May 4, 2023 • 38 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the so-called “telephone game,” in which a whispered message travels through a chain of individuals and is eventually announced again in an altered form. What does this game reveal about communication and what else can we learn from it?
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And today we are returning with part two in our
series on the Telephone Game, a children's game in which
a secret message is passed along from one player to
the next in a chain, until finally the original message
and the message that emerges at the end are both announced,
(00:37):
so everybody can see how the information was either preserved
faithfully or horribly mangled by the passing from mouth to
ear so many times. Now, if you have not heard
part one of the series, I think this is a
case where you really should go back and check that
one out.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
First.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
We lay a lot of the groundwork for what we're
talking about today in the first episode, but as a
brief refresher, we talked about some of our memories of
these games from childhood, and we also discussed a very
famous and influential series of experiments from roughly a century ago,
discussed in a book by the British experimental psychologist Frederick C.
(01:14):
Bartlett called Remembering a Study in Experimental and Social Psychology.
That book came out in nineteen thirty two. Now, the
experiments described by Bartlett in this book concerned what is
called serial reproduction, which is very similar to the telephone game,
but involves a written component. So basically, a person would
(01:35):
be given a text to read, and this could be anything.
It could be a transcription of a folk tale, it
could be a newspaper article, a passage from a book, whatever,
And then that person is allowed to read it several times,
and then it's taken away, and then later they are
asked to reproduce the text as accurately as they could
from memory. Then that reproduction would be the text given
(01:58):
to the next person in the chain would do at
the best they could to reproduce that from memory, and
so on down the chain for an arbitrary number of reproductions. Now,
what Bartlett found in these experiments was that his text
based version of the telephone game in most cases produced radical,
profound alterations to the original story or message. And to
(02:22):
read from his conclusion of that chapter quote, epithets are
changed into their opposites, incidents and events are transposed, names
and numbers rarely survive intact for more than a few reproductions.
Opinions and conclusions are reversed. Nearly every possible variation seems
as if it can take place, even in a relatively
(02:43):
short series. So I wanted to begin today by following
up on Bartlett's work, which we talked about in the
last episode, because it cast a very long shadow in
the study of memory and cultural transmission of information. But
obviously this book is from a very long time ago,
so I wanted to see whether there were any more
recent and scientific reviews commenting on whether his work on
(03:04):
serial reproduction has stood the test of time and or
been successfully replicated. So I found a few papers. One
was actually focused on Bartlett's repeated reproduction experiments. That's where
the same person tries to recall a story or piece
of information at different time intervals after being exposed to it,
as opposed to the serial reproduction experiments where it's given
(03:28):
from one person to the next. But this study did
briefly address the other Bartlett experiments in the background section.
This paper was ken Bartlett's repeated reproduction experiments be replicated
by Bergmann and Rodeger in Memory and Cognition in nineteen
ninety nine, and the authors say that quote serial reproduction
can often lead to dramatic distortions in recall over repeated
(03:50):
reconstructions of the event. Although rarely used now, this experimental
technique was used in later studies with results generally confirming
those of Bartlettlogists interested in transmission of rumors use this technique,
among others. And then I found another study from more
recent years. This was from twenty fourteen in the Journal
of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition by Rodigerette. I'll
(04:14):
called Bartlett Revisited Direct Comparison of repeated reproduction and serial
reproduction techniques, and in their review the authors say, in
some virtually every experiment we can find using Bartlet's serial
reproduction technique confirms his observations that social transmission of information
is error prone and that the more links there are
(04:35):
in the chain, the greater the probability of error. So,
putting all this together, it looks to me like subsequent
research may have found some differences at the margins, but
for the most part, Bartlett's findings about the telephone game
process have been confirmed. When you do this particular type
of experiment where one person gets to read a story
and then they're supposed to repeat it as accurately as
(04:57):
they can from memory, and you go on and on.
All the different kinds of changes that we talked about
in the last episode are introduced. Now there might be
some important caveats based on what the genre of the
information is, and we can talk about that later in
this episode, but for the most part, one of my
big takeaways from this is we should all be very
(05:18):
cautious about believing rumors, even if you trust that the
person directly sharing the information with you is not a liar,
because this is something people always say when you know,
when you hear a rumor, people say like, oh, but Johnny,
who told me this isn't a liar? Why would he
tell me this if it wasn't true.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
M Yeah, that's a good point, though. I think the
only example of rumors that you should take to the bank,
the only example is going to be the of course
the eleven studio album by Fleetwood Mac, which absolutely holds
up no doubt about it.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
That's just secondhand news.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
There's also a track you also have the chain on there,
so take that into account.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I do love Fleetwood Mac, but I got to ding
them for a false meteorological fact that they perpetuate in
one of their songs with the statement the thunder only
happens when it rains. That is not true.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Yeah, absolutely incorrect, But to your point, Yeah, that's a
good point on rumors, sort of like the dark side
of this this phenomenon. I really like the idea of
the of the storytelling element and the chain of storytellers
within a given oral storytelling tradition or what have you.
Like it just it made me rethink and reanalyze the
(06:34):
role of the storyteller in a given culture. You know
that with each transmission of this story, you may lose
so many great things, but you also may gain things.
It's going to introduce new ways to make this content
more agreeable with an audience, more beneficial to the audience,
more entertaining, though at the same time also opening it
(06:55):
up to further manipulation so that the message of the
story could also be misused.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Absolutely. I mean this is noted I think by Bartlett himself,
but also in many papers I was reading about this research.
So the thing is that, yes, this should make us
very skeptical of the objective accuracy of much of memory
and of chains of information sharing between people, especially where
the whole process cannot be reviewed with a fixed record,
(07:21):
because the crucial element of this here is that you
only have to work with what the previous person told you.
It's a totally different thing if like it's all done,
maybe it's all done in writing or somehow it's all recorded,
and you can go back and review what the story
was at each point in its history. But for this
type of information sharing, yes, it should make us skeptical
(07:43):
about objective accuracy in reproduction of the original. But this
doesn't mean that the way people process information and serial
transmission is bad. It just means that you shouldn't rely
on it to get objective, accurate accounts. It may not
be good for that, but it's good for other things.
It's great for creating culture, for enlivening art and narrative
(08:06):
across time and making it always newly relevant, for maintaining
friendship and social bonds, for teaching applicable lessons in everyday life.
In fact, several papers I was reading pointed out that
in fact, this combination of conservation and distortion of information
at the same time through transmission from person to person
(08:28):
could be viewed as metaphorically similar to the combination of
conservation and distortion in biological evolution. Life can only exist
on Earth where there is the appropriate balance of conservation
and distortion of genetic information. So genetic traits are heritable
and they're passed on from one generation of organisms to another.
(08:50):
But species survive in a changing environment because they're able
to adapt and evolve, and they're able to adapt and
evolve when mutations distortions of that genetic information prove beneficial
to them. Though it's interesting to note, I think that
the error rate is probably much higher in the transmission
of most genres of verbal information than it is for
(09:12):
genetic information and organisms. Like in life, accurate transmission of
genes is the norm and mutations are the exception. When
we're telling stories to each other or repeating something we
read in the newspaper to a friend. In that kind
of verbal memory based transmission, mutations are much more the norm.
But at the same time, I think about how there
(09:33):
I guess there is a higher survival tolerance there, Like
a single harmful mutation can prove fatal to a bacterium,
But how does that work in the analogy for transmitting information?
