From the constructive memory of Bartlett to narrative theories of social (Brady Wagoner: The constructive mind. Bartlett's Psychology in Reconstruction. 2017)

This is a timely book of reconstructing the social and anthropological message of Frederic Bartlett, the founding father both of modern British cognitive psychology, and of an alternative approach to memory research. Wagoner’s book concentrates on showing that this ‘alternative model of memory research’ is part of a more general issue in Bartlett, the creation of qualitative social science, and a general anthropological embedding of psychology. In a way, this is an interpretation of the combination of ‘experimental’ and ‘social’ in the titles of the two famous books of Bartlett (1932, 1958). The book’s author Brady Wagoner is himself a Cambridge-trained social and cultural psychologist now working at Aalborg U, Denmark and a good fit for this task. He is involved in depth with historical research on Bartlett (e.g. Wagoner, 2013), being one of the officers of the Bartlett archives (http://www.bartlett.psychol.cam.ac.uk/), and at the same time, he is a leading activist for the new social constructionist moves in cultural psychology, as his papers on qualitative research (Wagoner, 2015), and his handbook of cultural memory (Wagoner, Ed., 2017; Saint-Laurent, de Bresco, de Luna & Wagoner, 2017) clearly show. This monograph is a new review of the social message of Bartlett that was first reconstructed by the edited volume of Saito (2000). The Saito book was already positioning Bartlett both in relation to the anthropological past, and to the present of cultural psychology and social constructionism. The book of Wagoner presents a fresh look at these issues, since it is more straightforward and more personal compared to the edited volume.

In line with the dual engagement of its author, the book has mixed aims. It is partly history of psychology, with noteworthy philological reconstructions of the life and oeuvre of Bartlett, partly a reconsideration of a classic author for present day purposes, for the case of an anthropologically informed cultural psychology. Wagoner uses Bartlett to show that our culture certainly has an impact on our mental operations, but our mental life at the same time is still full of individualized meaning constructing efforts. Regarding memory itself, i.e. the most famous topic of Bartlett, the basic message of Wagoner is that constructive memory processes are not the exception but the rule, and they indicate that memory is as much future as past oriented. Instead of errors of recall, which is one of the central data type in the mainstream paradigm of memory research, one has to study the functions of remembering. The reconstruction of the anthropological undercurrent in the work of Bartlett also serves to show Bartlett as a case study or the stabilization and the spread of cultural patterns. The philological reconstructions in this case study also provide a case study for the process of memory reconstruction itself. Social patterns ‘out there’ and mental schemata ‘in here’ go hand in hand, says Wagoner in the introductory chapter already. “He [Bartlett] took remembering out of the head and situated it at the enfolding relation between the organism and its environment” (p. 8). This would also mean a change of basic metaphors. While the Ebbinghaus (1885) style of mainstream rote learning memory research uses a spatial metaphor of traces and shelves, the Bartlett style remembering research would use temporal metaphors to characterize memory processes.

For historians of psychology, the descriptive novelties of the book are concentrated in the first chapter. The presentation of the family background and early life of Bartlett carries several surprises. For many of us, Sir Frederic seemed to be the born Cambridge done, while in fact he was a boy coming from rather humble background, with recurring illnesses and mostly informal secondary education. The formative years of Bartlett in Cambridge at the turn of century are characterized by showing that at the time of Cambridge, interest towards psychology and anthropology was characteristic of the progressive youth, in contrast to the bookish philosophical heritage. Though, as a matter of fact, Bartlett (1917, 1918) did publish some philosophical papers. Regarding the middle life of Bartlett, in line with his own interest in Bartlett as a social theorist, Wagoner clearly shows the inherent tensions within Bartlett when during WWII, along with the promoter of a cybernetic approach to psychology, Kenneth Craik (1943), Bartlett was to become the founder of a new technology related and inspired human/machine interaction inspired cognitive psychology. The mediating notion for this engagement was the concentration of Bartlett on skills in man/machine interaction and human mentality (Bartlett, 1941, 1951).

