6 ideas
English subjects repeatedly recalled a Native American folktale about warriors and a ghostly battle, and each retelling shortened it and bent it toward their own conventions: 'canoes' became 'boats', 'hunting seals' became 'fishing', and the supernatural elements were dropped or rationalized. The story's strangeness was not preserved faithfully. It was steadily converted into something that made sense to the teller.
A schema is an active organization of past reactions and experiences that operates as a unified mass, not as a store of separate traces. New material is understood and later recalled by fitting it into this existing structure.
Recall is not the re-excitation of fixed traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction built from a general attitude toward the whole event plus a few salient details. The result is rarely exact even in simple cases, and the rememberer usually cannot tell which parts were retrieved and which were supplied.
Repeated recall changes material in predictable ways. Unfamiliar or illogical details are omitted. Puzzling elements are rationalized by adding explanations that make them coherent. Foreign forms are conventionalized into familiar cultural equivalents.
When material passes from one person to the next, as in a telephone game, the distortions pile up. The end product reveals the shared expectations of the group more than the content of the original. The version that comes out the other end shows you the culture's schemas.
People do not passively register what they see or hear. They actively strive to give it meaning by linking it to something they already know, and they often name or label it immediately. This search for meaning happens during initial perception and shapes what is encoded, so distortion starts before recall ever takes place.