Is it possible that one memory error could kill a
piece of information and prevent it from spreading further.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
I guess so, you know, like the example of the
story of the ghost Battle the Ghost Warriors and in
the last episode, you know, like sometimes if certain details,
certain descriptions, certain narrative choices are removed, like you can
take the heart out of a particular story, a particular myth,
(10:14):
and could impact the degree to which people want to
pass it on or need to pass it on.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
That's a good point. Yes, This thing that Bartlett noticed
where certain details this is he called the leveling process,
where individualizing characteristics and stylistic details from a story are
stripped out as they are reproduced by people who don't
remember them because they deem them inessential, not realizing that
the soul of the story lies in those details. The
(10:42):
fact that those details are now missing could make the
story so uninteresting to the person who hears it that
they would never share it again. That's a good point.
But wait a minute. I wanted to come back to
something I started saying a minute ago. This thing about
believing rumors, where people are often inclined to believe or
because they don't want to believe the individual person who
(11:03):
shared the rumor with them is a liar, And I
think that that is such a misguided mentality because, first
of all, and less related to the experimental findings we're
talking about here, the person who shared the rumor with
you may not be a liar, but you know less
about the person who shared the rumor with them, and
who that person heard it from, et cetera. You can't
(11:23):
usually inspect the entire chain of transmission, only the person
you're directly getting it from. But more relevant to today's topic,
it's absolutely clear from these experiments that massive distortions of
original source material can creep into human transmission chains, even
when the person isn't a liar. When they're not trying
(11:44):
to distort it, they're trying as best they can to
accurately reproduce it. And that's in cases where the person
is not personally invested in the subject matter, where they
have no incentive to exaggerate and they're just trying to
reproduce the material as best they can. How much worse
will things be in the real world. Will distortions be when,
(12:05):
like somebody is personally invested in the material, maybe in
it presenting a certain way, when they do have incentives
to exaggerate or otherwise distort the material, whether that's to
maybe make it more entertaining, more impressive, more illustrative of
a point they want to make, or whatever, and when
they're not necessarily conscious of being scrutinized for accuracy.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yeah, so there are all these different types of unconscious
changes and event of course, intentional changes that can take place.
And the result is that some details in the story
or the rumor or what have you, some will change,
some will remain, and there will also be a sharpening
of things, you know, like an exaggeration. But what does
it all mean? I was looking at a handful of
(12:48):
papers discussing transmission chain experiments and the transmission of urban
legends and other stories, which I thought seems like a
really good area to look at, because a lot of
times urban legends is actually I mean, we're not talking
about literature, we're not talking about myths. They often kind
of come out of nowhere, and the way in which
(13:09):
we pass them on sometimes feels more akin to like
older oral storytelling traditions.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Well, right, because the case with urban myths is you
at least usually assume that they were created by many minds.
You know, they're the product of this transmission chain, rather
than say, being originally written down in a fixed form
by one person and then other people have tried to
replicate it across time, though in fact there are variation,
(13:37):
like some urban legends do come from books. That's a
funny thing that pops up occasionally, like it was originally
a story somebody wrote, was published in a sci fi
magazine somewhere, and then it got turned into an urban
legend and morphed along along the chain.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yeah, and of course, speaking of the chain, we have
to acknowledge the email chain of technology changes things. Technology
ends up bringing us a scenario or end up with
things like like pasta creepy pasta and so forth, where
it's something that is, as the name alludes to, generally
just copied and pasted, though sometimes there are augmentations made,
and then of course everyone has received it or at
(14:13):
least in times pasted. I don't know if this is
still a thing so much, but when a family member
forwards you an email and it has some sort of
perhaps unbelievable quality to it, some sort of tall tail
or urban legend at the heart of it. But nothing
has changed except for the string of forwards that are
at the top of it where you can see all
(14:34):
these people that have passed it on like a chain letter.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
But if I don't forward this, I'm going to look
in the mirror and see a ghost and it will
kill me.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
That's right, in seven days. So one of the papers
I was looking at was from Storytelling to Facebook by
Alberto Orcibi, published in Human Nature in twenty twenty two.
This particular paper utilized a registered online pair of studies,
(15:06):
one using a traditional transmission chain set up, and the
other asking subjects whether they would be likely to share
a story on social media or with friends, you know,
in a anonymous or attributed status.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
So I thought this was really interesting. So, if I'm
understanding right, the author wanted to compare different types of
information sharing in the modern era. One is more like
the experiments we've been talking about, where somebody has to
pass along the story effortfully by like using their memory
to retell the story as they understand it, like in
the Bartlett experiments, versus the technology assisted passing along of
(15:46):
a story passively in its original unaltered form. You know,
you just click the button to share, so you're not
actually changing it. In that case, you're just deciding whether
or not you want this same original piece of media
to go to all of the people following you.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yeah. Yeah, So just some of the very quick sort
of findings from this. First of all, negative content was
both better transmitted and transmission chain experiments and shared more
than its neutral counterpart.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
That should not be surprising based on all the studies
of what does well online negative content works.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Yeah. Next, threat related information was successful in transmission chain experiments,
but not when sharing straight up. So that's that's interesting
as well, and again kind of matches up with what
we tend to understand about, you know, why we pass
something on why we would we would tell someone a
particular story. And then finally, information eliciting disgust was not
(16:45):
advantaged in either, which which is interesting.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
That's surprising to me.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
But okay, I guess you know some people. I guess
maybe it depends on the population. Again, this is this
was a small study, but it does seem like there
would be individuals who are like, hey, I got a
disgusting story I need to tell you listen to me.
But maybe other's not so much, or maybe it's like
the disgusting thing that we might might be the thing
(17:11):
we sort of focus on, like maybe it's ultimately something
about it being negative or something about it being threat
related that is more important to the transmission than merely
the discussed Now, the author points out that content biases
are strongest when memorization and reproduction aren't involved in the
transmission of information, as in the telephone game and the
(17:33):
traditional oral transmission of narratives. Now, another paper I was
looking at pointed out some other great ideas related to this.
It's titled serial Killers, Spiders and Cybersex, Social and Survival
Information by Us in the Transmission of Urban Legends by
stubbards Field at All, published in the British Journal of
Psychology in twenty fourteen. Okay, oh, it's great time. The
(17:56):
authors point out that when we take in information and
retell it, various cognitive selection pressures kick in to make
sure it's maximally transmittable. This can alter structure, it can
alter content, and transmissibility depends on three factors salience, accuracy
of recall, and motivation to pass it on.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Okay, so can you explain that The.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Way I was thinking about is in terms of, like,
all right, you've heard a good joke and you want
to retell that joke? Why do you want to retell
that joke? Is it good? Is it notable? Is it
attention grabbing in any way? Can you actually remember the
beats well enough to retell it? And then why are
you retelling it? Is it timely? Is it entertaining? Is
it particularly cutting? Are you just trying to create a distraction?
(18:41):
You know, don't sort of lift the mood. All of
this matters without any of us having to actively check
these boxes off in our head. We don't have to
actually think, like, all right, can I read? Because Lord knows,
plenty of people launch into a joke without trying to
without making sure that they can actually retell all the
necessary beats first, So you're not necessarily conscious of all
(19:04):
of this as you're about to retell something.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
The horse goes into the doctor's office, has a long face.