The second chapter of the book gives a detailed account of the formation of the peculiar experimental attitude that was so characteristic in Bartlett’s (1916) Remembering. Two important new aspects show up here for historians of psychology. First, that Bartlett was experimenting with interpretation, meaning, and constructive processes well before the First World War, due to his dislike of classical meaningless laboratory studies, and his anthropological interests. Bartlett received his first inspirations towards these meaningful experimentations from the Würzburg school, from their attitude like notions, and the general idea of a task being crucial as an organizing factor in memory. However, at the time Bartlett was still missing his organizing concept, the notion of schema that would enable him to summarize all of his innovative approaches later on. Bartlett always wanted to remain contextual, and felt decontextualization, the ideal of classical psychological experimentation rather strange (Wagoner, 2015). In the reconstruction of Wagoner, this attitude was related to the African experiences of Bartlett. All of this methodical casuality was much criticized two generations later. In fact as Wagoner shows in an interesting manner, when statistics in all experimental design replaced the Bartlett style qualitative analysis, changes in cognitive psychology “coincided with a reinterpretation of ‘reconstruction’ to mean that memory was prone to error. As such it became negatively valued, whereas for Bartlett it was linked with flexibility and creativity” (p. 76).

The general presentation of Wagoner shows clearly for the contemporary audience, that the most basic methodological feature of the psychology of Bartlett was the need to move away from the laboratory and abstractions towards everyday life and meaningfulness. Bartlett remained a naturalist in psychology, a scientist who expected research to reveal the studied phenomena in an immediate manner with examples and details of protocols. The naturalistic attitude of Bartlett explained his choice of topics, materials and methods. Bartlett certainly was experimenting, but in a rather casual and impressionistic manner. He remained a self-conscious contextualist, who believed that real progress in psychology comes from the recognition of the complexity of real life. In the midst fight for dominance of the great schools of psychology, in the mid-1930s, Bartlett expressed his ars psychologica as follows: “Complete systems and schemes of psychological explanation are the biggest stumbling-block to progress in psychology. The comprehensive systems and schemata of psychological explanation constitute the greatest obstacles to progress” (Bartlett, 1936, p. 50–51).

Bartlett certainly treated the mind as an active agent, and in this sense, he is rightfully presented by Wagoner as a constructivist. While Bartlett’s vision had a biological flavor, it was a holistic biology that he sympathized with. He was the psychologist, who reminded the biologist about phenomena not yet explained or not easy to explain by the current biological conceptual apparatus. Further, as the social and anthropological presentation of Wagoner shows, this biological functionalism was at the same time social.

This case of Wagoner is in fact supported by the self-reflection of Bartlett himself. The laboratory for Bartlett was not to be a supplement to real social life. Casual experimentation and the social embedding of mental life go hand in hand for him. “The laboratory should be a place to work in, not to live in. I am a firm believer in the great value of dumping a student into a social group that he is not familiar with, for I think that this stimulates observation of genuine human life reactions more than anything else. Further what I learned in social contacts at first hand I would try to bring into the laboratory and test under more exact conditions” (Bartlett, 1936, p.51).

The middle chapters of the book present the cultural interests of Bartlett and his schema-based interpretation of his most important findings regarding cultural adaptations, additions, and reconstructions in remembering. The cultural chapters show Bartlett as an early psychological theoretician of cultural diffusion. In this regard, Wagoner compares the ideas of Bartlett to recent neo-Durkheimian theories of social representation proposed by Moscovici in 1961 for the spread of psychoanalysis in France (Moscovici, 1961/2008, 1984). The book shows very clearly the critical stance of Bartlett himself towards versions of group mind theories of his own time, like Jung and McDougall. Bartlett did not trust theories of the primitive mind, and maintained that.” The processes of diffusion found in modern societies are not fundamentally different from ‘primitive’ societies, but do set up different conditions as a function of their differentiation into many special groups and their technologies of transport and communication (p. 113). He preserved this attitude from the analysis of African tribal cultural diffusions, to the wartime analysis of German propaganda (Bartlett, 1940).

