to illustrate how
Speaker 2: much actually changes in these serial reproduction experiments by reading
Speaker 2: the text of one original text give into the subjects
Speaker 2: in Bartlet's experiments, and one example of what that text
Speaker 2: looked like after ten transmission, after ten links in the
Speaker 2: transmission chain. So this is probably the most famous example.
Speaker 2: It is a folk tale called the War of the Ghosts.
Speaker 2: This is something that Bartlett presents as a Native American
Speaker 2: folk tale. Now, I was trying to find out more
Speaker 2: about the origins of this folk tale, like specifically what
Speaker 2: group people it came from, and when it was first
Speaker 2: putting down in writing and so forth. I was not
Speaker 2: able to turn up that information, So I can't vouch
Speaker 2: for how authentic this is to the actual tradition. The
Speaker 2: folk tradition that this written version of the story is
Speaker 2: based on but you can say at least that this
Speaker 2: written version is the original version for the purpose of
Speaker 2: the experiment. Okay, so I'm going to read this original
Speaker 2: written interpretation of the story. It's called the War of
Speaker 2: the Ghosts. One night, two young men from Egguloch went
Speaker 2: down to the river to hunt seals, and while they
Speaker 2: were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard
Speaker 2: war cries, and they thought maybe this is a war party.
Speaker 2: They escaped to the shore and hid behind a log.
Speaker 2: Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of
Speaker 2: paddles and saw one canoe coming up to them. There
Speaker 2: were five men in the canoe, and they said, what
Speaker 2: do you think we wish to take you along. We
Speaker 2: are going up the river to make war on the people.
Speaker 2: One of the young men said, I have no arrows.
Speaker 2: Arrows are in the canoe. They said, I will not
Speaker 2: go along. I might be killed. My relatives do not
Speaker 2: know where I have gone. But you, he said, turning
Speaker 2: to the other, may go with them. So one of
Speaker 2: the young men went, but the other returned home, and
Speaker 2: the warriors went on up the river to a town
Speaker 2: on the other side of Kalama. The people came down
Speaker 2: to the water, and they began to fight, and many
Speaker 2: were killed. But presently the young man heard one of
Speaker 2: the warriors say, quick, let us go home. That Indian
Speaker 2: has been hit. Now he thought, oh, they are ghosts.
Speaker 2: He did not feel sick, but they said he had
Speaker 2: been shot. So the canoes went back to Egguloch, and
Speaker 2: the young man went ashore to his house and made
Speaker 2: a fire, and he told everybody and said, behold, I
Speaker 2: accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight. Many of
Speaker 2: our fellows were killed, and many of those who attacked
Speaker 2: us were killed. They said I was hit and I
Speaker 2: did not feel sick. He told it all, and then
Speaker 2: he became quiet. When the sun rose, he fell down.
Speaker 2: Something black came out of his mouth, his face became contorted.
Speaker 2: The people jumped up and cried he was dead. Very
Speaker 2: haunting story.
Speaker 1: I think a little bit of a ghost arrow Elf
Speaker 1: arrow action in there too.
Speaker 2: Kind of okay. So Bartlett's method in the serial reproduction
Speaker 2: experiments was he would begin with a text like that,
Speaker 2: He would let the subject read the text in full
Speaker 2: twice over at their own pace, and then fifteen to
Speaker 2: thirty minutes later, the subject was asked to reproduce the
Speaker 2: passage from memory. Would you like to hear what the
Speaker 2: War of the Ghosts looked like in one of these
Speaker 2: transmission experiments ten steps down the chain, Oh, let's hear
Speaker 2: it the War of the Ghosts. Two Indians were out
Speaker 2: fishing for seals in the Bay of man Papan when
Speaker 2: along came five other Indians in a war canoe. They
Speaker 2: were going fighting. Come with us, said the five to
Speaker 2: the two and fight. I cannot come, was the answer
Speaker 2: of the one, for I have an old mother at
Speaker 2: home who is dependent upon me. The other also said
Speaker 2: he could not come because he had no arms. That
Speaker 2: is no difficulty. The others replied, for we have plenty
Speaker 2: in the canoe with us. So he got into the
Speaker 2: canoe and went with them in a fight. Soon afterwards,
Speaker 2: this Indian received a mortal wound. Finding that his hour
Speaker 2: was come, he cried out that he was about to die. Nonsense,
Speaker 2: said one of the others. You will not die, But
Speaker 2: he did.