The horse says, why is my face like this? I
don't remember the rest? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Yeah, But still, it's like you're taking a joke or
some other bit of information. If it ends with you,
there's a reason, and if you pass it on, there's
a reason as well. So the first and third factors here,
salience and motivation depend on social information bias and survival
information bias. In other words, coming back to the joke
(19:36):
or say an urban legend, does the thing you were
passing on contained to any degree social information or survival information?
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Hmm okay, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
It's really interesting to think about this because indeed, some
of the memorable ideas out there, be they jokes, urban legends,
or what have you, at least seem to have some
sort of social revelation or commentary baked into them, and
or some sort of information that seems to contain a
lesson on how to survive in the world.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
I mean, you're not necessarily processing this. You're not thinking like, oh,
this is a good urban legend. I can use this,
This might save my life tomorrow. You might not be
thinking that, but that could be like the reason that
you're inclined to remember it.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
I think a lot of the jokes that people find
the funniest are ones that make a playfully negative observation
about general human nature.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Classic example, the two hunters in the woods they see
a bear charging at them. One kneels down to tie
his shoes. His friend says, why are you tying your shoes?
You can't outrun a bear. The guy tying his shoes says,
I don't have to outrun a bear, I just have
to outrun you.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Yeah. Yeah, So you can look to examples like this.
They are also various parables and coens that really zing
because they seem to reveal something about human nature. Likewise,
you can also point to a lot of negative examples,
things that contain disinformation or just hurt ideas or stereotypes,
but true or not, they seem to have some sort
(21:05):
of social information. Now on the survival information front, the
first place my mind went to was the old urban
legend of hey, don't flash your lights or your car
lights at another car that doesn't have its lights on,
because you know what's going on. This is a murder
gang initiation. There gang members in that car. They're intentionally
riding around without their headlights on, and if you flash
(21:27):
your lights at them, you may think you're generally reminding
them that they need to turn their lights on. They
but know it'll be on and they will come and
kill you.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
So this allegedly has survival information. You need to know this.
If you don't know this, you could die, right.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
It seems to be important on some level and then
gets transmitted and passed on it. Of course, completely false.
This was an urban legend that began in the nineteen eighties,
has no truth to it, though at times got passed
on by reputable and semi reputable sources. But again, it
seems to have survival information inside it, and therefore there's
(22:02):
a stickiness to it.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Okay, Now back to the paper itself. They conducted a
very small study but found quote legends which contained social information,
social type legends which contained survival information survival type, and
legends which contained both forms of information combined type were
all recalled with significantly greater accuracy than control material, while
(22:24):
social and combined type legends were recalled with significantly greater
accuracy than survival type legends.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
Well, counterintuitive is it may be that social and combined
beats out survival. I am not really surprised by that,
because I don't know what is the what is the
juiciest type of information that if you hear a little
snippet of you've got to lean in and find out more.
It's gossip about people, it's you know, it's not people
talking about life threatening situations. You might lean in and
(22:51):
want to hear more about life threatening situations. But even
more so, it's if you hear like, oh man, did
you hear what Johnny said to say? And then the
like you have to hear the rest of that.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Yeah, like the whole thing about gang members driving around
in cars without their lights on. Yeah, there's the survival
aspect of it, certainly, but there was also at least
and I'm not I didn't look at any specific examples
of the text. I'm just kind of remembering it. There's
it's at least implied that there's some sort of social
information about like reckless youth culture or punk gangs, or
(23:24):
there's some sort of racial connotation to it. That's all
just kind of baked into the idea, even if they're
not specific examples added in its transmission.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yes, it just it like pings on a lot of
different unhealthy fixations people might have.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
So anyway, I thought that was interesting. It also I
would be interested to hear from listeners out there if
they have other examples of the sort of like urban
legend transmission. I think there's a there's a lot to
reveal in these examples.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Well, speaking of urban legends, I also wanted to talk
briefly about a study I was looking at that concerned
urban legends and folk tales. And so this was by
a host at all, published in the journal Memory very
recently in twenty twenty two, and the title was the
serial reproduction of an Urban Myth, revisiting Bartlett's schema theory.
(24:26):
So the title makes reference to Bartlett's schema theory. This
is an idea proposed by Bartlett that memory is more
accurate when it conforms to what he called our schema,
meaning a sort of an existing body of knowledge and
expectations that we use to help store memory efficiently and
(24:50):
make sense of the world. And so according to this theory,
not all information is distorted at the same rate the
author's rite quote. According to the law of Bartlett's schema theory,
remembering should, in relation to certain kinds of material, be
relatively reliable. And so the authors here investigate the reliability
(25:11):
of Bartlett style serial reproduction chains by modulating two different variables.
First of all, whether the original information fits with the
subject's familiar cultural schema or not, and whether the audience
of their retelling was understood to be quote lenient or strict.
(25:32):
And I thought both of these variables were interesting because
they both came up in Bartlett's discussion of his own work.
One of the things he was testing with the famous
example of that story, the War of the Ghosts, which again,
this is when we discussed in episode one. This is
a translated adaptation of a Native American folk tale that
in its original form is we found very haunting and
(25:55):
beautiful and interesting, but it doesn't conform to common expectations
of storytelling that might be expected by a Western audience.
And thus Bartlett featured it because he thought that these
differences in storytelling conventions and the subjects lack of familiarity
(26:16):
with the cultural context of the story would make it
more difficult for them to remember and reproduce it accurately.
And that did seem to be the case. But here
the authors of this study wanted to actually compare that
directly with a much more culturally familiar story, and in
this case they chose the Vanishing Hitchhiker. Rob Do you
(26:37):
know the vanishing Hitchhiker tale?
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Oh? I don't know. Is this the one? Or the Hook?
Speaker 3 (26:41):
No? No, no, no, no, not the hook. A hook is
a good one too, the Vanishing Hitchhiker. There are a
lot of different variations but usual contours are the same.
So maybe there is a man driving along a lonely
highway at night and he sees a hitchhiker, a woman
who appears to be in distress. She's asking for a ride,
walking on the side of the highway. She asks him
for a ride, he picks her up. They have a
(27:04):
brief conversation as he drives her to the address she
asks for, and then when he arrives, he turns to
find she has vanished entirely from the car. And then
he later often compares his story with somebody else He
tells this, you know, he's like. He gets home and says, oh,
you wouldn't believe it. I picked up this woman to
give her a ride home, and then she disappeared completely.
(27:24):
And then the person he's talking to says, I've driven
her home as well. She also disappeared from my car.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Oh nice, nice, nice. So this is like an automobile
age sort of take on the classic ghost story where
you find out after the fact that this mysterious person
who vanished is a frequently occurring.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Ghost exactly now. It might have earlier analogs, but I
think most people would interpret this as like a twentieth
century folk tale.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Yeah yeah, yeah, clearly involves the car the hitchhiker. It's
new for a new age.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
So the authors of this study, first they did a
pilot study to CoMIR these two stories, the War of
the Ghosts and the Vanishing Hitchhiker, within to determine how
scheme of friendly these two stories were in the cultural
setting of the experiment, which was twenty first century college undergrads.
I believe in the UK, so again always testing with
the college students, but okay, you know you at least
(28:18):
want to find out among the general population that is
being tested in this study, how familiar would these two
different types of stories be. And familiarity here doesn't just
mean like have you heard this story before. They measured
it along a bunch of different variables, and those variables
were familiarity of the setting, what the readers perceived to be,
(28:39):
the logical structure, the clarity of the structure, how understandable
the events in the story were, and how conventional the
language was. So I think this is generally a good
way of approaching it, finding a bunch of different ways
of scoring, Like when a person in the study encounters
a particular story how out of their element do they feel?
