In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the so-called “telephone game,” in which a whispered message travels through a chain of individuals and is eventually announced again in an altered form. What does this game reveal about communication and what else can we learn from it? (part 2 of 2, originally published 05/04/2023)
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We are heading into the vault for an older episode of the show. This is part two of the series that we did in May of twenty twenty three. This episode published on May fourth, twenty twenty three, Part two of the series on the game of telephone and related concepts about the oral transmission of information.
All right, let's dive right in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And today we are returning with part two in our series on the Telephone Game, a children's game in which a secret message is passed along from one place to the next in a chain, until finally the original message and the message that emerges at the end are both announced, so everybody can see how the information was either preserved faithfully or horribly mangled by the passing from mouth to ear so many times now, if you have not heard part one of the series, I think this is a case where you really should go back and check that one out.
First.
We lay a lout of the groundwork for what we're talking about today in the first episode, but as a brief refresher, we talked about some of our memories of these games from childhood, and we also discussed a very famous and influential series of experiments from roughly a century ago, discussed in a book by the British experimental psychologist Frederick C. Bartlett called Remembering, a Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. That book came out in nineteen thirty two. Now, the experiments described by Bartlett in this book concerned what is called serial reproduction, which is very similar to the telephone game, but involves a written component. So basically, a person would be given a text to read, and this could be anything. It could be a transcription of a folk tale, it could be a newspaper article, a passage from a book, whatever, and then that person is allowed to read it several times, and then it's taken away, and then later they are asked to reproduce the text as accurately as they could from memory. Then that reproduction would be the text given to the next person in the chain, and they would do the best they could to reproduce that from memory, and so on down the chain for an arbitrary number of reproductions. Now, what Bartlett found in these experiments was that his text based version of the telephone game in most cases produced radical, profound alterations to the original story or message. And to read from his conclusion of that chapter quote, epithets are changed into their opposites, Incidents and events are transposed, names and numbers rarely survive intact for more than a few reproductions. Opinions and conclusions are reversed. Nearly every possible variation seems as if it can take place, even in a relatively short series. So I wanted to begin today by following up on Bartlett's work, which we talked about in the last episode, because it cast a very long shadow in the study of memory and cultural transmission of information. But obviously this book is from a very long time ago, so I wanted to see whether there were any more recent scientific reviews commenting on whether his work on serial reproduction has stood the test of time and or been successfully replicated. So I found a few papers. One was actually focused on Bartlett's repeated reproduction experiments. That's where the same person tries to recall a story or piece of information at different time intervals after being exposed to it, as opposed to the serial reproduction experiments where it's given from one person to the next. But this study did briefly address the other Bartlett experiments in the background section. This paper was ken Bartlett's repeated reproduction experiments be replicated by Bergmann and Rodeger in Memory and Cognition in nineteen ninety nine, and the authors say that quote serial reproduction can often lead to dramatic distortions in recall over repeated reconstructions of the event. Although rarely used now, this experimental technique was used in later studies with results generally confirming those of Bartlett. Psychologists interested in transmission of rumors use this technique among others. And then I found another study from more recent years. This was from twenty fourteen in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition by Rodigertte a'll called Bartlett Revisited direct comparison of repeated reproduction and serial reproduction techniques, and in their review the authors say in some virtually every experiment we can find using Bartlet's serial reproduction technique confirms his observation that social transmission of information is error prone and that the more links there are in the chain, the greater the probability of error. So, putting all this together, it looks to me like subsequent research may have found some differences at the margins, but for the most part, Bartlett's findings about the telephone game process have been confirmed. When you do this particular type of experiment where one person gets to read a story and then they're supposed to repeat it as accurately as they can from memory, and you go on and on, all the different kinds of changes that we talked about in the last episode are introduced. Now there might be some important caveats based on what the genre of the information is, and we can talk about that later in this episode, But for the most part, one of my big takeaways from this is we should all be very cautious about believing rumors, even if you trust that the person directly sharing the information with you is not a liar, because this is something people always say when you know, when you hear a rumor, people say like, oh, but Johnny, who told me this isn't a liar? Why would he tell me this if it wasn't true.
