Bartlett, F. C.
Bartlett, F. C.
F. C. Bartlett was born in 1886 at Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire. He was educated privately and at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he came under the influence of W. H. R. Rivers, the physician, anthropologist, and psychologist. Bartlett’s early leanings were toward anthropology, in which he retained a lifelong interest, but circumstances led him to a career in psychology. In 1922 Bartlett succeeded C. S. Myers as director of the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory and nine years later became the first professor of experimental psychology in the university, a post that he held until his retirement, in 1952. Bartlett was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1932 and was knighted in 1948. He received honorary doctorates from the universities of Athens, Louvain, London, and Edinburgh and from Princeton and Oxford.
Bartlett’s early work was concerned chiefly with perception and memory, and for this he owed a good deal to the influence of James Ward. In his work on memory, Bartlett was quick to see that the conditions of psychological study must be as lifelike as possible if light is to be thrown on the realities of human behavior. For this reason he rejected the use of artificially simplified material, of the kind introduced by Ebbinghaus, and arranged his experimental conditions to approximate as closely as possible those of everyday life. Although this involved some sacrifice in quantitative precision, it led to an important gain in psychological realism. Bartlett’s methods and results were brought together in his noteworthy book Remembering—published in 1932—which had wide influence.
The main thesis of Bartlett’s study is that remembering cannot properly be regarded as a reproductive process. He pointed out that much use is made of inference and judgment, with the result that what is remembered may come to differ remarkably from the events as originally experienced. Typically, the original experiences undergo extensive changes governed by factors of interest, emotion, and cultural background. Indeed, Bartlett went so far as to speak of recall as a reconstructive rather than as a reproductive process, placing particular emphasis on the unwitting alterations in memory brought about by habit and social convention. This inevitably led him to explore the social background of memory and its dependence on cultural elements. Indeed, the view that no psychological response, at least above the level of sensation, can be profitably studied in isolation from its social context has always been central to Bartlett’s thinking.
Bartlett’s interest in anthropological issues is even more explicit in an earlier, if less important, book entitled Psychology and Primitive Culture (1923), the aim of which was to provide a ground-work of basic psychological principles applicable to the study of society, primitive or not so primitive. Throughout, Bartlett stressed that the underlying psychological mechanisms determining group activity remain the same at all levels of social development, advanced societies being characterized principally by the number and diversity of their component social groupings. He was therefore led to seek an analysis of group processes in terms of a relatively small number of basic human tendencies (in particular, comradeship, assertiveness, and submission ) and to trace their expression and inter-action in social groups at various levels of complexity. In opposition to the view of Lévy-Bruhl and others, Bartlett insisted that there is no true antithesis between primitive and civilized man, but that primitive culture, in virtue of its relative simplicity, forms the best introduction to the psychology of contemporary social life.
Although Bartlett produced no subsequent work of major proportions in social psychology, a number of the themes expressed or foreshadowed in his earlier writings are taken further in later papers. In a paper on “Psychological Methods and Anthropological Problems” (1937), he returned to the contribution that quite simple methods of psycho-logical measurement—even the determination of sensory thresholds—might make to our understanding of cultural differences. At the same time, he came out strongly against the use of intelligence tests, which he felt lacked adequate theoretical foundation. Unaccompanied by any investigation of temperament, character, and personality, and devised without reference to the pattern of culture under inquiry, such tests might, he urged, give seriously misleading results. This warning was repeated, on the basis of wartime experience of personnel selection, in a Maudsley lecture on “Intelligence as a Social Problem” (1947b). Bartlett returned on several occasions (e.g., 1939; 1943a) to the general relations between psychology and anthropology, invariably stressing the extent of common ground, the promise of interdisciplinary inquiry, and the need for greater precision in research method.