Unfortunately, the fragmentation in modern societies Wagoner talks about did not avoid him either. From contemporary diffusion theories, only social representation theories of social psychology à la Moscovici are considered by him. The rival diffusionist theories present today in cognitive circles are not even mentioned as a basis for comparisons with the ideas of Bartlett. This clearly shows the distaste of Wagoner towards individualized biological theories. The memetic theory proposed by Dawkins (1976) is a strong case to consider with its automatized cultural imitation patterns (Blackmore, 1975). For an anthropologically minded psychologist, an even stronger case is the theory of the epidemiology of representations promoted by Dan Sperber (1985, 1996). Sperber proposes that the transmission of representations is regulated by cognitive attractors, and in this manner his idea with an interplay between the individual mind and the social distribution is rather similar to the attitude of Bartlett. “Widely distributed, long-lasting representations are what we are primarily referring to when we talk of culture. There exists, however, no threshold, no boundary with cultural representations on one side and individual ones on the other. Representations are more or less widely or lastingly distributed, and hence more or less cultural. So, to explain culture is to answer the following question: why are some representations more successful in a human population, more ‘catching’ than others? (Sperber, 1985, cited after Sperber, 1996, p. 57–58).

Bartlett who was much against behaviorism, and with his qualitative experimentation was alien to mainstream machine minded cognitive science, was still rediscovered by cognitivists. Wagoner presents this rediscovery in a critical manner. It is worthy to remember that this was a real rediscovery, especially of his book on remembering, not merely a transient fad. Bartlett has 172 mentions in the PsychInf database between 1920 and 1950, 271 between 1950 and 80, but almost 1200 mentions between 1980 and 2010.

Wagoner treats the rediscovery of Bartlett with a critical eye. In the CogSci rediscovery, Bartlett was treated with a quantitative machinery as a theoretician about the distortions of memory, and his schema concept was also treated in a more piecemeal manner. Wagoner analyses in detail the study of Gauld and Stephenson (1967) which was the source of skepticism about the mnemonic nature of distortive schematization. According to these authors, recall importations and distortions in the works of Bartlett and his followers are frequent only because their subjects showed a lenient, liberal attitude to recall. If we warn them to recall only what was really in the story, their recall will be characterized much more by omissions than by distortions. Especially those subjects who describe themselves as more scrupulous tended to produce fewer additions in recall. Anderson and Bower (1973) in their mainstream treatment of human associative memory even claimed that the entire process of schematization pointed out by Bartlett, i.e., processes beyond encoding and storing individual propositions, might well be interpreted as the result of a coherence-producing editorial work during recall.

Wagoner shows many details of how one could see the real place of constructions, and how this is related to serial social transmissions, partly based on his own studies (Wagoner & Gillespie, 2014). They showed that in repeated recalls there are self-reflective processes which do modulate reconstructions during recall as if recall was a discursive process. There are further anthropological points here, however. Morin (2016) has pointed out in a more systematic argument the limitations of the laboratory serial recall situations. Serial recall studies cannot be literally taken as models of cultural transmission at least for two reasons. In typical cultural transmissions, there is always a chance for feedback, and there are always multiple serial channels working in parallel. This was in a peculiar manner technically also excluded, since surprisingly for his naturalistic attitude, Bartlett made his subjects read and write down the stories he presented them. In real life, a gossip reaches us through different oral channels. Intrinsic interest, psychological biases, alternative routes, and feedback loops make for the stabilization of real traditions. A cultural stabilization of which Bartlett (1923) was aware early on.

Wagoner’s chapter on schematization is historically very rich and correct. It shows the indebtedness of Bartlett to the notion proposed by Head (1920) for bodily schema, and how it was transformed into a concept responsible for dynamic constructive processes by Bartlett, especially with his notion of “turning around schemata.” In a peculiar way, this clumsy looking concept is similar to contemporary notions of metacognition and more broadly, it relates schemata to recent theories of procedural knowledge and procedural theories of memory, at least in mainstream cognitive psychology (Brwer, 2000).

Wagoner also summarizes the fate of the schema concept. Using his general metaphor for knowledge processes, he takes a ‘meta attitude’, proposing that the concept of schema was constructively changing. Along with his general dislike for cognitive ideas, he proposes that the cognitive transformations were not towards the better. “As the concept of schema has been constructively reconstructed, it has changed from an embodied, dynamic, temporal, holistic, and social concept into its opposite in cognitive psychology” […] Schema was transformed into a static knowledge structure composed of different slots or nodes […] Schema is here severed from and organism’s functioning in the world” (p. 136–137).

This is more or less true. Rumelhart and Ortony (1977) listed four major characteristics of schemata, but interestingly Rumelhart (1980, p. 40–41) supplemented this by two further dynamic features.

Schemata have variables.