M Yeah, that's a good point, though. I think the only example of rumors that you should take to the bank, the only example is going to be the of course, the eleven studio album by Fleetwood Mac, which absolutely holds up, no doubt about it.
That's just secondhand news.
There's also a track cook you also have the chain on there, so take that into account.
I do love Fleetwood Mac, but I got to ding them for a false meteorological fact that they perpetuate in one of their songs with the statement the thunder only happens when it rains. That is not true.
Yeah, absolutely incorrect. But to your point, Yeah, that's a good point on rumors. Sort of like the dark side of this this phenomenon. I really like the idea of the storytelling element and the chain of storytellers within a given oral storytelling tradition or or what have you. Like. It made me rethink and reanalyze the role of the storyteller in a given culture. You know that with each transmission of this story you may lose so many great things, but you also may gain things. It's going to introduce new ways to make this content more agreeable with an audience. More beneficial to the audience, more entertaining, though at the same time also opening it up to further manipulation so that the message of the story could also be misused.
Absolutely, I mean this is noted I think by Bartlett himself, but also in many papers I was reading about this research. So the thing is that, yes, this should make us very skeptical of the objective accuracy of much of memory and of chains of information sharing between people, especially where the whole process cannot be reviewed with a fixed record, Because the crucial element of this here is that you only have to work with what the previous person told you. It's a totally different thing if like it's all done, maybe it's all done in writing or somehow it's all recorded, and you can go back and review what the story was at each point in its history. But for this type of information sharing, yes it should make a skeptical about objective accuracy in reproduction of the original. But this doesn't mean that the way people process information and serial transmission is bad. It just means that you shouldn't rely on it to get objective accurate accounts. It may not be good for that purpose, but it's good for other things. It's great for creating culture, for enlivening art and narrative across time, and making it always newly relevant, for maintaining friendship and social bonds, for teaching applicable lessons in everyday life. In fact, several papers I was reading pointed out that in fact, this combination of conservation and distortion of information at the same time through transmission from person to person could be viewed as metaphorically similar to the combination of conservation and distortion in biological evolution. Life can only exist on Earth where there is the appropriate balance of conservation and distortion of genetic information. So genetic traits are heritable and they're passed on from one generation of organisms to another. But species survive in a changing environment because they're able to adapt and evolve, and they're able to adapt and evolve when mutations distortions of that genetic information prove beneficial to them. Though it's interesting to note, I think that the error rate is probably much higher in the transmission of most genres of verbal information than it is for genetic information and organisms. Like in life, accurate transmission of genes is the norm and mutations are the exception. When we're telling stories to each other or repeating something we read in the newspaper to a friend. In that kind of verbal memory based transmission, mutations are much more than norm But at the same time, I think about how there I guess there is a higher survival tolerance there, Like a single harmful mutation can prove fatal to a bacterium. But how does that work in the analogy for transmitting information. Is it possible that one memory error could kill a piece of information and prevent it from spreading further?
I guess so, you know, like the example of the story of the ghost Battle the Ghost Warriors in the last episode. You know, like sometimes if certain details, certain descriptions, certain narrative choices are removed, like you can take the heart out of a particular story, a particular myth, and could impact the degree to which people want to pass it on or need to pass it on.