Speaker 1: Absolutely terrible. They're totally ruin, said yes, like all the
Speaker 1: great stuff in the original and is gone, like obviously
Speaker 1: the stuff with the contorted face and the black bile
Speaker 1: leaking out of the mouth, like that's gone, and that
Speaker 1: was great. But also the relationship between the two warriors
Speaker 1: that was pretty interesting in the original, you know, the
Speaker 1: idea that did one kind of like the butt to
Speaker 1: the other and it's like, why I can't go but
Speaker 1: you can. All that is gone.
Speaker 2: That's the interesting character drama. The atmosphere at the beginning
Speaker 2: is lost, the elements that it became that it was
Speaker 2: foggy and calm when when the boats arrived. Bartlett himself
Speaker 2: points out that the story has changed so so much,
Speaker 2: and it's it's in fact, it's changed so much it's
Speaker 2: easy to miss lots of the ways that it has changed.
Speaker 2: It is drastically shorter. Basically all the supernatural elements have
Speaker 2: been removed and it's just left as a material story
Speaker 2: of violent conflict with like none of the none of
Speaker 2: the ghosts. And it's still called the War of the Ghost,
Speaker 2: but there are no ghosts in it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Pretty much all of the cultural conventions in the story
Speaker 2: that would have been less familiar to the subjects at
Speaker 2: Cambridge trying to reproduce this story, they've been removed or
Speaker 2: replaced with more familiar cultural elements, like, for example, just
Speaker 2: the use of the word fishing for seals at the beginning.
Speaker 1: And instead of referring to one's relatives back at home,
Speaker 1: it's just oh me old mom.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And Bartlett points out three major patterns that
Speaker 2: have happened to the story. Number one, a series of omissions.
Speaker 2: Details are just continually at each stage being left out.
Speaker 2: Second is, he says, quote, by the provision of links
Speaker 2: between one part of the story and another, and of
Speaker 2: reasons for some of the occurrences, that is to say,
Speaker 2: by continued rationalizations. So there were things in this story
Speaker 2: that might not have made sense to the subject, might
Speaker 2: well have made perfect sense to the intended original audience,
Speaker 2: but because of cultural unfamiliarity, the subject didn't really understand
Speaker 2: why somebody was doing something, so they added in a
Speaker 2: rationalization for it. And then the third thing is the
Speaker 2: transformation of minor detail, which can snowball into major changes
Speaker 2: over serial reproductions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's fascinating, And again it's interesting to keep in
Speaker 1: mind that, of course, the the oral transmission of stories
Speaker 1: was of the original way that we pass these things on.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes you might have some sort of a
Speaker 1: text refer back to, or some sort of you know,
Speaker 1: iconography or or even like geographic features or what have
Speaker 1: you that that help inform the story. But otherwise it's
Speaker 1: like it's kind of a miracle that any creative story
Speaker 1: remained good over time, right, that it would just I
Speaker 1: guess that that speaks to the role of a dedicated,
Speaker 1: like storytelling class within a given culture.
Speaker 2: But even in those cases, I think you could not
Speaker 2: assume that the story would remain the same. It would
Speaker 2: be a tradition, and you might have a core of
Speaker 2: a story that is sort of stable over time. But
Speaker 2: like storytellers are in a way also story writers when
Speaker 2: they reperform. When we when anybody reperforms a story learned orally,
Speaker 2: they lose some original detail and supply new details of
Speaker 2: their own, so they become a creative participant in the
Speaker 2: story tradition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and if your culture's storyteller happens to be Michael Bay,
Speaker 1: then you suddenly there's all these explosions that weren't there.
Speaker 1: It's the previous version. It takes on a certain character.
Speaker 2: So in the chapter on serial reproduction in Bartlett's book,
Speaker 2: he gives a bunch of different examples and he shows
Speaker 2: actually each reproduction along the chain so you can follow
Speaker 2: it and see what changes they are introduced at each stage.