In line with his general critical attitude towards the cognitive reinterpretation, one aspect of the rediscovery of Bartlett that is most important in the eye of the reviewer is almost entirely missed by Wagoner. This relates to the use of stories, folk tales by Bartlett in his research. The most important data on social constructions, abbreviations, rationalizations found by Bartlett were mostly related to the use of textual materials that were rather alien to the readers. Wagoner (2015) is his paper on the qualitative Bartlett is much aware of this, and the book also details the later studies of Irving Paul (1959, 1967) who had shown that if the strange stories are culturally adopted, they undergo less transformations. Paul had also shown the two typical subject attitudes in story recall: skeletonization and importation. It is all the more symptomatic, that the further developments of reusing stories in the Bartlett renaissance are summarily ignored by Wagoner. This is – to use a term from the Bartlett debates – a distortion, since it ignores how social the cognitive interpretation of schemata has become within cognitive psychology itself.

From the 1970s on, the use of narrative materials by modern schema theorists was motivated by an interesting combination of folklore, literary studies and cognitive psychology, to result in an ‘applied theory’ of naïve social attribution, that is mostly ignored by Wagoner. The narrative pattern ideas were imported to psychology from other social sciences, from folklore, from anthropology and literary studies, and while they infiltrated psychology, soon they had reached a level of generality touching upon philosophical issues such as the use of anthropomorphic schemata, and the relationships between story telling practices and our naive notions of personhood. The Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp (1928/1958) was working at the same time Bartlett was experimenting with his diffusionist ideas on story schematization. Propp realized that strict rules or regularities are hidden behind the fantasy-rich world of our European folktale heritage. Folktales have a skeletal underlying structure, and they are characterized by a limited number of ‘roles’ and ‘functions’. We can see these ‘roles’ now as special attractors that are somehow related to our folk psychology notions regarding human agency and its underlying motivations. This attitude was taken over into modern narrative research by Colby (1973) analyzing the corpus of Eskimo folktales. In line with the dominant ‘generative metaphor’, Colby proposed a generative grammar for his large corpus of Eskimo tales. Colby (1966, 1975) also provided a theory to account for the role of stories in culture. From repeated patterns, we extract schemata and templates – among them the story template – and use these on their turn to interpret new events.

The construction of cognitive templates is based both on subliminal perceptions of human life and on experience with the array of cultural models available. But the cultural models themselves, being patterned and ‘ready-made’ in a coded, condensed form, are more likely to yield information on the nature of these templates (Colby, 1966, p. 798).

Thus, in this vision, story structure tells us about the structure of mundane social reality.

Bartlett in a way was himself calling already in 1920 for what shall be done eventually by Propp: a more comprehensive elucidation of the basic social relations that are involved in folk tales. In his 1923 book, Bartlett has elaborated an entire program and conceptual apparatus towards the psychological study of culture. As Wagoner shows at several places, Bartlett was mainly interested in dispersion and stabilization of cultural patterns: what makes certain cultural patterns more resistant to change, and especially what makes the stabilized folk story so central to a given culture? The new structural approach to stories had some resemblance to the one started by Bartlett, looking for underlying social schematization and constraints, but this time round there was a stronger linguistic and even structural emphasis. Narrative patterns turned into something crucial for the cognitive psychologists, because they promised to provide a substantial anchoring point for the otherwise elusive concept of schemata proposed by Bartlett. The patterning, inherent in narration, promised to give a truly interpreted view of schematization, which in a peculiar way has lead the cognitive psychologists back to a naïve social psychology.

The Propp–Colby inspirations in a general structural enthusiasm were extended into overall models of story organization in the work of Rumelhart (1975), Mandler and Johnson (1977), Thorndyke (1977), and Kintsch and van Dijk (1978). These were mainly proposing a kind of formal grammar to account for the schematization phenomena in remembering stories. In the midst of these enthusiastic studies, Thorndyke and Yekovich (1980) raised the issue that the proposed story models mainly were using a post hoc attitude, and were missing a real predictive power. After a short excursion into strictly formal models, these efforts turned to theories of naive social psychology, specifically theories of attributed intentional action as the explanation for schematization effects. Black and Bower (1980) and Pléh (1987) had shown that in direct comparison, the predictions derived from the causal chain model of Schank (1975) and Schank and Abelson (1977) had the most explanatory power in predicting recall patterns. This was proven using old style multiple regression statistical models. Graesser (1996) and Graesser and Clark (1986) have shown that in text understanding the causal and intentional naïve attribution models are used in a complementary manner, and for human actions, we use an intentional frame. To summarize, in understanding stories, we mobilize our naive social psychology about the structure of human action and about the usual motives for action. The coherence is found by the hearer–reader through the projection of these motivated action schemata to the story (Pléh, 2003; Láészló, 2014). Stories as a special type of narration require a hero, who has a system of goals, as well as a perspective. The hidden coherence of stories is provided by the problem-solving path of the hero within a motivational field that is created by the goal system of the hero, such as the motives of hunger, and the like, as Bartlett (1923, 1925) was already aware of. The essence of this ‘philosophy’ is the coherence in the actions of the hero.