That's a good point. Yes, This thing that Bartlett noticed where certain details this is he called the leveling process, where individualizing characteristics and stylistic details from a story are stripped out as they are reproduced by people who don't remember them because they deem them inessential, not realizing that the soul of the story lies in those details. The fact that those details are now missing could make the story so uninteresting to the person who hears it that they would never share it again. That's a good point, But wait a minute. I wanted to come back to something I started saying a minute ago, this thing about believing rumors, where people are often inclined to believe a rumor because they don't want to believe the individual person who shared the rumor with them is a liar. And I think that that is such a misguided mentality because, first of all, and less related to the experimental findings we're talking about here, the person who shared the rumor with you may not be a liar, but you know less about the person who shared the rumor with them, and who that person heard it from, etc. You can't usually inspect the entire chain of transmission, only the person you're directly getting it from. More relevant to today's topic, it's absolutely clear from these experiments that massive distortions of original source material can creep into human transmission chains, even when the person isn't a liar. When they're not trying to distort it, they're trying as best they can to accurately reproduce it. And that's in cases where the person is not personally invested in the subject matter, where they have no incentive to exaggerate, and they're just trying to reproduce the material as best they can. How much worse will things be in the real world? Will distortions be when like somebody is personally invested in the material, maybe in it presenting a certain way, when they do have incentives to exaggerate or otherwise distort the material, whether that's to maybe make it more entertaining, more impressive, more illustrative of a point they want to make, or whatever, and when they're not necessarily conscious of being scrutinized for accuracy.
Yeah, so there are all these different types of unconscious chain an event, of course, intentional changes that can take place, and the result is that some details in the story or the rumor or what have you, some will change, some will remain, and there will also be a sharpening of things, you know, like an exaggeration. But what does it all mean? I was looking at a handful of papers discussing transmission chain experiments and the transmission of urban legends and other stories, which I thought seems like a really good area to look at because a lot of times urban legends, especially, I mean, we're not talking about literature, we're not talking about myths, where they often kind of come out of nowhere, and the way in which we pass them on sometimes feels more akin to like older oral storytelling traditions.
Well, right, because the case with urban myths is you at least usually assume that they were created by many minds. You know, they're the product of this transmission chain, rather than say, being originally written down in a fixed form one person and then other people have tried to replicate it across time, though in fact there are variation, Like some urban legends do come from books. That's a funny thing that pops up occasionally, like it was originally a story somebody wrote that was published in a sci fi magazine somewhere, and then it got turned into an urban legend and morphed along along the chain.
Yeah. And of course, speaking of the chain, we have to acknowledge the email chain of technology changes things. Technology ends up bringing us a scenario we're end up with things like pasta, creepy pasta and so forth, where it's something that is as the name alludes, to generally just copied and pasted, though sometimes there are augmentations made, and then of course everyone has received it, or at least in times past. I don't know if this is still a thing so much, but when a family member forwards you an email and it has some sort of perhaps an unbelievable quality to it, some sort of tall tail or urban legend at the heart of it. But nothing has changed except for the string of forwards that are at the top of it, where you can see all these people that have passed it on like a chain letter.
But if I don't forward this, I'm going to look in the mirror and see a ghost and it will kill me.
That's right, in seven days. So one of the papers I was looking at was from Storytelling to Facebook by Alberto Rcibi, published in Human Nature in twenty twenty two. This particular paper utilized a registered online pair of studies, one using a traditional transmission chain set up, and the other asking subjects whether they would be likely to share a story on social media or with friends in a anonymous or attributed status.
So I thought this was really interesting. So, if I'm understanding right, the author wanted to compare different types of information sharing in the modern era one is more like the experiments we've been talking about, where somebody has to pass along the story effortfully by like using their memory to retell the story as they understand it, like in the Bartlet experiments, versus the technology assisted passing along of a story passively in its original unaltered form. You know, you just click the button to share, so you're not actually changing it in that case, you are just deciding whether or not you want this same original piece of media to go to all of the people following you.
Yeah. Yeah, So just some of the very quick sort of findings from this. First of all, negative content was both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more than its neutral counterpart.
That should not be surprising based on all the studies of what does well online negative content works.
Yeah. Next, threat related information was successful in transmission chain experiments, but not when sharing straight up. So that's that's interesting as well, and again kind of matches up with what we we tend to understand about, you know, why we pass something on, why we would we would tell someone a particular story. And then finally, information eliciting disgust was not advantaged in either which which is interesting.
