Wagoner, 2013 Culture and Mind in Reconstruction

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Chapter X 
 
Culture and mind in reconstruction: Bartlett’s analogy between individual 
and group processes 
 
Brady Wagoner 
Aalborg University, Denmark 
 
 
 
SUMMARY 
 
Frederic Bartlett is widely recognized for his insight that remembering is (re)constructive, rather than reproductive. However, 
there is much misunderstanding about what precisely he meant by this. Many cognitive psychologists, for example, now assume 
that reconstructive means ‘distorted’ or ‘inaccurate’ memory. This paper aims to clarify the concept of reconstruction through an 
analysis of how Bartlett uses it to describe individual and group processes. It will be argued that for Bartlett ‘schemata’ are to the 
individual as ‘cultural patterns’ are to the social group. After briefly describing what schemata and cultural patterns are, five 
points of comparison will be made: (1) readiness to receive, (2) dominance of the past over the present, (3) stability through 
plasticity, (4) radical reconstruction, and (5) de- and re-contextualization. The paper will conclude by suggesting that the 
similarities between individual and group processes go beyond analogy, by highlighting how the two levels are interdependent. 
 
 
INTRODUCTION: SCHEMATA AND CULTURAL PATTERNS 
 
A central idea of Bartlett’s approach is that culture (e.g. stories, ideas, designs, ceremonies, scientific theories) 
is continuously reconstructed (rather than simply reproduced) in action and communication. Bartlett’s early 
experiments aptly demonstrated this process by highlighting, for example, how images and stories are 
transformed when they are repeatedly or serially reproduced outside their culture of origin. He theorized this 
process of transformation at both individual and group levels. At the group level, Bartlett (1923) refers to 
‘cultural patterns’ as group norms, which regulate the behavior of the group’s members. He borrows heavily 
from his anthropological mentor W.H.R. Rivers (1914), who had argued that the most important factor in 
social change was cultural contact between groups. When groups come into contact they exchange cultural 
elements, which in turn are transformed in the direction of the ‘cultural patterns’ of the recipient group, a 
process named ‘conventionalization’ (Rivers, 1912). At the individual level, Bartlett (1932) developed the 
concept of schema, from the neurologist Henry Head (1920), to articulate the way in which the accumulated 
past operates en masse in the present. Any new action or experience always occurs against the background of 
an organized mass of previous experience (i.e., schemata). Bartlett (1932) says schemata operate at the 
intersection between an organism and its environment and are ‘actively doing something all the time’ (p. 201). 
Thus, his concept of schema is incompatible with cognitive psychologist’s understanding of it as a relatively 
static knowledge structure in the head which functions to store experiences (see Wagoner, under review). 
Parallels between Bartlett’s theorizing of individual and group processes are apparent even in the unstable 
terminology he uses to refer to them: one of Bartlett’s (1932) preferred names for schemata was ‘active 
developing patterns’, whereas he later discusses ‘cultural patterns’ using the phrase ‘group schemata’. In what 
follows I will outline five conceptual parallels between the two levels in Bartlett’s work. 
 
COMPARISON 1: READINESS TO RECEIVE 
 
A person is not equally ready to receive all impressions. What is experienced of the world is a function of the 
person’s attitude, interests, personal history and group membership. These factors constitute a person’s active 
orientation to the world, aspects of which change from moment to moment, while others endure through ones 
lifetime. The role that a transitory attitude plays in shaping experience can easily be demonstrated with a 
simple experiment: briefly present subjects with nonsense syllables of different colors, letters and 
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arrangements and instruct them to observe a particular feature. Although there is sensory experience of all 
aspects of stimulus, subjects will remain oblivious to those aspects that are unrelated to the experimental task 
(Ogden, 1951). Attitudes are (for Bartlett) an active, holistic and variable orientation to the world, which are 
powerful determinants of what is remembered from a situation. His experiments on ‘perceiving and imaging’ 
(Bartlett, 1916) are apt demonstrations of what the person brings to an experience or reaction, rather than 
assuming that the stimulus itself determines a response. In like fashion, groups do not notice or adopt every 
new element of culture they encounter in other groups. Only those elements of cultural for which there is some 
active interest or perceived utility for the group enter into it. As such new technologies are frequently adopted 
while social organization is particularly resistant to outside influence. History is replete with examples of 
cultural contact without transmission. For example, groups without large administrative structures found little 
interest in adopting or recreating systems of writing (Diamond, 1997) or Asian painters did not adopt the new 
perspective painting developed during the Renaissance, though they knew of it. In short, groups like individual 
need to be ready for some material if they are to act on it. 
 
