SOME EXPERIMENTS ON THE REPRODUCTION OF FOLK-STORIES.
BY F. C. BARTLETT.
(From the Psychological Laboratory, University of Cambridge.)
I. Introduction.
When a story is passed on from one person to another, each man repeating, as he imagines, what he has heard from the last narrator, it undergoes many successive changes before it at length arrives at that relatively fixed form in which it may become current throughout a whole community. To discover the principles according to which successive versions in such a process of change may be traced, presents problems of considerable interest, both for psychology and for sociology. Moreover, precisely the same type of problems confront investigators who endeavour to study the diffusion of decorative and representative art forms, of music, of social customs, institutions, and beliefs, and in fact, of almost every element which enters into the varied and complex life of man in society.
One possible line of approach to the study of these problems is by way of psychological experiment. No doubt many of the most potent influences which help to determine the nature and direction of conventionalisation in daily life are definitely social in origin. And such influences are not clearly brought out by the type of experiment the results of which I propose to discuss in the present paper. In these experiments subjects effected their reproduction of the presented material rather as isolated individuals