That's surprising to me. But okay, I.
Guess you know some people. I guess maybe it depends on the population. Again, this is this is a small study, but it does seem like there would be individuals who are like, hey, I got a disgusting story I need to tell you listen to me. But but maybe other's not so much, or maybe it's like the disgusting thing that we might might be the thing we sort of focus on, Like, maybe it's ultimately something about it being negative or something about it being threat related that is more important to the transmission than merely the discuss Now, the author points out that content biases are strongest when memorization and reproduction aren't involved in the transmission of information, as in the telephone game and the traditional oral transmission of narratives. Now, another paper I was looking at pointed out some other great ideas related to this. It's titled serial Killers, Spiders and Cybersex, Social and Survival Information by us in the Transmission of Urban Legends by stubbards Field at All, published in the British Journal of Psychology in twenty fourteen. Okay, oh y, that's great time. The authors point out that when we take in information and retell it, various cognitive selection pressures kick in to make sure it's maximally transmittable. This can alter structure, it can alter content, and transmissibility depends on three factors salience, accuracy of recall, and motivation to pass it on.
Okay, so can you explain that.
The way I was thinking about is in terms of like, all right, you've heard a good joke and you want to retell that joke. Why do you want to retell that joke? Is it good? Is it notable? Is it attention grabbing in any way? Can you actually remember the beats well enough to retell it? And then why are you retelling it? Is? Is it timely? Is it entertaining? Is it particularly cutting? Are you just trying to create a distraction? You know, dot sort of lift the mood. All of this matters without any of us having to actively check these boxes off in our head. We don't have to actually think like, all right, can I read? Because Lord knows, plenty of people launch into a joke without trying to, without making sure that they can actually retell all the necessary beats first. But also you're not necessarily you know, conscious of all of this. As you're about to retell.
Something, the horse goes into the doctor's office has a long face. The horse says, why is my face like this? I don't remember the rest.
Yeah, yeah, but still, it's like you're taking a joke or some other bit of information. If it ends with you, there's a reason, and if you pass it on, there's a reason as well. So the first and third factors here, salience and motivation, depend on social information bias and survival information bias. In other words, coming back to the joke or say an urban legend, does the thing you were passing on contain to any degree social information or survival information?
Hmm okay, Yeah.
It's really interesting to think about this because indeed, some of the memorable ideas out there, be they jokes, urban legends, or what have you, at least seem to have some sort of social revelation or commentary baked into them, and or some sort of information that seems to contain a lesson on how to survive in the world. I mean, you're not necessarily processing this. You're not thinking like, oh, this is a good urban legend. I can use this, This might save my life tomorrow. You might not be thinking that, but that could be like the reason that you're inclined to remember it.
I think a lot of the jokes that people find the funniest are ones that make a playfully negative observation about general human nature. Yes, classic example, the two hunters in the woods they see a bear charging at them. One kneels down to tie his shoes. His friend says, why are you tying your shoes. You can't outrun a bear. The guy tying his shoes says, I don't have to outrun a bear, I just have to outrun you.
Yeah. Yeah, So you can look at examples like this. There are also various parables and co EN's that really zing because they seem to reveal something about human nature. Likewise, you can also point to a lot of negative examples, things that contain disinformation or just hurtful ideas or stereotypes, but true or not, they seem to have some sort of social information. Now, on the survival information front, the first place my mind went to was the old urban legend of hey, don't flash your lights your car lights at another car that doesn't have its lights on, because you know what's going on. This is a murder gang initiation. There are gang members in that car. They're intentionally riding around without their headlights on, and if you flash your lights at them, you may think you're generally reminding them that they need to turn their lights on. They but know it'll be on and they will come and kill you.
So this allegedly has survival information. You need to know this. If you don't know this, you could die.