(29:00):
And perhaps not surprisingly, participants here rated the Vanishing Hitchhiker
as much more familiar along these dimensions than the War
of the Ghosts. No surprise there, And so they tried
to do the serial reproduction experiments like Bartlett did with
these two different stories, and in line with their hypothesis,
they found that while participants in the experimental portion of
(29:21):
the study came up with enormous distortions while attempting to
transmit the War of the Ghosts, they produced comparatively very
accurate copies from memory of the Vanishing Hitchhiker. And I
thought that was very interesting. It would seem to validate
some part of the scheme of theory, the idea that
stories that fit more in the box of our cultural
(29:45):
expectations are remembered and preserved more accurately and more easily
than stories that somehow don't fit our expectations or don't
behave in familiar ways that are easy for us to understand.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I also can't help but
think that, like the basic hitchhiker scenario, that the experience
of picking up a hitchhiker, I guess it's something that
I mean a lot of people have never done this,
maybe even more so today, but you've seen it in movies,
you've seen it heard it in stories. So the basic
scenario is pretty much like culturally intact, and then this
(30:20):
is a supernatural twist on that that you know, I
guess it doesn't particularly have survival information or social information.
To go back to that earlier study, I mean, it's
not implied that the ghost is harmful, but it's like
there's something about the everyday quality of it, Like you're
saying that it's very relatable. It's relatable to this reality
(30:41):
of modern life.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
So this is totally a tangent off of what we're
talking about. But I would almost say that there is
somehow implied social and survival information in any ghost story,
even though it's hard to express what that social or
survival information is. It might have something to do with
proof of the afterlife. You know, something about life after
(31:03):
death and the experience of any ghost has some kind
of inherent survival type value to us, and ghosts are
usually understood to have some kind of message to the living,
which has a kind of gossip or social information quality
to it. At least that's my take.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Yeah, and I guess you could also make an argument
that the hitchhiker was not what they seemed. They were
a ghost. This is basically just a supernatural twist on
the hitchhiker was not what they seemed, which could arguably
have survival and social commentary within it, right in a
more mundane way, like you know, there's some sort of
(31:41):
criminal threat there or something or some sort of unknown
that one should be wary of. And this is just
taking a mundane threat and transforming it into a supernatural
threat on some level. Because you don't want a ghost
in your car. You don't know what's gonna happen.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
They might get ectoplasm on your passenger seat.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yeah, they might scare you. I mean, we've all heard
enough ghost stories that don't involve automobiles to know it
can go any number of ways. Your hitchhiker vanishes, you
finally pull over the gas station, and then bam, hook
on the outside handle of the car.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
That's a good twist. At first, it's a ghost, she vanishes,
but then she reappears with a hook.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Okay, but here's another interesting twist on what they found
in this study. So remember the first variable was does
familiarity with the story, whether the story fits in the
box of your cultural expectations, does that affect how well
you can remember and transmit it. Answer is yes, it does.
If the story fits in the box, it's easier for
you to remember and transmit it. The other thing is
(32:39):
does the implied audience of the story matter. They were
testing the hypothesis that a listener understood as strict in
terms of expecting accuracy would produce more accurate recall than
one understood as lenient. So the way they did this was,
on one hand, they said, okay, produce this story for
(33:01):
a friend. Here's the story for you to memorize. Now
you need to reproduce it and tell it to a friend.
Second option is reproduce this and tell it to a
police officer. Well, that changes a lot, Yes, And they
found this did indeed matter for one type of story
more than the other. So they say recall was better
for a strict audience than a lenient audience. People did
(33:23):
remember better when talking to the cop, but this only
really applied to one of the stories, so recall was
more accurate when talking to the cop for the familiar story,
the vanishing Hitchhiker, but recall seemed to be equally bad
for the War of the Ghosts. The having a strict
(33:44):
cop listening to your recounting did not really improve recall
for the story that was more difficult to remember anyway,
which I don't know. I guess you could interpret that
multiple ways. But that makes me wonder if, well, you know,
when you're talking to a friend, it signals you're probably
just not putting that much effort into being strictly accurate
(34:06):
in reproducing a story, even when in cases when you
could be so the case with the familiar story that's
easier to reproduce, but when you're trying to reproduce an
unfamiliar story that doesn't really fit with your schema, is
it's sort of impossible to do even if you're putting
that extra effort.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
In Yeah, I mean, I guess, in speaking to a
police officer about your ghost story, like it's something about
it should be actionable, right, like, even if it's not
a ghost story, Like if you're telling a police officer
about it, it must be because you want the police
to do something, and therefore that I guess could impact
your attention to details and so forth.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
But Anyway, at the end today, I wanted to come
back to something we talked about earlier in the episode,
which has emphasize my feeling that there are two sides
to the coin and they're both true. One is that
serial reproduction of information between people, you know, information passing
a lot the grapevine between people should not be relied
upon as representing what that information was accurately at the beginning.
(35:07):
You just should not trust that. And at the same
time you should not think about serial reproduction or transmission
chains as they occur in human culture as bad. It's
part of what culture is, and it provides a lot
of good things. It provides a lot of the entertainment
and the learning and the spice of life, even if
it does not objectively accurately usually preserve the information from
(35:32):
the beginning of the chain.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
See, this is all great stuff that I think should
have been included in the elementary school telephone games that
does so many of us play, Well.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
I don't know, I mean, it kind of is all there.
Like the game, you recognize that the message doesn't make
it to the end intact, so you get a lesson there, like, oh,
don't believe everything you hear but also the game is fun,
and the fun comes from the failure.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Fail and distort. This is how you amuse yourself. This
is the less into the telephone game I get, but
it is really revealing. Like I said, I just didn't
think about it much when I was a kid playing
this game. But yeah, when you looking at these studies
and discussing the out effects of transmission of rumors and
myths and legends, urban legends, et cetera, Yeah, it really
(36:17):
gets fascinating.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
Another thing I was thinking about was how when we
talk about rumors, I feel like we still often have
an understanding of this being entirely word of mouth, just
like one person talking to another and then that person
talking to the next person. But it seems to me
the much more common route of rumors today involves some
kind of media in between there. So it may go
(36:40):
like a word of mouth from one person to the next,
and then to the Internet to a written form, and
then somebody reading that piece of information on the Internet
and then telling somebody in person, and then them posting
on the Internet and reading it. So you're also having
these media changes back and forth that are not really
showing up quite so much in at least any of
(37:01):
the experiments we've looked at, because all of them either
went you know, they either go entirely oral or entirely
text based.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Hmm, yeah, that's a good point. I should also just
remind everyone probably don't go to the police with your
ghost story. I'm I'm just there may be exceptions to
that rule, you know, use your best judgment, but it
was it's also hard for me to get past that
idea of just like I think I saw a ghost,
I better call the police.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
I disagree. I think you should only call the police
with your ghost story.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Agree to disagree.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
I'm kidding. Do not call nine one one and tie
up the phone lines with your ghost story.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Yes, tell a friend, tell a close friend. All Right,
we're gonna We're gonna go ahead and close out this episode,
but we'll be back on Tuesday. So you know, hey,
keep writing into us because on Mondays we do listener mail,
and then we do our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
On Wednesdays we do a short form monster fact or
artifact episode, and Friday's we set us most serious concerns
(38:01):
to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with this with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And today we are returning with part two in our
series on the Telephone Game, a children's game in which
a secret message is passed along from one player to
the next in a chain, until finally the original message
and the message that emerges at the end are both announced,
(00:37):
so everybody can see how the information was either preserved
faithfully or horribly mangled by the passing from mouth to
ear so many times. Now, if you have not heard
part one of the series, I think this is a
case where you really should go back and check that
one out.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
First.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
We lay a lot of the groundwork for what we're
talking about today in the first episode, but as a
brief refresher, we talked about some of our memories of
these games from childhood, and we also discussed a very
famous and influential series of experiments from roughly a century ago,
discussed in a book by the British experimental psychologist Frederick C.