Speaker 2: It does this for a number of different types of texts,
Speaker 2: several different folk tales, different experiments with the same folk tale,
Speaker 2: different like newspaper articles or passages from books, like passages
Speaker 2: from Ralph Waldo Emerson, or just like stories from the
Speaker 2: newspaper about tennis matches, all different kinds of texts, and
Speaker 2: he says, in every case, for every genre of information
Speaker 2: he has tried, with the exception of what he calls
Speaker 2: cumulative stories, and I think this might be stories where
Speaker 2: like each little element that happens is logically dependent on
Speaker 2: the thing that happened before. And he says, quote the
Speaker 2: final result after comparatively few reproductions, would hardly ever be
Speaker 2: connected with the original by any person who had no
Speaker 2: access to some intermediate versions. There is little doubt that
Speaker 2: with the ordinary free handling of material, which is characteristic
Speaker 2: of daily life, much more elaboration commonly takes place, though
Speaker 2: it is perhaps difficult to imagine that very much more
Speaker 2: startling changes could occur. So he's saying that conditions of
Speaker 2: the experiment are probably producing higher fidelity transmission than you
Speaker 2: would expect in everyday life. Even in this setting, the
Speaker 2: changes are drastic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it brings me back to various folk
Speaker 1: tale traditions and legends and myths that we've discussed in
Speaker 1: the past, you know, where there's sometimes a question of,
Speaker 1: well does the myth in this culture, does this have
Speaker 1: an actual connection to this similar myth in another culture
Speaker 1: or where are they both independent creations? And you know,
Speaker 1: given the amount of drift that would that would take
Speaker 1: place if something were transmitted to this other culture, potentially,
Speaker 1: I mean you can see where you could go either way,
Speaker 1: like like it would just be so so much would
Speaker 1: be lost in it becoming a part of this other culture.
Speaker 2: Yes, And this actually connects to a broader idea that
Speaker 2: Bartlett has Maybe we can get into this later or
Speaker 2: in the next episode, about the idea of schema. His
Speaker 2: proposal was that in order to remember something, you don't
Speaker 2: just remember the event itself, you encode it with the
Speaker 2: help of what he calls a schema or schemata, basically
Speaker 2: an existing body of knowledge about the world and about
Speaker 2: your culture that can sort of like be a shorthand
Speaker 2: for elements of the thing you're trying to remember, and
Speaker 2: thus things that fit with your available schema are easier
Speaker 2: to remember. And things that don't just kind of either
Speaker 2: get transformed to fit your schema or get forgotten. And
Speaker 2: this would account for one thing, people's tendency to make changes,
Speaker 2: especially to culturally unfamiliar elements from a folk tale from
Speaker 2: a different culture. But anyway, at the end of this chapter,
Speaker 2: Bartlett was able to document a fairly consistent array of
Speaker 2: changes that he thought were most often introduced through serialized retelling.
Speaker 2: So I thought it'd be really interesting to look at, like,
Speaker 2: what are the changes that happen most often with this
Speaker 2: form of the telephone game where you're going you're reading
Speaker 2: a text and then you're trying to reproduce it from memory,
Speaker 2: and then you go on down the line, what kind
Speaker 2: of changes show up the most? So, first of all,
Speaker 2: he says, proper names and titles of pieces. He says
Speaker 2: consistent across the different examples. Some of the most unstable
Speaker 2: details were proper names and titles. And this was true
Speaker 2: for every genre of material, with every group of subjects tested. Now,
Speaker 2: when it comes to proper names, the examples in the
Speaker 2: reproductions printed in the chapter are numerous. I just I
Speaker 2: dug through to try to find some particular examples. One
Speaker 2: of them comes from a paragraph that was used for
Speaker 2: an experiment about evolutionary theory, and the name is a
Speaker 2: name to which an argument about evolutionary theory is attributed.
Speaker 2: The name is mister Gulick, and the name mister Ghuliic
Speaker 2: is transformed into mister Garlic by the second reproduction, and
Speaker 2: it stays that way for ten more steps down the chain. Now,
Speaker 2: I think it's interesting that Gulick quickly changes to garlic,
Speaker 2: but the garlic name doesn't change nearly so easily. It
Speaker 2: sticks for many more transmissions. I wonder if that's because
Speaker 2: Gulick would have been a relatively unfamiliar name to the subjects,
Speaker 2: and of course so would Garlick as a name, Except
Speaker 2: Garlick as a name for a scientist is weirdly evocative
Speaker 2: of garlic, the food, so it kind of sticks in
Speaker 2: the mind.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Yeah. And and just in general, so some
Speaker 1: of the weirder names are the ones that stick with you.
Speaker 2: But I would say my intuition would be more likely
Speaker 2: if it's a word in your language, especially an unusual
Speaker 2: word in your language, as opposed to like just a
Speaker 2: name that that isn't like a noun in your language,
Speaker 2: but is also not one that's very common to you anyway.