Right. It seems to be important on some level and then gets transmitted and passed on. It of course completely false. This was as an urban legend that began in the nineteen eighties, has no truth to it, though at times got passed on by reputable and semi reputable sources. But again, it seems to have survival information inside of it, and therefore there's a stickiness to it.
That makes sense.
Okay, Now back to the paper itself. They conducted a very small study but found quote legends which contained social information, social type legends which contained survival information survival type, and legends which contained both forms of information combined type were all recalled with significantly greater accuracy than control material, while social and combined type legends were recalled with significantly greater accuracy than survival type legend.
Well counterintuitive? Is it maybe that social and combined beats out survival. I am not really surprised by that, because I don't know what is the what is the juiciest type of information that if you hear a little snippet of you've got to lean in and find out more. It's gossip about people, it's you know, it's not people talking about life threatening situations. You might lean in and want to hear more about life threatening situations, But even more so, it's if you hear like, oh man, did you hear what Johnny said to say? And then like you have to hear the rest of that.
Yeah, like the whole thing about gang members driving around in cars without their lights on. Yeah, there's the survival last aspect of it, certainly, But there is also at least, and I'm not I didn't look at any specific examples of the text. I'm just kind of remembering it. There's it's at least implied that there's some sort of social information about like reckless youth culture or punk gangs, or there's some sort of racial connotation to it. That's all just kind of baked into the idea. Even if they are not specific examples added in its transmission.
Yes, like pings on a lot of different unhealthy fixations people might have.
So anyway, I thought that was interesting. It also I would be interested to hear from listeners out there if they have other examples of the sort of like urban legend transmission. I think there's a lot to reveal in these examples.
Well, speaking of urban legends, I also wanted to talk briefly about a study I was looking at that concerned urban legends and folk tales. And so this was by ost at All published in the journal Memory very recently in twenty twenty two, and the title was the Serial Reproduction of an Urban Myth revisiting Bartlett's schema theory. So the title makes reference to Bartlett's schema theory. This is an idea proposed by Bartlett that memory is more accurate when it conforms to what he called our schema, meaning a sort of an existing body of knowledge and expectations that we use to help store memory efficiently and make sense of the world. And so according to this theory, not all information is distorted at the same rate the author's right quote. According to the logic of Bartlett's schema theory remembering should, in relation to certain kinds of material, be relatively reliable, and so the authors here investigate the reliability of Bartlett style serial reproduction chains by modulating two different variables. First of all, whether the original information fits with the subject's familiar cultural schema or not, and whether the audience of their retelling was understood to be quote lean or strict. And I thought both of these variables were interesting because they both came up in Bartlett's discussion of his own work. One of the things he was testing with the famous example of that story, the War of the Ghosts, which again this is when we discussed in episode one. This is a translated adaptation of a Native American folk tale that in its original form is we found very haunting and beautiful and interesting, but it doesn't conform to common expectations of storytelling that might be expected by a Western audience. And thus Bartlett featured it because he thought that these differences in storytelling conventions and the subjects lack of familiarity with the cultural context of the story would make it more difficult for them to remember and reproduce it accurately, and that did seem to be the case. But here the authors of this study wanted to actually compare that directly with a much more culturally familiar story, and in this case they chose the vanishing hitchhiker. Rob Do you know the vanishing hitchhiker tail?
Oh, I don't know. Is this the one? Or the hook? No?
No, no, no, no not the hook? A hook is a good one too, the vanishing hitchhiker. There are a lot of different variations, but usual contours are the same. So maybe there is a man driving along a lonely highway at night and he sees a hitchhiker, a woman who appears to be in distress. She's asking for a ride. Walking on the side of the highway. She asks him for a ride, He picks her up. They have a brief conversation as he drives her to the address she asks for, and then when he arrives, he turns to find she has vanished entirely from the car. And then he later often compares his story with somebody else He tells this, you know, he's like. He gets home and says, oh, you wouldn't believe it. I picked up this woman to give her a ride home, and then she disappeared completely, and then the person he's talking to says, I've driven her home as well. She also disappears from my car.
