Abstract
Readers who’ve wished to know more about the genesis of Remembering: a study in experimental and social psychology (Bartlett, 1932), will find in Brady Wagoner’s The Constructive Mind a treasure trove. Remembering was originally published in 1932, and is probably Frederic Bartlett’s most well known work today. Wagoner does not focus on Bartlett’s contributions to memory studies, though, but on the promise that Bartlett’s work holds for the field of psychology today, especially the study of thinking. Although rich in historical detail, The Constructive Mind is not only a work in history of psychology, but a critique—and, hence, implicitly, a programmatic work. Wagoner describes himself as a cultural psychologist, and this book as “the first extended and integrative reconstruction of Bartlett’s work and legacy.” The work also serves, he says, as “a case study in the diffusion and reconstruction of ideas in a science” (p. 5).
In the stimulating and well written introduction, Wagoner clearly indicates the book’s aim: “to explore how [Frederic Bartlett’s] ideas help us to understand human beings as constructive agents situated in a complex social and material world” (p. 1). Not just with respect to memory, either: “Although Bartlett is most famous for how he uses this approach to study remembering as a constructive process, his contribution is much more wide ranging” (p. 2). The problem is not so much that Bartlett is unknown, but that the understanding of his work, especially in psychology, is “skewed.” The distortion of Bartlett’s ideas, he thinks, is due to the failure of those who have taken Bartlett as their inspiration to properly appreciate Bartlett’s role as a “researcher of culture and a truly ‘social’ (as opposed to individual) psychology” (p. 4). Thus, an ambition of the book is to “stimulate a renewed surge of interest in Bartlett and his legacy” (p. 3).
The first chapter of the book is about Bartlett’s life and work, and what a treat it is! Wagoner brings experience from his work on the project that produced an online archive about Bartlett (Duveen et al., n.d.) and it shows, especially in the richly detailed intellectual history that covers relevant figures from before Bartlett arrived in Cambridge, through two world wars and up through the end of his life in 1969. Bartlett came to psychology via logic and philosophy, extending his interest in symbolic systems to the works of analytic psychologists, specifically GF Stout’s Manual of Psychology (1898/9) and James Ward’s 1886 encyclopedia article “Psychology” Topics in this first chapter include: experiments in perception (in which he became interested in what the perceiver contributes or brings to perceiving); cultural dynamics (as a contribution to methodology in social psychology and anthropology); ergonomics (the idea of designing the machine to fit the human); the concept of (high level) skill in terms of operations involving “complex, coordinated, and accurately timed activities,” and human-machine interaction; the importance of narrative in memory; and research on different kinds of thinking, including “everyday thinking.” This chapter is sure to contain surprises for the reader, as it did for me, for example, that Bartlett’s Remembering grew out of an abandoned project on “conventionalization”; Craik’s “Cambridge Cockpit”; Bartlett’s book on political propaganda (1940); and what Bartlett’s knighthood was for. Wagoner does more than relate historical facts well; he comments throughout on their significance. I found it especially useful that he is specific, and identifies his sources. His retrospective assessment of Bartlett uncovers a tension between “scientific freedom, adventure, the breaking of methodological conventions, and the interdisciplinary development of ideas” and, in contrast, “the importance of ‘exact methods’” (p. 35). Wagoner’s explanation for this tension is that it arises from the two different roles Bartlett occupied: research scientist and institutional leader.
The chapter on Bartlett’s life and work is followed by five chapters sandwiched between Chapter 1 and the Conclusion: “Experiments in Psychology” (Chapter 2); “Cultural Diffusion and Reconstruction” (Chapter 3); “Concept of Schema in Reconstruction” (Chapter 4); “Social Psychology of Remembering” (Chapter 5); and “Thinking about Thinking” (Chapter 6).
In discussing Bartlett’s experiments, Wagoner explains that the notion of an experiment in psychology later changed. When Bartlett’s early experiments are criticized for lack of rigor, the criticisms are based on an anachronism: that a proper experiment is “the manipulation of an independent variable while holding all other variables constant, and inferring a relationship between variables through statistical analysis of a large sample of subjects” (p. 40). Bartlett was interested in a more holistic approach. Wagoner’s succinct summary:
What is most essential about remembering, as it normally occurs, is that it is done through previous experience, in a social context and activates a person’s interests. These factors are precisely the ones that Ebbinghaus tried to remove from his investigation (p. 42).
There is much more: for example, Bartlett and the Würzburg psychologists; the effect of the French psychologist Jean Philippe on Bartlett’s methodology (“analysis of qualitative changes occurring through a series of reproductions”); and Bartlett’s work in CS Meyers’s lab. Finally, there is Wagoner’s description of Bartlett’s experiments in Remembering. He describes Bartlett’s four methods (description, picture writing, repeated reproduction, and serial reproduction), how they differ (in the conditions under which reproduction takes place) and Bartlett’s observations on the results. He then discusses work that replicated and/or extended Bartlett’s experiments—pointing out that, when researchers in the 50’s and 60’s did such work, “Bartlett’s focus on how social and cultural processes shape remembering completely disappears as a topic of investigation” (p. 69). Misunderstandings arose and were nurtured: for example, that Bartlett’s experiments had been undermined; that they were about “errors” in remembering. Wagoner discusses recent memory research, ending with a suggestion for redefining “experiment” in psychology.
Chapter 3 discusses Bartlett’s work in relation to ideas of cultural evolution, the approach that dominated anthropological research in the early 20th century. Wagoner discusses the cross-cultural study from the Cambridge expedition to the Torres Strait in detail, providing invaluable context for Bartlett’s contrasting approach (in terms of “contact” and “cultural dynamics”). Wagoner’s nuanced discussion of Bartlett’s work on “tendencies” in relation to MacDougall’s on instincts is also helpful. He discusses Bartlett’s book on propaganda (Bartlett, 1940), in which Bartlett drew distinctions between kinds of persuasion, allowing a role for what he called “democratic propaganda”.