(01:14):
Bartlett called Remembering a Study in Experimental and Social Psychology.
That book came out in nineteen thirty two. Now, the
experiments described by Bartlett in this book concerned what is
called serial reproduction, which is very similar to the telephone game,
but involves a written component. So basically, a person would
(01:35):
be given a text to read, and this could be anything.
It could be a transcription of a folk tale, it
could be a newspaper article, a passage from a book, whatever,
And then that person is allowed to read it several times,
and then it's taken away, and then later they are
asked to reproduce the text as accurately as they could
from memory. Then that reproduction would be the text given
(01:58):
to the next person in the chain would do at
the best they could to reproduce that from memory, and
so on down the chain for an arbitrary number of reproductions. Now,
what Bartlett found in these experiments was that his text
based version of the telephone game in most cases produced radical,
profound alterations to the original story or message. And to
(02:22):
read from his conclusion of that chapter quote, epithets are
changed into their opposites, incidents and events are transposed, names
and numbers rarely survive intact for more than a few reproductions.
Opinions and conclusions are reversed. Nearly every possible variation seems
as if it can take place, even in a relatively
(02:43):
short series. So I wanted to begin today by following
up on Bartlett's work, which we talked about in the
last episode, because it cast a very long shadow in
the study of memory and cultural transmission of information. But
obviously this book is from a very long time ago,
so I wanted to see whether there were any more
recent and scientific reviews commenting on whether his work on
(03:04):
serial reproduction has stood the test of time and or
been successfully replicated. So I found a few papers. One
was actually focused on Bartlett's repeated reproduction experiments. That's where
the same person tries to recall a story or piece
of information at different time intervals after being exposed to it,
as opposed to the serial reproduction experiments where it's given
(03:28):
from one person to the next. But this study did
briefly address the other Bartlett experiments in the background section.
This paper was ken Bartlett's repeated reproduction experiments be replicated
by Bergmann and Rodeger in Memory and Cognition in nineteen
ninety nine, and the authors say that quote serial reproduction
can often lead to dramatic distortions in recall over repeated
(03:50):
reconstructions of the event. Although rarely used now, this experimental
technique was used in later studies with results generally confirming
those of Bartlettlogists interested in transmission of rumors use this technique,
among others. And then I found another study from more
recent years. This was from twenty fourteen in the Journal
of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition by Rodigerette. I'll
(04:14):
called Bartlett Revisited Direct Comparison of repeated reproduction and serial
reproduction techniques, and in their review the authors say, in
some virtually every experiment we can find using Bartlet's serial
reproduction technique confirms his observations that social transmission of information
is error prone and that the more links there are
(04:35):
in the chain, the greater the probability of error. So,
putting all this together, it looks to me like subsequent
research may have found some differences at the margins, but
for the most part, Bartlett's findings about the telephone game
process have been confirmed. When you do this particular type
of experiment where one person gets to read a story
and then they're supposed to repeat it as accurately as
(04:57):
they can from memory, and you go on and on.
All the different kinds of changes that we talked about
in the last episode are introduced. Now there might be
some important caveats based on what the genre of the
information is, and we can talk about that later in
this episode, but for the most part, one of my
big takeaways from this is we should all be very
(05:18):
cautious about believing rumors, even if you trust that the
person directly sharing the information with you is not a liar,
because this is something people always say when you know,
when you hear a rumor, people say like, oh, but Johnny,
who told me this isn't a liar? Why would he
tell me this if it wasn't true.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
M Yeah, that's a good point, though. I think the
only example of rumors that you should take to the bank,
the only example is going to be the of course
the eleven studio album by Fleetwood Mac, which absolutely holds
up no doubt about it.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
That's just secondhand news.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
There's also a track you also have the chain on there,
so take that into account.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I do love Fleetwood Mac, but I got to ding
them for a false meteorological fact that they perpetuate in
one of their songs with the statement the thunder only
happens when it rains. That is not true.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Yeah, absolutely incorrect, But to your point, Yeah, that's a
good point on rumors, sort of like the dark side
of this this phenomenon. I really like the idea of
the of the storytelling element and the chain of storytellers
within a given oral storytelling tradition or what have you.
Like it just it made me rethink and reanalyze the
(06:34):
role of the storyteller in a given culture. You know
that with each transmission of this story, you may lose
so many great things, but you also may gain things.
It's going to introduce new ways to make this content
more agreeable with an audience, more beneficial to the audience,
more entertaining, though at the same time also opening it
(06:55):
up to further manipulation so that the message of the
story could also be misused.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Absolutely. I mean this is noted I think by Bartlett himself,
but also in many papers I was reading about this research.
So the thing is that, yes, this should make us
very skeptical of the objective accuracy of much of memory
and of chains of information sharing between people, especially where
the whole process cannot be reviewed with a fixed record,
(07:21):
because the crucial element of this here is that you
only have to work with what the previous person told you.
It's a totally different thing if like it's all done,
maybe it's all done in writing or somehow it's all recorded,
and you can go back and review what the story
was at each point in its history. But for this
type of information sharing, yes, it should make us skeptical
(07:43):
about objective accuracy in reproduction of the original. But this
doesn't mean that the way people process information and serial
transmission is bad. It just means that you shouldn't rely
on it to get objective, accurate accounts. It may not
be good for that, but it's good for other things.
It's great for creating culture, for enlivening art and narrative
(08:06):
across time and making it always newly relevant, for maintaining
friendship and social bonds, for teaching applicable lessons in everyday life.
In fact, several papers I was reading pointed out that
in fact, this combination of conservation and distortion of information
at the same time through transmission from person to person
(08:28):
could be viewed as metaphorically similar to the combination of
conservation and distortion in biological evolution. Life can only exist
on Earth where there is the appropriate balance of conservation
and distortion of genetic information. So genetic traits are heritable
and they're passed on from one generation of organisms to another.
(08:50):
But species survive in a changing environment because they're able
to adapt and evolve, and they're able to adapt and
evolve when mutations distortions of that genetic information prove beneficial
to them. Though it's interesting to note, I think that
the error rate is probably much higher in the transmission
of most genres of verbal information than it is for
(09:12):
genetic information and organisms. Like in life, accurate transmission of
genes is the norm and mutations are the exception. When
we're telling stories to each other or repeating something we
read in the newspaper to a friend. In that kind
of verbal memory based transmission, mutations are much more the norm.
But at the same time, I think about how there
(09:33):
I guess there is a higher survival tolerance there, Like
a single harmful mutation can prove fatal to a bacterium,
But how does that work in the analogy for transmitting information?