Oh nice, nice, nice. So this is like an automobile age sort of take on the classic ghost story where you find out after the fact that this mysterious person who vanished is a frequently occurring ghost exactly. Now.
It might have earlier analogs, but I think most people would interpret this as like a twentieth century folk tale.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, clearly involves the car, the hitch hiker. It's new for a new age.
So the authors of the study, first they did a pilot study to compare these two stories, the War of the Ghosts and the Vanishing hitch Hiker within to determine how schema friendly these two stories were in the cultural setting of the experiment, which was twenty first century college undergrads. I believe in the UK, So again always testing with the college students, but okay, you know, you at least want to find out among the general population that is being tested in this study, how familiar would these two different types of stories be. And familiarity here doesn't just mean like have you heard this story before? They measured it along a bunch of different variables, and those variables were familiarity of the setting, what the readers perceived to be the logical structure, the clarity of the structure, how understandable the events in the story were, and how conventional the language was. So I think this is generally a good way of approaching it, finding a bunch of different ways of scoring, like when a person in the study encounters a particular story, how out of their element do they feel? And perhaps not surprisingly, participants here rated the Vanishing Hitchhiker as much more familiar along these dimensions than the War of the Ghosts. No surprise there, and so they tried to do the serial reproduction experiments like Bartlett did with these two different stories, and in line with their hypothesis, they found that while participants in the experimental portion of the study came up with enormous distortions while attempting to transmit the War of the Ghosts, they produced comparatively very accurate copies from memory of the Vanishing Hitchhiker. And I thought that was very interesting. It would seem to validate some part of the scheme of theory, the idea that stories that fit more in the box of our cultural expectations, are remembered and preserved more accurately and more easily than stories that somehow don't fit our expectations or don't behave in familiar ways that are easy for us to understand.
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean also can't help but think that, like the basic hitchhiker scenario, the experience of picking up a hitchhiker, I guess it's something that I mean a lot of people have never done this, maybe even more so today, but you've seen it in movies, you've seen it heard it in stories. So the basic scenario is pretty much like culturally intact. And then this is a supernatural twist on that that you know, I guess it doesn't particularly have survival information or social and information. To go back to that earlier study, I mean, it's not implied that the ghost is harmful, but it's like there's something about the everyday quality of it, like you're saying, like it's very relatable. It's relatable to this reality of modern life.
So this is totally a tangent off of what we're talking about. But I would almost say that there is somehow implied social and survival information in any ghost story. Even though it's hard to express what that social or survival information is, it might have something to do with proof of the afterlife. You know, something about life after death, and the experience of any ghost has some kind of inherent survival type value to us, and ghosts are usually understood to have some kind of message to the living, which has a kind of gossip or social information quality to it. At least that's my take.
Yeah, and I guess you could also make an argument that the hitchhiker was not what they seemed, they were a ghost. This is basically just a supernatural twist on the hitchhiker was not what they seemed, which could arguably have survival and social commentary within it right in a more mundane way, like you know, you know that there's some sort of criminal threat there or something or some sort of unknown that one should be wary of. And this is just taking a mundane threat and transforming it into a supernatural threat on some level. Because you don't what a ghost in your car, you don't know what's gonna happen.
They might get ectoplasm on your passenger seat.
Yeah, they might scare you. I mean We've all heard enough ghost stories that don't involve automobiles to know it can go any number of ways. Your hitchhiker vanishes, you finally pull over the gas station, and then bam, hook on the outside handle of the car.
That's a good twist. At first it's a ghost, she vanishes, but then she reappears with a hook.
Yeah.
