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