Is it possible that one memory error could kill a
piece of information and prevent it from spreading further.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
I guess so, you know, like the example of the
story of the ghost Battle the Ghost Warriors and in
the last episode, you know, like sometimes if certain details,
certain descriptions, certain narrative choices are removed, like you can
take the heart out of a particular story, a particular myth,
(10:14):
and could impact the degree to which people want to
pass it on or need to pass it on.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
That's a good point. Yes, This thing that Bartlett noticed
where certain details this is he called the leveling process,
where individualizing characteristics and stylistic details from a story are
stripped out as they are reproduced by people who don't
remember them because they deem them inessential, not realizing that
the soul of the story lies in those details. The
(10:42):
fact that those details are now missing could make the
story so uninteresting to the person who hears it that
they would never share it again. That's a good point.
But wait a minute. I wanted to come back to
something I started saying a minute ago. This thing about
believing rumors, where people are often inclined to believe or
because they don't want to believe the individual person who
(11:03):
shared the rumor with them is a liar, And I
think that that is such a misguided mentality because, first
of all, and less related to the experimental findings we're
talking about here, the person who shared the rumor with
you may not be a liar, but you know less
about the person who shared the rumor with them, and
who that person heard it from, et cetera. You can't
(11:23):
usually inspect the entire chain of transmission, only the person
you're directly getting it from. But more relevant to today's topic,
it's absolutely clear from these experiments that massive distortions of
original source material can creep into human transmission chains, even
when the person isn't a liar. When they're not trying
(11:44):
to distort it, they're trying as best they can to
accurately reproduce it. And that's in cases where the person
is not personally invested in the subject matter, where they
have no incentive to exaggerate and they're just trying to
reproduce the material as best they can. How much worse
will things be in the real world. Will distortions be when,
(12:05):
like somebody is personally invested in the material, maybe in
it presenting a certain way, when they do have incentives
to exaggerate or otherwise distort the material, whether that's to
maybe make it more entertaining, more impressive, more illustrative of
a point they want to make, or whatever, and when
they're not necessarily conscious of being scrutinized for accuracy.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yeah, so there are all these different types of unconscious
changes and event of course, intentional changes that can take place.
And the result is that some details in the story
or the rumor or what have you, some will change,
some will remain, and there will also be a sharpening
of things, you know, like an exaggeration. But what does
it all mean? I was looking at a handful of
(12:48):
papers discussing transmission chain experiments and the transmission of urban
legends and other stories, which I thought seems like a
really good area to look at, because a lot of
times urban legends is actually I mean, we're not talking
about literature, we're not talking about myths. They often kind
of come out of nowhere, and the way in which
(13:09):
we pass them on sometimes feels more akin to like
older oral storytelling traditions.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Well, right, because the case with urban myths is you
at least usually assume that they were created by many minds.
You know, they're the product of this transmission chain, rather
than say, being originally written down in a fixed form
by one person and then other people have tried to
replicate it across time, though in fact there are variation,
(13:37):
like some urban legends do come from books. That's a
funny thing that pops up occasionally, like it was originally
a story somebody wrote, was published in a sci fi
magazine somewhere, and then it got turned into an urban
legend and morphed along along the chain.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yeah, and of course, speaking of the chain, we have
to acknowledge the email chain of technology changes things. Technology
ends up bringing us a scenario or end up with
things like like pasta creepy pasta and so forth, where
it's something that is, as the name alludes to, generally
just copied and pasted, though sometimes there are augmentations made,
and then of course everyone has received it or at
(14:13):
least in times pasted. I don't know if this is
still a thing so much, but when a family member
forwards you an email and it has some sort of
perhaps unbelievable quality to it, some sort of tall tail
or urban legend at the heart of it. But nothing
has changed except for the string of forwards that are
at the top of it where you can see all
(14:34):
these people that have passed it on like a chain letter.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
But if I don't forward this, I'm going to look
in the mirror and see a ghost and it will
kill me.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
That's right, in seven days. So one of the papers
I was looking at was from Storytelling to Facebook by
Alberto Orcibi, published in Human Nature in twenty twenty two.
This particular paper utilized a registered online pair of studies,
(15:06):
one using a traditional transmission chain set up, and the
other asking subjects whether they would be likely to share
a story on social media or with friends, you know,
in a anonymous or attributed status.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
So I thought this was really interesting. So, if I'm
understanding right, the author wanted to compare different types of
information sharing in the modern era. One is more like
the experiments we've been talking about, where somebody has to
pass along the story effortfully by like using their memory
to retell the story as they understand it, like in
the Bartlett experiments, versus the technology assisted passing along of
(15:46):
a story passively in its original unaltered form. You know,
you just click the button to share, so you're not
actually changing it. In that case, you're just deciding whether
or not you want this same original piece of media
to go to all of the people following you.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yeah. Yeah, So just some of the very quick sort
of findings from this. First of all, negative content was
both better transmitted and transmission chain experiments and shared more
than its neutral counterpart.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
That should not be surprising based on all the studies
of what does well online negative content works.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Yeah. Next, threat related information was successful in transmission chain experiments,
but not when sharing straight up. So that's that's interesting
as well, and again kind of matches up with what
we tend to understand about, you know, why we pass
something on why we would we would tell someone a
particular story. And then finally, information eliciting disgust was not
(16:45):
advantaged in either, which which is interesting.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
That's surprising to me.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
But okay, I guess you know some people. I guess
maybe it depends on the population. Again, this is this
was a small study, but it does seem like there
would be individuals who are like, hey, I got a
disgusting story I need to tell you listen to me.
But maybe other's not so much, or maybe it's like
the disgusting thing that we might might be the thing
(17:11):
we sort of focus on, like maybe it's ultimately something
about it being negative or something about it being threat
related that is more important to the transmission than merely
the discussed Now, the author points out that content biases
are strongest when memorization and reproduction aren't involved in the
transmission of information, as in the telephone game and the
(17:33):
traditional oral transmission of narratives. Now, another paper I was
looking at pointed out some other great ideas related to this.
It's titled serial Killers, Spiders and Cybersex, Social and Survival
Information by Us in the Transmission of Urban Legends by
stubbards Field at All, published in the British Journal of
Psychology in twenty fourteen. Okay, oh, it's great time. The
(17:56):
authors point out that when we take in information and
retell it, various cognitive selection pressures kick in to make
sure it's maximally transmittable. This can alter structure, it can
alter content, and transmissibility depends on three factors salience, accuracy
of recall, and motivation to pass it on.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Okay, so can you explain that The.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Way I was thinking about is in terms of, like,
all right, you've heard a good joke and you want
to retell that joke? Why do you want to retell
that joke? Is it good? Is it notable? Is it
attention grabbing in any way? Can you actually remember the
beats well enough to retell it? And then why are
you retelling it? Is it timely? Is it entertaining? Is
it particularly cutting? Are you just trying to create a distraction?
(18:41):
You know, don't sort of lift the mood. All of
this matters without any of us having to actively check
these boxes off in our head. We don't have to
actually think, like, all right, can I read? Because Lord knows,
plenty of people launch into a joke without trying to
without making sure that they can actually retell all the
necessary beats first, So you're not necessarily conscious of all
(19:04):
of this as you're about to retell something.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
The horse goes into the doctor's office, has a long face.
The horse says, why is my face like this? I
don't remember the rest? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Yeah, But still, it's like you're taking a joke or
some other bit of information. If it ends with you,
there's a reason, and if you pass it on, there's
a reason as well. So the first and third factors here,
salience and motivation depend on social information bias and survival
information bias. In other words, coming back to the joke
(19:36):
or say an urban legend, does the thing you were
passing on contained to any degree social information or survival information?