Narrative patterns turned into something crucial for the psychologists, because they promised to provide a substantial anchoring point for the otherwise elusive concept of schemata proposed by Bartlett. The patterning, inherent in narration, promised to give a truly interpreted view of schematization, which had unexpected consequences for our conceptions about ourselves.

I mention all of this narrative renaissance of Bartlett not because I wish to advertise again narrative psychology. However, it is my conviction, that there was an interesting meeting of paradigms when the structure hungry cognitive psychologists themselves had to turn to theories and even naïve theories of human action to account for what Bartlett labeled as schematization. They would call for structure in the naïve social psychology of action organization and attribution. This interest of cognitivists towards a naive psychology of human action is unfortunately entirely missed by Wagoner. Though he pays tribute to the alliance of cognitive constructions and social group selection pressures in Bartlett, he misses the issues about the ‘social content’ of remembering. Here is a cognitive anthropology quote to show how these two issues are combined by contemporary cognitive science.

Stabilization has two basic sources: mechanisms of social control, such as conformity, and the working of certain modular systems that have cognitive preferences. The propagation, stabilization and evolution of cultural representations clearly have a variety of causes. They are helped or hindered by demographic and other ecological conditions, in particular by man-made features of the environment, and by religious, educational and political institutions. We agree with standard social science that culture is not human psychology writ large and that it would make little sense to seek a psychological reductionist explanation of culture. We believe, however, that psychological factors play an essential role in culture (Sperber & Hirschfeld, 2004, p. 45).

The chapter on thinking in the Wagoner book pays tribute to the last important work of Bartlett (1958). This book analyzed famous scientific discoveries, like the measurement of the speed of nerve conduction, everyday thought, and the development of the ideas of Bartlett himself. Wagoner shows the skill-based attitude of Bartlett, and his simple but very productive message that the key to creative thought is seeing relations between non adjacent fields of knowledge. A missing point here is how the skill attitude of Bartlett developed into modern procedural learning and memory conceptions, and to the issues of metacognitive control over memory (Squire, 2004). The approach of Bartlett is interestingly related to that of Selz (1922), and the later studies of protocol analysis by Simon and Newell (1972) in their production systems theory. There is an interesting combination of psychoanalytic history and the Bartlett heritage that also missed the attention of Wagoner. Mathew Erdélyi (2006) the American theoretical psychoanalyst claimed similarities with regard to constructive processes between Bartlett and the constructive processes emphasized by psychoanalysts.

The laboratory and the clinic have converged on a simple but fundamental insight: Cognition, from perception to memory, is pervasively constructive. We structure our fragmentary reality by omitting from and elaborating on our meager scraps of information. We inhibit and augment our reality by different techniques and for different reasons. We try to make sense of our reality, intellectually as well as emotionally (Erdélyi, 2006, p. 511)”.

On the whole, the book is a very broad and interesting presentation of Bartlett as a theoretician who combined psychology with anthropology a century ago. The combination of the historical and the presentist aims is successful. Through the attitude of Wagoner, we learn about Bartlett as a kind of soft social constructionist, according to whom social life and culture are constructive backgrounds for the mind, many times sources of thought, but by far not necessarily prisons to novel thought. It is more of a scaffolding theory in the sense initiated by Bruner (1973) towards which Wagoner is using Bartlett rather than towards a radical social constructionism.

The missing points emphasized in this review are intended to show that the sharp separation between a cognitive attitude and a social science-based attitude is missing crucial points where the two converge. Namely the theories that treat elementary sociality as a basic, not constructed feature of the human mind. Ignoring this interface can mislead the interpretation of the historical heritage of complex figures like Bartlett.