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