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Hmm okay, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
It's really interesting to think about this because indeed, some
of the memorable ideas out there, be they jokes, urban legends,
or what have you, at least seem to have some
sort of social revelation or commentary baked into them, and
or some sort of information that seems to contain a
lesson on how to survive in the world.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
I mean, you're not necessarily processing this. You're not thinking like, oh,
this is a good urban legend. I can use this,
This might save my life tomorrow. You might not be
thinking that, but that could be like the reason that
you're inclined to remember it.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
I think a lot of the jokes that people find
the funniest are ones that make a playfully negative observation
about general human nature.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Classic example, the two hunters in the woods they see
a bear charging at them. One kneels down to tie
his shoes. His friend says, why are you tying your shoes?
You can't outrun a bear. The guy tying his shoes says,
I don't have to outrun a bear, I just have
to outrun you.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Yeah. Yeah, So you can look to examples like this.
They are also various parables and coens that really zing
because they seem to reveal something about human nature. Likewise,
you can also point to a lot of negative examples,
things that contain disinformation or just hurt ideas or stereotypes,
but true or not, they seem to have some sort
(21:05):
of social information. Now on the survival information front, the
first place my mind went to was the old urban
legend of hey, don't flash your lights or your car
lights at another car that doesn't have its lights on,
because you know what's going on. This is a murder
gang initiation. There gang members in that car. They're intentionally
riding around without their headlights on, and if you flash
(21:27):
your lights at them, you may think you're generally reminding
them that they need to turn their lights on. They
but know it'll be on and they will come and
kill you.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
So this allegedly has survival information. You need to know this.
If you don't know this, you could die, right.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
It seems to be important on some level and then
gets transmitted and passed on it. Of course, completely false.
This was an urban legend that began in the nineteen eighties,
has no truth to it, though at times got passed
on by reputable and semi reputable sources. But again, it
seems to have survival information inside it, and therefore there's
(22:02):
a stickiness to it.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Okay, Now back to the paper itself. They conducted a
very small study but found quote legends which contained social information,
social type legends which contained survival information survival type, and
legends which contained both forms of information combined type were
all recalled with significantly greater accuracy than control material, while
(22:24):
social and combined type legends were recalled with significantly greater
accuracy than survival type legends.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
Well, counterintuitive is it may be that social and combined
beats out survival. I am not really surprised by that,
because I don't know what is the what is the
juiciest type of information that if you hear a little
snippet of you've got to lean in and find out more.
It's gossip about people, it's you know, it's not people
talking about life threatening situations. You might lean in and
(22:51):
want to hear more about life threatening situations. But even
more so, it's if you hear like, oh man, did
you hear what Johnny said to say? And then the
like you have to hear the rest of that.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Yeah, like the whole thing about gang members driving around
in cars without their lights on. Yeah, there's the survival
aspect of it, certainly, but there was also at least
and I'm not I didn't look at any specific examples
of the text. I'm just kind of remembering it. There's
it's at least implied that there's some sort of social
information about like reckless youth culture or punk gangs, or
(23:24):
there's some sort of racial connotation to it. That's all
just kind of baked into the idea, even if they're
not specific examples added in its transmission.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yes, it just it like pings on a lot of
different unhealthy fixations people might have.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
So anyway, I thought that was interesting. It also I
would be interested to hear from listeners out there if
they have other examples of the sort of like urban
legend transmission. I think there's a there's a lot to
reveal in these examples.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Well, speaking of urban legends, I also wanted to talk
briefly about a study I was looking at that concerned
urban legends and folk tales. And so this was by
a host at all, published in the journal Memory very
recently in twenty twenty two, and the title was the
serial reproduction of an Urban Myth, revisiting Bartlett's schema theory.
(24:26):
So the title makes reference to Bartlett's schema theory. This
is an idea proposed by Bartlett that memory is more
accurate when it conforms to what he called our schema,
meaning a sort of an existing body of knowledge and
expectations that we use to help store memory efficiently and
(24:50):
make sense of the world. And so according to this theory,
not all information is distorted at the same rate the
author's rite quote. According to the law of Bartlett's schema theory,
remembering should, in relation to certain kinds of material, be
relatively reliable. And so the authors here investigate the reliability
(25:11):
of Bartlett style serial reproduction chains by modulating two different variables.
First of all, whether the original information fits with the
subject's familiar cultural schema or not, and whether the audience
of their retelling was understood to be quote lenient or strict.
(25:32):
And I thought both of these variables were interesting because
they both came up in Bartlett's discussion of his own work.
One of the things he was testing with the famous
example of that story, the War of the Ghosts, which again,
this is when we discussed in episode one. This is
a translated adaptation of a Native American folk tale that
in its original form is we found very haunting and
(25:55):
beautiful and interesting, but it doesn't conform to common expectations
of storytelling that might be expected by a Western audience.
And thus Bartlett featured it because he thought that these
differences in storytelling conventions and the subjects lack of familiarity
(26:16):
with the cultural context of the story would make it
more difficult for them to remember and reproduce it accurately.
And that did seem to be the case. But here
the authors of this study wanted to actually compare that
directly with a much more culturally familiar story, and in
this case they chose the Vanishing Hitchhiker. Rob Do you
(26:37):
know the vanishing Hitchhiker tale?
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Oh? I don't know. Is this the one? Or the Hook?
Speaker 3 (26:41):
No? No, no, no, no, not the hook. A hook is
a good one too, the Vanishing Hitchhiker. There are a
lot of different variations but usual contours are the same.
So maybe there is a man driving along a lonely
highway at night and he sees a hitchhiker, a woman
who appears to be in distress. She's asking for a ride,
walking on the side of the highway. She asks him
for a ride, he picks her up. They have a
(27:04):
brief conversation as he drives her to the address she
asks for, and then when he arrives, he turns to
find she has vanished entirely from the car. And then
he later often compares his story with somebody else He
tells this, you know, he's like. He gets home and says, oh,
you wouldn't believe it. I picked up this woman to
give her a ride home, and then she disappeared completely.
(27:24):
And then the person he's talking to says, I've driven
her home as well. She also disappeared from my car.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
Oh nice, nice, nice. So this is like an automobile
age sort of take on the classic ghost story where
you find out after the fact that this mysterious person
who vanished is a frequently occurring.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Ghost exactly now. It might have earlier analogs, but I
think most people would interpret this as like a twentieth
century folk tale.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Yeah yeah, yeah, clearly involves the car the hitchhiker. It's
new for a new age.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
So the authors of this study, first they did a
pilot study to CoMIR these two stories, the War of
the Ghosts and the Vanishing Hitchhiker, within to determine how
scheme of friendly these two stories were in the cultural
setting of the experiment, which was twenty first century college undergrads.
I believe in the UK, so again always testing with
the college students, but okay, you know you at least
(28:18):
want to find out among the general population that is
being tested in this study, how familiar would these two
different types of stories be. And familiarity here doesn't just
mean like have you heard this story before. They measured
it along a bunch of different variables, and those variables
were familiarity of the setting, what the readers perceived to be,
(28:39):
the logical structure, the clarity of the structure, how understandable
the events in the story were, and how conventional the
language was. So I think this is generally a good
way of approaching it, finding a bunch of different ways
of scoring, Like when a person in the study encounters
a particular story how out of their element do they feel?