Speaker 2: There's another example. It's a story about a lawn tennis
Speaker 2: match where the name Tilden transforms into Felden and the
Speaker 2: name Brooks transforms into Bowden, and then a player named
Speaker 2: Captain Wilding becomes Captain wild and then his name just
Speaker 2: completely disappears from retelling. And this last pattern reflects that
Speaker 2: sometimes names don't just change, they completely disappear. They go
Speaker 2: down the drain into anonymity. So you might start with
Speaker 2: a story about a man named John Agar who might
Speaker 2: then become a man named Garfield, and then he might
Speaker 2: just become a man. And Bartlett thinks that it's understandable
Speaker 2: that proper names should change through retelling of a story
Speaker 2: from memory, because he says, quote, their significance and application
Speaker 2: are local and vary from group to group. And this
Speaker 2: sort of makes sense to me, like it usually makes
Speaker 2: very little difference in a story what the person's name
Speaker 2: is unless that name is connected to a known identity.
Speaker 2: So it'd be kind of weird if the name of
Speaker 2: somebody you knew personally changed, or if the name of
Speaker 2: a famous person whose reputation you were familiar with changed.
Speaker 2: But since the characters in these stories are usually not
Speaker 2: known to the subject. Their names are easily changed or
Speaker 2: forgotten completely.
Speaker 1: So if you were given a story about Yvonne and
Speaker 1: you didn't know that Yvonne is an important character in
Speaker 1: a body of folklore, you know, particularly like Russian folklore,
Speaker 1: you could easily switch it out for Ivan or anything
Speaker 1: else and it would lose it. But if you had,
Speaker 1: if you felt the weight of that, if you had
Speaker 1: a cultural attachment to a particular name, it would be
Speaker 1: a different story.
Speaker 2: It's this character, I.
Speaker 1: Know him, m hmm. Otherwise it's just a name now.
Speaker 2: More interesting to Bartlett is the finding that usually the
Speaker 2: titles of stories are dropped fairly quickly from reproductions, so
Speaker 2: like the title just disappears, it is left off.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: These titles can be the conventional names of folk tales
Speaker 2: or the headlines of newspaper articles. It doesn't really seem
Speaker 2: to matter. People very often just simply drop them. And
Speaker 2: this might seem kind of strange, since titles, including headlines
Speaker 2: often provide the important element of setting for the story,
Speaker 2: the context you need in order to understand what the
Speaker 2: story is about or what the point.
Speaker 1: Of it is. You know, part of me wants to
Speaker 1: resist this idea and be like, well, how could you
Speaker 1: forget the title? Because the titles like the thing that
Speaker 1: you would like? How do you request it? How do
Speaker 1: you sort of catalog it? But then I think too
Speaker 1: various examples that came up in some sources I was
Speaker 1: looking at, you know, looking at like urban legends, you know,
Speaker 1: where you're not really perhaps attaching any kind of like
Speaker 1: cultural value to it or really it's not the idea
Speaker 1: that this story is like important, you know, culturally or historically,
Speaker 1: but there's some other reason it's being transmitted and in
Speaker 1: doing so, Yeah, these are stories that don't necessarily have
Speaker 1: a name or any kind of concrete name, like, for example,
Speaker 1: like the old story about the you know, oh and
Speaker 1: then when he pulled up the hook was was hanging
Speaker 1: from the door of the car. You know. Some of
Speaker 1: those kind of stories like those don't necessarily have names
Speaker 1: they I mean, I'm sure you can find a handful
Speaker 1: of names for them, but there's going to probably be
Speaker 1: a fair amount of drift. I guess the exception to that
Speaker 1: would be a case where an urban legend has is
Speaker 1: so centered around a particular character or monster or something
Speaker 1: like if it were s that I don't slender man
Speaker 1: like that. The name is evocative. It brings to mind
Speaker 1: a certain thing, and no matter what else is changing,
Speaker 1: you're probably going to hold onto that, and it's not
Speaker 1: going to be like skinny dude or something.
Speaker 2: You know. Based on his comments about the role of
Speaker 2: titles and how they're easily forgotten even though they are
Speaker 2: very important contextual information that colors are understanding of a
Speaker 2: story or an article, Bartlet writes quote. With this general
Speaker 2: consideration in mind, it would be a matter of some
Speaker 2: interest to study experimentally the psychological effects of newspaper headlines.
Speaker 2: It looks as if the merely descriptive headline is the
Speaker 2: most ineffective, and as if the biased headline may produce
Speaker 2: a profound effect, though or perhaps even because it itself
Speaker 2: is speedily forgotten. So, if I understand him right here,
Speaker 2: I think the insight he's claiming is that you know,
Speaker 2: the title or headline is able to make an impression,
Speaker 2: a strong impression that colors your understanding of the story
Speaker 2: or the article, whatever it is you're reading. But because
Speaker 2: the title or the headline is by nature forgettable, you
Speaker 2: may sort of forget the kind of work that it
Speaker 2: did on you that it did on coloring your understanding
Speaker 2: of a story. So you could write a perfectly accurate
Speaker 2: newspaper story, slap a misleading headline on it, and the
Speaker 2: headline would strongly influence what people remember as the gist
Speaker 2: of the story, even if they don't actually remember the
Speaker 2: headline itself, so they wouldn't remember that the headline did
Speaker 2: that to them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course, this is a great example too, and
Speaker 1: that traditionally the headline itself is a choice made by
Speaker 1: the editor as opposed to the writer of the article.