Okay, but here's another interesting twist on what they found in this study. So remember the first variable was, you know, does familiarity with the story, whether the story fits in the box of your cultural expectations, does that affect how well you can remember and transmit it. Answer is yes, it does. If the story fits in the box, it's easier for you to remember and transmit it. The other thing is does the implied audience of the story matter. They were testing the hypothesis that a listener understood as strict in terms of expecting accuracy would produce more accurate recall than one understood as lenient. So the way they did this was, on one hand, they said, okay, reproduce this story for a friend. Here's the story for you to memorize. Now you need to reproduce it and tell it to a friend. Second option is reproduce this and tell it to a police officer. Well, that changes a lot, yes, And they found this did indeed matter for one type of story more than the other. So they say recall was better for a strict audience than a lenient audience. People did remember better when talking to the cop, but this only really applied to one of the story, So recall was more accurate when talking to the cop for the familiar story the Vanishing Hitchhiker, but recall seemed to be equally bad for the War of the Ghosts. The having a strict cop listening to your recounting did not really improve recall for the story that was more difficult to remember anyway, which I don't know. I guess you could interpret that multiple ways. But that makes me wonder if, well, you know, when you're talking to a friend, it signals you're you're probably just not putting that much effort into being strictly accurate in reproducing a story, even when in cases when you could be, so the case with the familiar story that's easier to reproduce, but when you're trying to reproduce an unfamiliar story that doesn't really fit with your schema it is, it's sort of impossible to do even if you're putting that extra effort.
In Yeah, I mean, I guess in speaking to a police officer about your ghost story, did something about it should be actionable, right, Like, even if it's not a ghost story, Like, if you're telling a police officer about it, it must be because you want the police to do something. And therefore that I guess could impact your attention to details and so forth.
But anyway, at the end today, I wanted to come back to something we talked about earlier in the episode, which has emphasize my feeling that there are two sides to the coin and they're both true. One is that serial reproduction of information between people, you know, information passing along the grapevine between people should not be relied upon as representing what that information was accurately at the beginning. You just should not trust that. And at the same time, you should not think about serial reproduction or transmission chains as they occur in human culture as bad. It's part of what culture is and it provides a lot of good things. It provides a lot of the entertainment and the learning and the spice of life, even if it does not objectively accurately usually preserve the information from the beginning of the chain.
See. This is all great stuff that I think should have been included in the elementary school telephone games that does so many of us play.
Well, I don't know, I mean, it kind of is all there. Like the game, you recognize that the message doesn't make it to the end intact, so you get a lesson there like, oh, don't believe everything you hear. But also the game is fun and the fun comes from the failure.
Fail and distort. This is how you amuse yourself. This is the lesson to the telephone game I get. But it is really revealing. Like I said, I just didn't think about it much when I was a kid playing this game. But yeah, when you looking at these studies and discussing, you know, the out effects of transmission of rumors and myths and legends, urban legends, et cetera. Yeah, it really gets fascinating.
Another thing I was thinking about was how when we talk about rumors, I feel like we still often have an understanding of this being entirely word of mouth, just like one person talking to another and then that person talking to the next person. But it seems to me the much more common route of rumors today involves some kind of media in between there. So it may go like a word of mouth from one person to the next, and then to the internet to a written form, and then somebody reading that piece of information on the Internet, and then telling somebody in person, and then them posting on the internet and reading it. So you're also having these media changes back and forth that are not really showing up quite so much in at least any of the experiments we've looked at, because all of them either went you know, they either go entirely oral or entirely text based.
Yeah, that's a good point. I should also just remind everyone probably don't go to the police with your ghost story. I'm just maybe exceptions to that rule, you know, use your best judgment. But it's also hard for me to get past that idea of just like I think I saw a ghost, bet I called the police.
I disagree. I think you should only call the police with your ghost story.
Hmm, agree to disagree.
I'm kidding. Do not call nine one one and tie up the phone lines with your ghost story.
Yes, tell a friend, tell a close friend. All right, We're gonna go ahead and close out this episode, but we'll be back on Tuesday. So you know, hey, keep writing into us because on Mondays we do listener mail and then we do our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form Monster Factor Artifact episode, and Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with this with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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