(29:00):
And perhaps not surprisingly, participants here rated the Vanishing Hitchhiker
as much more familiar along these dimensions than the War
of the Ghosts. No surprise there, And so they tried
to do the serial reproduction experiments like Bartlett did with
these two different stories, and in line with their hypothesis,
they found that while participants in the experimental portion of
(29:21):
the study came up with enormous distortions while attempting to
transmit the War of the Ghosts, they produced comparatively very
accurate copies from memory of the Vanishing Hitchhiker. And I
thought that was very interesting. It would seem to validate
some part of the scheme of theory, the idea that
stories that fit more in the box of our cultural
(29:45):
expectations are remembered and preserved more accurately and more easily
than stories that somehow don't fit our expectations or don't
behave in familiar ways that are easy for us to understand.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I also can't help but
think that, like the basic hitchhiker scenario, that the experience
of picking up a hitchhiker, I guess it's something that
I mean a lot of people have never done this,
maybe even more so today, but you've seen it in movies,
you've seen it heard it in stories. So the basic
scenario is pretty much like culturally intact, and then this
(30:20):
is a supernatural twist on that that you know, I
guess it doesn't particularly have survival information or social information.
To go back to that earlier study, I mean, it's
not implied that the ghost is harmful, but it's like
there's something about the everyday quality of it, Like you're
saying that it's very relatable. It's relatable to this reality
(30:41):
of modern life.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
So this is totally a tangent off of what we're
talking about. But I would almost say that there is
somehow implied social and survival information in any ghost story,
even though it's hard to express what that social or
survival information is. It might have something to do with
proof of the afterlife. You know, something about life after
(31:03):
death and the experience of any ghost has some kind
of inherent survival type value to us, and ghosts are
usually understood to have some kind of message to the living,
which has a kind of gossip or social information quality
to it. At least that's my take.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Yeah, and I guess you could also make an argument
that the hitchhiker was not what they seemed. They were
a ghost. This is basically just a supernatural twist on
the hitchhiker was not what they seemed, which could arguably
have survival and social commentary within it, right in a
more mundane way, like you know, there's some sort of
(31:41):
criminal threat there or something or some sort of unknown
that one should be wary of. And this is just
taking a mundane threat and transforming it into a supernatural
threat on some level. Because you don't want a ghost
in your car. You don't know what's gonna happen.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
They might get ectoplasm on your passenger seat.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Yeah, they might scare you. I mean, we've all heard
enough ghost stories that don't involve automobiles to know it
can go any number of ways. Your hitchhiker vanishes, you
finally pull over the gas station, and then bam, hook
on the outside handle of the car.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
That's a good twist. At first, it's a ghost, she vanishes,
but then she reappears with a hook.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Okay, but here's another interesting twist on what they found
in this study. So remember the first variable was does
familiarity with the story, whether the story fits in the
box of your cultural expectations, does that affect how well
you can remember and transmit it. Answer is yes, it does.
If the story fits in the box, it's easier for
you to remember and transmit it. The other thing is
(32:39):
does the implied audience of the story matter. They were
testing the hypothesis that a listener understood as strict in
terms of expecting accuracy would produce more accurate recall than
one understood as lenient. So the way they did this was,
on one hand, they said, okay, produce this story for
(33:01):
a friend. Here's the story for you to memorize. Now
you need to reproduce it and tell it to a friend.
Second option is reproduce this and tell it to a
police officer. Well, that changes a lot, Yes, And they
found this did indeed matter for one type of story
more than the other. So they say recall was better
for a strict audience than a lenient audience. People did
(33:23):
remember better when talking to the cop, but this only
really applied to one of the stories, so recall was
more accurate when talking to the cop for the familiar story,
the vanishing Hitchhiker, but recall seemed to be equally bad
for the War of the Ghosts. The having a strict
(33:44):
cop listening to your recounting did not really improve recall
for the story that was more difficult to remember anyway,
which I don't know. I guess you could interpret that
multiple ways. But that makes me wonder if, well, you know,
when you're talking to a friend, it signals you're probably
just not putting that much effort into being strictly accurate
(34:06):
in reproducing a story, even when in cases when you
could be so the case with the familiar story that's
easier to reproduce, but when you're trying to reproduce an
unfamiliar story that doesn't really fit with your schema, is
it's sort of impossible to do even if you're putting
that extra effort.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
In Yeah, I mean, I guess, in speaking to a
police officer about your ghost story, like it's something about
it should be actionable, right, like, even if it's not
a ghost story, Like if you're telling a police officer
about it, it must be because you want the police
to do something, and therefore that I guess could impact
your attention to details and so forth.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
But Anyway, at the end today, I wanted to come
back to something we talked about earlier in the episode,
which has emphasize my feeling that there are two sides
to the coin and they're both true. One is that
serial reproduction of information between people, you know, information passing
a lot the grapevine between people should not be relied
upon as representing what that information was accurately at the beginning.
(35:07):
You just should not trust that. And at the same
time you should not think about serial reproduction or transmission
chains as they occur in human culture as bad. It's
part of what culture is, and it provides a lot
of good things. It provides a lot of the entertainment
and the learning and the spice of life, even if
it does not objectively accurately usually preserve the information from
(35:32):
the beginning of the chain.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
See, this is all great stuff that I think should
have been included in the elementary school telephone games that
does so many of us play, Well.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
I don't know, I mean, it kind of is all there.
Like the game, you recognize that the message doesn't make
it to the end intact, so you get a lesson there, like, oh,
don't believe everything you hear but also the game is fun,
and the fun comes from the failure.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Fail and distort. This is how you amuse yourself. This
is the less into the telephone game I get, but
it is really revealing. Like I said, I just didn't
think about it much when I was a kid playing
this game. But yeah, when you looking at these studies
and discussing the out effects of transmission of rumors and
myths and legends, urban legends, et cetera, Yeah, it really
(36:17):
gets fascinating.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
Another thing I was thinking about was how when we
talk about rumors, I feel like we still often have
an understanding of this being entirely word of mouth, just
like one person talking to another and then that person
talking to the next person. But it seems to me
the much more common route of rumors today involves some
kind of media in between there. So it may go
(36:40):
like a word of mouth from one person to the next,
and then to the Internet to a written form, and
then somebody reading that piece of information on the Internet
and then telling somebody in person, and then them posting
on the Internet and reading it. So you're also having
these media changes back and forth that are not really
showing up quite so much in at least any of
(37:01):
the experiments we've looked at, because all of them either
went you know, they either go entirely oral or entirely
text based.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Hmm, yeah, that's a good point. I should also just
remind everyone probably don't go to the police with your
ghost story. I'm I'm just there may be exceptions to
that rule, you know, use your best judgment, but it
was it's also hard for me to get past that
idea of just like I think I saw a ghost,
I better call the police.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
I disagree. I think you should only call the police
with your ghost story.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Agree to disagree.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
I'm kidding. Do not call nine one one and tie
up the phone lines with your ghost story.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
Yes, tell a friend, tell a close friend. All Right,
we're gonna We're gonna go ahead and close out this episode,
but we'll be back on Tuesday. So you know, hey,
keep writing into us because on Mondays we do listener mail,
and then we do our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
On Wednesdays we do a short form monster fact or
artifact episode, and Friday's we set us most serious concerns
(38:01):
to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with this with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
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