In the chapter on Bartlett’s concept of schema, Wagoner gives an account of its genesis, and of what others later made of it. He begins by pointing out that Bartlett “intended to utilitize the concept [of schema] to develop an alternative to the storage theory of remembering” (p. 115). Bartlett disliked the term, from neurologist Henry Head, but the role that schema occupied in his theory of remembering was crucial. Wagoner discusses Bartlett’s student Mary L Northway, who noted the effect of Ward and Lotze on Bartlett’s use of schema in Remembering, crediting her with developing the concept farther, based on new, innovative experiments she developed. He describes the use of schema in cognitive psychology, which changed schema “from a dynamic and embodied concept that incorporated affect and interests, into a static knowledge structure used to represent information in a world ‘out there’” (p. 130). He criticizes Neisser’s (1967) treatment of Bartlett’s schema for separating “the psychological level of analysis from the bio-functional” (p. 131). Wagoner discusses the rehabilitation of the concept in the 1990’s up to the present, highlighting Naohisa Mori’s (2009) work as original and true to Bartlett’s insight that remembering is both personal and social. He concludes with suggestions that the works of Mead and/or Vygotsky can make sense of Bartlett’s idea of “turning around upon schema.”
In “Social Psychology of Remembering,” Wagoner emphasizes Part II of Bartlett’s Remembering, in which he says, “Bartlett is very clear that most human schemata are social in origin,” rather than being “pre-social” (p. 142). This, I think, does distinguish Bartlett’s concept of schema from many uses of it in cognitive science. Jung and Halbwachs laid out two competing accounts of collective memory: Wagoner identifies Jung’s view with biological inheritance (since it involves one’s ancestral past), and Halbwachs’ with “cultural patterns” and “social networks.” Though leaning toward Halbwachs’ side of the contrast, Bartlett did not take on the idea of a group having a memory, Wagoner says; rather he felt that we can talk about “memory in the group,” but should not feel so confident speaking of “memory of the group” (p. 145). Wagoner explains the significance of Bartlett’s views for contemporary social psychology, citing specific studies and noting specific correctives. There is far more in this chapter: a discussion of the “matter of recall” vs the “manner of recall”; experiments by anthropologists Bateson and Nadel to test Bartlett’s “social psychological theory of remembering”; and by Michael Cole and his colleagues. Wagoner’s comments throughout highlight their relevance to Bartlett’s work; the points about methodology are especially interesting. Finally, there is an uplifting section on James Wertsch, “one of the few recent thinkers to analyze schemata in their embeddedness within the cultural traditions of different communities,” and whose approach “represents a substantial development of Bartlett’s social psychology of remembering and his notion of schemata in particular” (p. 162). He ends with some approving comments on current trends such as extended cognition.
In the last topical chapter, “Thinking about Thinking” which “contextualizes, outlines, and elaborates Bartlett’s distinctive approach to the topic of thinking” (p. 167). Wagoner compares Bartlett’s very early programmatic work about thinking in his dissertation with his later experiments: the social is still important; the cultural less so. Wagoner cites Bartlett’s remark that the theory of association “tells us something about the characteristics of associated details, when they are associated, but it explains nothing of the activity of the conditions by which they are brought together” (p. 169) to argue that Bartlett was anti-associationist. He describes later moves in psychology on which the metaphor of a calculating machine is used for the human mind, remarking that “Bartlett’s own laboratory in Cambridge . . . helped set the ground for this conceptual shift through the focus on human–machine interactions, such as flying an airplane or performing some industrial task,” although Bartlett insisted, as one might expect, that “a thinker is more than a thinking-machine” (p. 171). The account of Bartlett’s work on skill is engaging; the analogy (and disanalogy) between thinking and bodily skills, even more so. The discussions on different kinds of thinking, and the design of experiments to study them, is too complex to summarize here, but is clear enough to be accessible to everyone; Wagoner concludes with reasons why bringing this work into current work on psychology of thinking would benefit it.
All this, in under 200 pages. The writing is clear and accessible, yet dense in ideas. The concluding chapter reviews the content of all the chapters, with critiques of even more researchers in terms of their contributions in integrating Bartlett’s insights in their work.
I do have some criticisms, best expressed as puzzlements. First, that William James is no part of this story is hard to believe. Many of Bartlett’s views are in sympathy with James; the points about skill are reminiscent of William James’ “Habit” (1887, 1890). James’ “Are We Automata?” appeared in (James, 1872) in the journal Mind, which GF Stout edited from 1891 on. There’s work for an intellectual history detective here, it seems to me. The other puzzlement is an omission, too: Ulrich Neisser’s Cognition and Reality (1976) and subsequent experimental work on memory (e.g. Neisser and Harsch, 1992 work on flashbulb memories, and many others). Throughout the book, Wagoner cites only Neisser’s earlier 1967 work. In the last footnote of his book, Wagoner finally mentions Neisser’s later work, and grants a notion in it is “reminiscent of Bartlett’s schema” (p. 205). It may be that the book was written before Wagoner had really engaged with Neisser’s later work. There is likely a whole book that could be written on the diffusion of Bartlett’s concept of schema throughout other branches of social psychology via Neisser’s work.
Despite these puzzlements, I highly recommend Wagoner’s book. I first came across Bartlett via Neisser’s 1976 work describing Bartlett’s concept of schema, before Remembering had been reprinted. No one I knew knew anything about this person named Frederic Bartlett. I am so grateful for Wagoner’s fabulous book—both as a resource and for Wagoner’s own insights into psychology’s history—and future.