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