Although the extent of Bartlett’s interest in the social sciences was remarkable, it is his work as an experimental psychologist that has the highest claims to distinction. While his earlier work on memory remains his best-known single contribution, he was later responsible for initiating new and fruitful work on the analysis of human skill, much of it prompted by practical issues arising in the course of World War ii. This work, it is true, owed much to the singular genius of his gifted pupil K. J. W. Craik, 1914–1945, but Bartlett was responsible for many of the guiding ideas and for the general development of the research program. He laid particular stress on the need to study not only the final level of performance, that is, the degree of skill achieved, but also the timing, grouping, and stability of the component responses involved in the performance itself (1947a). This emphasis on the detailed structure of human skill made possible a new and important analysis of the effects of fatigue and other adverse circumstances upon high-level motor activity (1943b). Bartlett’s ideas were given experimental substance by his many pupils, who used methods a great deal more sophisticated than had been attempted before in the laboratory. Although much of the detailed work was undertaken by others, Bartlett’s leadership may be said to have opened a new chapter in British experimental psychology.
Bartlett’s book Thinking (1958), published after his retirement from the Cambridge chair, may be regarded as in some respects a natural sequel to Remembering. Again Bartlett stressed the constructive character of higher mental processes and their close relation to social activities. The book takes its departure, however, less from the earlier work on memory than from the more recent studies of human skilled performance. In Bartlett’s view, thinking can properly be regarded as a high-level skill, sharing with bodily skill many of its most characteristic properties. With a wealth of pertinent illustration, some of it experimentally derived, Bartlett outlined the ways in which processes of interpolation and extrapolation play their part in thinking and how thinking comes to acquire its directional properties. Characteristically, he added chapters on adventurous thinking, as displayed more especially in the original thinking of artists and scientists. He also devoted attention to everyday thinking of the kind that governs decision in regard to current social issues. Although it presents no new theory, the book provides an original and stimulating approach to some of the most recalcitrant problems in experimental psychology.
Bartlett’s work combines a belief in experimental method with a degree of imagination rare in contemporary psychology. Although he advanced no theory of sufficient precision to command general acceptance and founded no school built around a systematic approach to psychological issues, his originality, enterprise, and wise guidance have had a remarkable influence on the development of experimental psychology in Great Britain. In particular, his concern for the social application of psychology has ensured the development of the field into a responsible discipline in close contact with practical reality. As a teacher, his strong yet gentle personality and his exceptional tolerance and modesty endeared him to successive generations of students of psychology at Cambridge. His work touched contemporary science at many points and left its mark on the wider stage of public life in Britain.
O. L. Zangwill
[For the historical context of Bartlett’s work, see the biographies ofLÉvy-Bruhl; Rivers; Ward, James. For discussion of the subsequent development of his ideas, seeCreativity; Forgetting; Gestalt theory; Thinking.]
WORKS BY BARTLETT
1916 An Experimental Study of Some Problems of Perceiving and Imaging. British Journal of Psychology 8:222–267.
1923 Psychology and Primitive Culture. Cambridge Univ. Press; New York: Macmillan.
1925 Feeling, Imaging and Thinking. British Journal of Psychology 16:16–28.
1932 Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge Univ. Press; New York: Macmillan.
1936 F. C. Bartlett. Volume 3, pages 39–52 in Carl Murchison (editor), A History of Psychology in Autobiography. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Univ. Press; Oxford Univ. Press.
1937 Psychological Methods and Anthropological Problems. Africa 10:401–420.
1939 Suggestion for Research in Social Psychology. Pages 24–45 in F. C. Bartlett et al. (editors), The Study of Society: Methods and Problems. London: Routledge; New York: Macmillan.
1943a Anthropology in Reconstruction: The Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1943. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 73:9–16.
1943b Fatigue Following Highly Skilled Work. Royal Society of London, Proceedings Series B 131:247–257.
1947a The Measurement of Human Skill: Oliver-Sharpey Lecture. British Medical Journal 1:835–877.
1947b The Twentieth Maudsley Lecture: Intelligence as a Social Problem. Journal of Mental Science 93:1–8. → Now called the British Journal of Psychiatry.
1958 Thinking: An Experimental and Social Study. London: Allen & Unwin.