COMPARISON 2: DOMINANCE OF THE PAST OVER THE PRESENT 
 
‘If the experimentalist in psychology once recognizes that he remains to a great extent a clinician, he is forced 
to realize that the study of any well developed psychological function is possible only in the light of 
consideration of its history’ (Bartlett, 1932, p. 15). This idea of the experimentalist is in direct contrast to the 
contemporary practice, in which one attempts to manipulate one variable so as to cause a change in another. 
Such an approach becomes untenable once one recognizes that a person’s life history plays no small role in 
guiding their present response. In Bartlett’s (1916) early experiments on perceiving and imagining, he found 
subjects seeing an image, presented for a faction of a second, according to conventional expectations. Also, the 
ostensively same inkblot would remind subjects of entirely different things, as a function of their previous 
experience. Thus, subjects’ past experience played equal or greater role in the reaction than the stimulus. This 
is because all mental acts for Bartlett involve “an effort after meaning”—that is, a general tendency to connect 
up some present material to a setting or scheme, which in turn is an organized mass of previous experience. As 
Moscovici said somewhere, “we see what we know, we don’t know what we see”. This applies equally to the 
life of social groups. Any new thing must be given a setting and explanation within the group’s existing frame 
of reference. What is not given a place will not be attended to by the group. In his book Psychology and 
Primitive Culture, Bartlett (1923) emphasizes the conservative nature of primitive groups. They tend to hold 
on to traditional ways of acting in and interpreting the world. Even when change is compulsory, such as forced 
conversation to Christianity, natives have been found offering Christian paraphernalia to their overthrown 
deities, thus retaining their traditions at a deeper level (Bartlett, 1925). 
 
COMPARISON 3: STABILITY THROUGH PLASTICITY 
 
Both schemata and cultural patterns impose a stable framework on the novelty of the present. In this way, there 
is continuity in change. Thus, change and stability need to be understood as interdependent opposites: it isprecisely through the flexible application of a stable framework that continuity through time is ensured. As 
Bartlett (1923) said, “it is because the group is selectively conservative that it is also plastic” (p. 151-152). In 
other words, the group is able to persevere its traditions by flexibly adapting them to meet new needs. 
Similarly, at an individual level, we are told that schemata are active and developing, they are the constantly 
updated standard against which any new response is made. The fact that a continuous standard exists ensures 
continuity, while the fact it is developing in response to present conditions ensures change. Bartlett (1932) 
famously gives the example of a stroke made in a game of tennis: 
When I make the stroke I do not, as a matter of fact, produce something absolutely new, and I never merely 
repeat something old. The stroke is literally manufactured out of the living visual and postural 'schemata' of 
the moment and their interrelations. I may say, I may think that I reproduce exactly a series of text-book 
movements, but demonstrably I do not; just as, under other circumstances, I may say and think that I 
reproduce exactly some isolated event which I want to remember, and again demonstrably I do not. (p. 202) 
This, however, does not yet describe what happens in remembering in the full human sense of the word, which 
is a conscious and self-reflective act. Bartlett (1932) calls this “turn[ing] around upon [ones] own ‘schemata’ 
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and construct[ing] them afresh” (p. 206). It is this activity that he associates with more radical forms of 
reconstruction. 
 
COMPARISON 4: RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION 
 
Bartlett implicitly discusses two forms of reconstruction. In the first changes are introduced through 
assimilation, simplification and retention of apparently unimportant details (Bartlett, 1932, ch. 16). This 
describes the conservation through plasticity discussed above. Bartlett illustrates this process through both his 
own experiments and with anthropological reports on the transformation of decorate art and cultural practices 
as they move from one group to another (see Bartlett, 1923, 1932). However, a more radical reconstructive 
process can also occur, which he calls ‘social constructiveness’. With this concept Bartlett intended to 
highlight the fact that groups not only assimilate cultural elements into a familiar cultural framework but are 
also capable of developing genuinely new forms by welding “together elements of culture coming from 
diverse sources and having historically, perhaps, very diverse significance” (Bartlett, 1932, p. 275). Groups 
have both a past and an orientation to the future—what Bartlett (1923) calls their ‘prospect’. Social 
constructiveness points to the creative development of new cultural forms in a group’s movement towards its 
future. An example would be efforts during the First World War to develop radar detection systems (Bloor, 
2000) or new scientific theories like Bartlett’s own (see Bartlett, 1958, ch. 7). Likewise, at an individual level 
remembering is said to be constructive because of the interplay of different schemata in the act of 
remembering. Bartlett (1935, p. 224) gives the example of an enthusiastic journalist’s account of a cricket 
match: “To describe the batting of one man he finds it necessary to refer to a sonata of Beethoven; the bowling 
of another reminds him of a piece of beautifully wrought rhythmic prose written by Cardinal Newman”. 
Bartlett (1932, p. 206) called the individual’s radical reconstructive activity “turning around upon schemata 
and constructing them afresh”. 
 