Speaker 1: And especially nowadays, you'll sometimes see a particular article or
Speaker 1: story that comes out and you'll observe its title changing online.
Speaker 1: Either it may change on the same page that it
Speaker 1: has been initially published, or a change with republication on
Speaker 1: other websites. So, yeah, great example.
Speaker 2: I can't tell you how often I've seen people arguing
Speaker 2: about an article on the Internet, and what it turns
Speaker 2: out they're really arguing about is the title of the article,
Speaker 2: which is not something the writer even picked.
Speaker 1: Right right, Yeah, very often the cliche is that the
Speaker 1: editor comes along and slaps the title onto the article.
Speaker 1: That is just going to be the most it's going
Speaker 1: to lead to the most engagement. It's got to hook
Speaker 1: people and potentially make them read at least part of
Speaker 1: the article.
Speaker 2: Okay, but anyway, we dwelt on that one a bit,
Speaker 2: the idea of proper names and titles. There is a
Speaker 2: tendency over time in this type of serial reproduction experiment
Speaker 2: for those things to go by the wayside to change
Speaker 2: or disappear. Second thing Bartlett says is a general trend
Speaker 2: in the sort of experiment, the bias towards the concrete.
Speaker 2: He says, concrete physical details in drama are more likely
Speaker 2: to be preserved in their original form than abstract content.
Speaker 2: And Bartlett writes that with one notable exception quote, every
Speaker 2: general opinion, every argument, every piece of reasoning, and every
Speaker 2: deduction is speedily transformed and then omitted. Now that makes sense,
Speaker 2: and I think we can see some elements of that
Speaker 2: in the examples he gives in his chapter. But he
Speaker 2: says there's one exception to the bias for concrete detail
Speaker 2: and against the preservation or expansion of abstract or mental detail.
Speaker 2: And Bartlett says the exception here is the tendency of
Speaker 2: folk tales to have a moral. Now, a quick caveat
Speaker 2: on terminology. I think it can be confusing in this
Speaker 2: context sometimes to talk about a moral of the story, because,
Speaker 2: of course, the moral of a story is not always
Speaker 2: moral in character, meaning it's not always about doing what's
Speaker 2: good or right. Sometimes it's just teaching you something about
Speaker 2: the way the world allegedly works, or showing a way
Speaker 2: to be clever. And sometimes these lessons are not particularly
Speaker 2: moral at all. So when we say moral, you can
Speaker 2: think of it as the lesson of the story, the
Speaker 2: part at the end where you might say the point
Speaker 2: of this story is to show you that. So while
Speaker 2: a lot of non concrete detail and narratives tends to
Speaker 2: change and disappear over time, this was not so much
Speaker 2: the case with the moral of the story. In fact,
Speaker 2: I thought this was very interesting. Bartlett says that when
Speaker 2: you do serial reproduction experiments with a folk tale that
Speaker 2: does not specify a moral in its original form, people
Speaker 2: will often add one during attempts to retell the story.
Speaker 2: People actually subconsciously add on a moral of the story,
Speaker 2: thinking it was already part of what they just read.
Speaker 1: Hmmm, that's fascinating.
Speaker 2: Next Trendy says is loss of individual characteristics. So there
Speaker 2: is across the board, a loss of what Bartlett calls
Speaker 2: the individualizing features of stories. Quote, the descriptive passages lose
Speaker 2: most of the peculiarities of style and matter that they
Speaker 2: may possess, and the arguments tend to be reduced to
Speaker 2: a bald expression of conventional opinion. So, in general, it
Speaker 2: seems to me that even if a passage manages to
Speaker 2: maintain the gist of a story, a story told, or
Speaker 2: an argument expressed through the chain of transmission, these stories
Speaker 2: tend to lose their soul. They become stripped of nuances
Speaker 2: and stylistic details, the details that really make them what
Speaker 2: they are. And so Bartlett says that carefully articulated, sophisticated
Speaker 2: expressions of opinion or argument tend to get translated into
Speaker 2: loosely related conventional views expressed in cliches. And I think
Speaker 2: we've probably all had that experience of like trying to
Speaker 2: express something very carefully in a very clear and particular way,
Speaker 2: only to have somebody sort of translated back to us
Speaker 2: as a very blunt or conventional statement that does not
Speaker 2: capture what we think we were trying to say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Or if someone's summarizing moment in a work
Speaker 1: in a film or a book. You know, sometimes if
Speaker 1: you have to, you find yourself explaining it and then
Speaker 1: you're like, well, you just need to see it. I
Speaker 1: get a terrible job.
