Abstract
This chapter describes an extension of Bartlett’s method of repeated reproduction, using War of the Ghosts, into a conversation task. In order to force participants to naturalistically externalize their process of remembering (i.e., think aloud), they were asked to recall the story with another person. Analysis shows the processes that lead to many of the changes into the story outlined by Bartlett, such as transformation of foreign place names, atmospheric weather, the reorganization of narrative structure, and more generally how construction of memories occurs (toward either accuracy or inaccuracy). There was however also differences in the data compared to Bartlett (Remembering: a study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1932) in the cultural resources participants used to reconstruct the story. One of the most interesting was the use of recent Hollywood films about ghosts to interpret and remember the Native American story. The chapter concludes with a broader discussion of the work of suggestion as a cultural tool in remembering.
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Wagoner, B., Brescó, I., Awad, S.H. (2019). Microgenesis of Remembering: A Conversational Study. In: Remembering as a Cultural Process . SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32641-8_3
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