COMPARISON 5: DE- AND RE-CONTEXTUALIZATION 
 
In radical reconstruction at both individual and group levels parts of one setting must be picked out and placed 
in another without loosing their identity. With regard to social groups, cultural elements are picked out of one 
group and brought into another. This happens under various conditions of cultural contact. For example, when 
an individual group member goes abroad to another group and then returns with new cultural elements, or 
where two groups live in close contact and a cooperative relationship. The latter case can be contrasted with 
asymmetrical power relations between groups, which tend to foster an all-or-nothing adoption of the dominant 
group’s culture (Bartlett, 1923). Thus, whereas symmetrical relations between groups enables a free exchange 
of cultural elements, asymmetrical relations creates conditions for whole bundles of cultural elements to be 
accepted together. Bartlett’s mentor W.H.R. Rivers already articulated this theory of cultural dynamics, using a 
model borrowed from his own work in neurology. In a well-known experiment, Rivers and Head (1908) 
severed a nerve in Head’s arm and a period of five years detailed the return of sensation to the arm. They 
found that first a holistic all-or-nothing sensitivity returned (i.e. protopathic sensibility), which registered blunt 
pressure on the skin but was completely insensitive to stimulation with cotton wool, to pricking with a pin, and 
to all degrees of heat and cold. Later localized sensitivity (i.e., epicritic sensibility) returned and suppressed the 
influence of the former. Following the neurologist Hughling Jackson, they thought the former was 
evolutionarily a more primitive response. The idea of two kinds of sensitivity moves from physiology to 
culture and then to psychology in Bartlett’s work. At an individual level, Bartlett (1932) argues it is through 
the function of images that elements of one setting are picked out and inserted in another. Images, like cultural 
elements, should not be seen as fixed entities but rather as living and constantly changing. In so doing, they are 
able to better respond to new demands in a changing environment. Still, in some cases images (especially 
visual) remain disconnected in consciousness, yet they have the potential to be integrated with others. 
Returning again to the social group, Bartlett (1923) describes how often new subgroups develop around newly 
adopted foreign cultural elements and thus tending not to mix with other existing elements. In these cases, 
social constructiveness will only occur to a minimal degree. 
 
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CONCLUSIONS: MORE THAN AN ANALOGY? 
 
Although there are conceptual parallels between individual and group levels, schemata and cultural patterns, 
neither one is reducible to the other. On the one hand, properties of social groups (their norms, values and 
traditions) cannot be reduced to the sum of individual members within them. Certain behavior does not occur 
outside of a social group’s framework. On the other hand, the individual is not the automaton of the group. 
One can say that their character is shaped by the social group but not determined by it. As a result of their 
unique history and combining of different schemata an individual’s experience has a personal quality. 
To say that individual and group processes cannot be reduced to the other, however, is not to say that they 
are independent of each other. In many ways they overlap and support one another. As already mentioned, 
Bartlett even uses the phrase ‘social schemata’ and ‘group schemata’ to refer to what in Psychology and 
Primitive Culture he called ‘cultural patterns’: ‘It may be that social conventions, institutions and traditions 
formed by persistent group tendencies constitute ‘group schemata’; just as the individual images, ideas and 
trains of thought formed by persistent interests constitute‘individual schemata’ (Bartlett, 1932, p. 299). Yet, at 
the same time, Bartlett is critical of applying certain psychological terms, such as ‘memory’, to a social group. 
Criticizing Halbwachs (1925), he argues that remembering is done in a group, not by a group (Bartlett, 1932). 
By this he meant that psychological acts are socially situated and should be interpreted as such. The locus of 
causality rests with the person making a response, not in the social group. 
This notion that mind is a social formation and yet irreducible to social processes comes close to other 
social-cultural theorists, such as Vygotsky, Mead and Janet (Rosa, 1996). Bartlett’s work is particularly 
insightful in that he offers us both a socially situated psychological theory as well as a psychologically 
informed theory of cultural dynamics. In this chapter, I have shown how these two inform each other in 
Bartlett’s thinking. This was done in part to overcome the traditional interpretation of Bartlett as a proto-
cognitive psychologist, by illustrating how his early work on cultural dynamics, to a great extent, informed his 
work on remembering, which he is most famous for. In sum, this chapter can be seen as reconstruction of 
Bartlett’s theory for the development of a culturally inclusive psychology. 
 
 
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