Speaker 2: But this leads to what I thought was actually a
Speaker 2: somewhat poignant comment that seems as much about the nature
Speaker 2: of stories as it does about the process of transmission
Speaker 2: between readers and rewriters. In this type of experiment, Bartlett says, quote,
Speaker 2: nobody seeing a single reproduction could predict the remarkable effect
Speaker 2: which the cumulative loss of small, outstanding detail may have.
Speaker 2: Yet the effect is continuous from version to version, following
Speaker 2: constant drifts of change from beginning to end. And I
Speaker 2: don't know. That kind of broke my heart a little
Speaker 2: bit thinking about how it elucidates the imperceptible but very
Speaker 2: real ways that a single like word, choice, or detail
Speaker 2: actually strongly affects how everything from a story to a
Speaker 2: newspaper article is perceived. It's kind of one of the
Speaker 2: tragic things about writing is that, like, you make a
Speaker 2: little change here and a little change there, and each
Speaker 2: of them you could argue is insignificant in itself, but
Speaker 2: it actually does change the effect of the piece overall.
Speaker 1: True, true, yeah, yeah, And then of course over time
Speaker 1: that it's like outside of that, even if you have
Speaker 1: this story and nobody's changed it, it's sealed so it
Speaker 1: can continue to live on, like the languages and experiences
Speaker 1: around that story are going to change, and ultimately you
Speaker 1: have this thing that then nobody can relate to without
Speaker 1: a dictionary or a whole bunch of notes. Though, I
Speaker 1: guess if it's a really good one, if it's a
Speaker 1: really good story, like it's sticking around because something in
Speaker 1: there is still speaking, something in there is still alive
Speaker 1: and hasn't died away with changes in language and traditions
Speaker 1: and and so forth.
Speaker 2: Now, one thing Bartlett points out here on this detail
Speaker 2: about the stripping of individualizing characteristics. He says this is
Speaker 2: likely a limitation of his experiments, because again, this is
Speaker 2: not a perfect reproduction of the way story is spread
Speaker 2: by word of mouth in the real world. This is
Speaker 2: a sort of approximation of it with some differences. And
Speaker 2: one different thing he says is that in the experimental setting,
Speaker 2: where you're reading a text somebody else wrote and then
Speaker 2: trying to reproduce it in writing from memory, there's very
Speaker 2: little incentive to elaborate in other words, to breathe new
Speaker 2: individual characteristics into the text when you retell it. So Bartlett,
Speaker 2: I think implies that in the real world you would
Speaker 2: probably still have this shearing off of individual characteristics from
Speaker 2: the original story, but people along the chain would also
Speaker 2: be more likely to end up adding new individual characteristics
Speaker 2: back in. So some of the original soul of the
Speaker 2: piece of writing or the story might be lost. But
Speaker 2: also so each teller breathes new soul in based on
Speaker 2: audience demand and what they think would be interesting, entertaining
Speaker 2: relevant to the listener, and so forth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and again Yeah. Speaks to the importance of
Speaker 1: dedicated and successful storytellers throughout human history. It's not just
Speaker 1: that you need people that can keep this chain going
Speaker 1: and can keep spicing it up as other spies are lost.
Speaker 2: Okay. The fourth trend he notices abbreviations. In short, all
Speaker 2: genres of serial reproduction tend to become more and more
Speaker 2: abbreviated over time. Some of the serial reproductions he includes
Speaker 2: start off taking up more than half the page, and
Speaker 2: by the tent threproduction they are just three lines. It
Speaker 2: gets massively paired down. In my judgment, just looking at
Speaker 2: the examples. This seems to be especially the case with
Speaker 2: more abstract writing as opposed to concrete narratives, Like it
Speaker 2: seems like the folk tales get pared down less than say,
Speaker 2: the writing about evolutionary theory or or thoughts about travel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I get it down to a tight ten.
Speaker 2: Now here's something I found really interesting in this little section.
Speaker 2: Many people will probably have noticed how stories can seem
Speaker 2: to become more exaggerated when they spread by word of mouth.
Speaker 2: This is the classic, you know, oh what's in there?
