Describe Bartlett's 'War of the Ghosts' study.

Bartlett's (1932) study investigated how memory is reconstructed. His aim was to see how cultural schemas affect memory. He used a method called serial reproduction. He showed participants, who were English, a Native American folk story called 'The War of the Ghosts'. The story was unfamiliar to them, containing strange concepts and a different structure to typical English stories. The first participant read the story and then recalled it to a second participant. This second participant then recalled it to a third, and so on, like a game of 'Chinese whispers'. Bartlett found that the story changed with each retelling. It became shorter, more coherent, and more conventional. Details that didn't fit with the participants' own cultural schemas were either omitted (e.g., supernatural elements) or transformed to make them more familiar (e.g., 'canoes' became 'boats'). This showed that memory is not an accurate recording but is actively reconstructed based on our existing schemas.