Repeated reproduction: Back to Bartlett. A French replication of narrative and an extension to proverbs

Abstract

The objective of this article is to replicate, for the first time in the French language, an original experiment of F.C. Bartlett (1920, 1932/1997) with the same narrative he used: “The War of the Ghosts”. Work on proverbs describes it as a matter socially elaborate calling on a practical thought. Thereby, in addition, this article proposes to study proverbs from a psychosocial point of view by using the method of repeated reproduction. Even if the proverb and the story are similar in their characteristics, they differ in their lengths and when one uses more the implicit, the other uses more the metaphor. The third objective is the comparison between memory processes for the proverb and the story. Eighteen dyads met twice to reconstruct their memories of these materials. The results highlight the importance of the cultural dimension in reconstructing memory and confirm that the strangeness of the proverb and narrative complicates their understanding. They also reveal similarities and differences in the processes of reconstructing the narrative through the different replicas of the original experiment.