Speaker 2: Like a there's like a musical where this happens or something.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It starts off as one story, and then as it
Speaker 2: goes through the rumors, you know, goes each each step
Speaker 2: down the rumor chain, the claim gets more and more grandiose.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, what wasn't there an old satura, not even
Speaker 1: an old Saturday Night Live, But there was a Saturday
Speaker 1: Night Live sketch about this with tall tales about some
Speaker 1: coworker or somebody that's someone knew, and they just keep
Speaker 1: getting more and more outlandish, this kind of escalation.
Speaker 2: So this is usually chalked up to a desire to
Speaker 2: make the story more impressive and exciting, to the audience
Speaker 2: by each person telling it. That obviously is a very
Speaker 2: real factor. But contrary to this mechanism, Bartlett notices another
Speaker 2: way that exactly duration can creep in over successive retellings.
Speaker 2: He says, quote, when a generality is expressed with saving clauses,
Speaker 2: the saving clauses tend to disappear, even if the generality
Speaker 2: is retained. And that really clicked for me. I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: I bet that is true. Yeah, So your story might
Speaker 2: start by saying the psychic mutant crabs were so powerful
Speaker 2: that nothing could stop them except maybe dynamite or Clint
Speaker 2: Eastwood in a jet fighter. Okay, next time, the psychic
Speaker 2: mutant crabs were so powerful that nothing could stop them.
Speaker 2: So it keeps the generality and it forgets to add
Speaker 2: in the exceptions offered. And then the next time it's
Speaker 2: the mutant crabs literally could not be stopped no matter what.
Speaker 2: It's just rephrasing the generality, but in a way that
Speaker 2: makes it sound more definitive.
Speaker 1: H Well, I mean that makes it sound like everything
Speaker 1: creeps toward cosmic horror, horror, and or something to that effect.
Speaker 2: So sometimes the general reality itself might be lost, but
Speaker 2: it might be preserved, while the nuance to it or
Speaker 2: the exceptions to it that they just fall away. Okay,
Speaker 2: two more things the trends in changes from these experiments.
Speaker 2: One is what Bartlett called the rationalization process. Something that
Speaker 2: was common when people repeated folk tales, especially from cultures
Speaker 2: that they weren't as familiar with, was the introduction of
Speaker 2: explanatory rationalizations for events described that didn't make sense to them.
Speaker 2: And again that didn't make sense to them as a reader,
Speaker 2: might have made perfect sense to a person who would
Speaker 2: have been more familiar with this folk tale and familiar
Speaker 2: with the cultural context.
Speaker 1: That makes sense. Makes me think back to our example earlier,
Speaker 1: the changing of my relatives' won't know what has happened
Speaker 1: to me, which is a statement it feels like it
Speaker 1: might connect to a different culture's idea of the importance
Speaker 1: of our ancestors or something, and he gets transformed into ah,
Speaker 1: my mom is old and I have to look after exactly.
Speaker 2: I think that is one of the change toward what
Speaker 2: the reader would view as a rationalization. So, just as
Speaker 2: one more example in these experiments, one of these experiments
Speaker 2: has a folk story that is reportedly from the Congo
Speaker 2: about a boy who wants to hide from his father,
Speaker 2: so he transforms himself into a kernel of a peanut,
Speaker 2: which is subsequently eaten by a fowl, which is eaten
Speaker 2: by a bush cat, which is eaten by a dog,
Speaker 2: which is eaten by a python. And then at the
Speaker 2: end of the story, the father finds the python caught
Speaker 2: in his fish trap. He opens it up, finds the dog,
Speaker 2: opens the dog. He goes down the line of animals
Speaker 2: until he finds the boy disguised as a peanut. Opens
Speaker 2: up the nut, and there's the boy. Now. In the
Speaker 2: original text used for this experiment, there is no explicitly
Speaker 2: given reason why the boy wanted to hide. It just
Speaker 2: says a son said to his father, I will hide
Speaker 2: and you will not be able to find me. And
Speaker 2: so Bartlett reproduces all of the stages of transmission in
Speaker 2: one of these experiments with this folk, and by the
Speaker 2: thirteenth transmission, the story begins by saying that the boy
Speaker 2: is trying to hide because he is afraid of his father,
Speaker 2: a rationalization that was not there to begin with, and
Speaker 2: in fact violates what I took to be the implied
Speaker 2: playfulness of the original first line that the boy wants
Speaker 2: to hide from his father because oh, and the story
Speaker 2: is called a boy who tried to outwit his father.
Speaker 1: We simply didn't think that the boy's hiding was earned
Speaker 1: in the text. We needed a stronger rationalization for him hiding.
Speaker 2: So by the seventeenth transmission there was a further rationalization.
Speaker 2: A boy who had been up to some mischief wanted
Speaker 2: to hide from his father, whose anger he feared. So
Speaker 2: he wants to hide because he's afraid of his father,
Speaker 2: because he had committed some mischief. And it's interesting also
Speaker 2: that I think these rationalizing details are also the sorts
Speaker 2: of non concrete mental phenomena that would be liable to
Speaker 2: be stripped out by subsequent retellings. So these things could
Speaker 2: probably kind of wash in and then wash out again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you can just imagine the various judgment
Speaker 1: calls that are being made here subconsciously, you know, like,
Speaker 1: I don't like the idea that the father is the
Speaker 1: antagonist here. Let's make the what if the boy were
Speaker 1: a little rowdy and he's bringing mischief into the scenario.
Speaker 1: Let's go in that direction.
Speaker 2: Interesting paradox. While many subjects have an urge to add
Speaker 2: what they obviously believe to be rationalizing details to a story.
Speaker 2: When a character's actions don't make sense to them, or
Speaker 2: when the connection between two described events is unclear to them.
Speaker 2: People tend to do exactly the opposite with quote descriptive
Speaker 2: and argumentative passages, which, over subsequent retellings, tend to, in
Speaker 2: Bartlett's words, degenerate into a few apparently disconnected sentences. And
Speaker 2: that is definitely true of like the attempts to reproduce
Speaker 2: like the argument about biology or something. Yeah so in
Speaker 2: the end, Bartlett says, you know, at least in his
Speaker 2: experiments with these types of transmission, it should be emphasized
Speaker 2: that while accurate transmission is not impossible, it is clearly
Speaker 2: not the norm, especially for many kinds of information and
Speaker 2: for most of the verbal information tested. The degree of
Speaker 2: change across several generations of honest attempts at faithful transmission
Speaker 2: is radical, even shocking. Bartlett writes, quote epithets are changed
Speaker 2: into their opposites, Incidents and events are transposed, names and
Speaker 2: numbers rarely survive intact for more than a few reproductions, opinions,
Speaker 2: and conclusions are reversed. Nearly every possible variation seems as
Speaker 2: if it can take place even in a relatively short series.
Speaker 2: At the same time, the subjects may be very well
Speaker 2: satisfied with their efforts, believing themselves to have passed on
Speaker 2: all important features with little or no change, and merely
Speaker 2: perhaps to have omitted unessential matters, you know. He also
Speaker 2: says that people are probably being more careful to reproduce
Speaker 2: as accurately as possible in this university experiment setting than
Speaker 2: they would be if they were just you know, living
Speaker 2: their lives, repeating something they read in the newspaper or
Speaker 2: heard from a friend, where there's less expectation of scrutiny
Speaker 2: of their efforts for accuracy, and more incentive to alter
Speaker 2: a story to make it more entertaining, more impressive, more
Speaker 2: illustrative of a point one wants to get across, or
Speaker 2: whatever else.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thinking of your audience, for example, you know, retelling
Speaker 1: the story to a loved one, you know, what kind
Speaker 1: of changes might you be making in order to make
Speaker 1: sure they enjoy it the most. This is something we'll
Speaker 1: get into more in the next episode as well.
Speaker 2: So finally, Bartlett says, quote, it looks as if what
Speaker 2: is said to be reproduced is far more generally than
Speaker 2: is commonly admitted. Really a construction serving to justify whatever
Speaker 2: impression may have been left by the original. It is
Speaker 2: this impression rarely find with much exactitude, which most readily persists.
Speaker 2: So I think that's a very interesting starting point. But
Speaker 2: there's obviously a lot more to say about this subject
Speaker 2: about serial reproduction of different forms, transmission chains, and the
Speaker 2: telephone games. So we will be continuing to look at
Speaker 2: this at at least one more part in this series.
Speaker 2: Maybe we'll go on beyond that. But yeah, I found
Speaker 2: this fascinating.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, again it gets It bleeds into so many
Speaker 1: aspects of our culture, and it's going to be interesting
Speaker 1: to also take into account technological changes when we continue
Speaker 1: to discuss this in the next episode. All Right, we'll
Speaker 1: close it out here, but just a reminder to everyone
Speaker 1: that stuff. Topop Your Mind is primarily a science podcast
Speaker 1: with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we
Speaker 1: do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short form
Speaker 1: Monster Factor Artifact episode, and then on Fridays we set
Speaker 1: aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
Speaker 1: film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2: Huge things. As always, to our audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 2: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 2: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
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