Frederic Bartlett

For other people of the same name, see Frederick Bartlett.

Frederic Bartlett
Born	20 October 1886
Died	30 September 1969 (age 82)
Nationality	British
Fields	psychology
Institutions	University of Cambridge
Known for	memory schema (psychology)
Notable awards	Fellow of the Royal Society

Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett FRS (20 October 1886 – 30 September 1969) was a British psychologist and the first professor of experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge. He was one of the forerunners of cognitive psychology. However, while Bartlett considered his own work on cognitive psychology, especially remembering, to be a study in social psychology more recent developments have individualised his concepts.

One study involved the cognitive and social processes of remembering. He would recite short fables which comprised a sequence of events which were subtly illogical, then ask subjects to recall as much of it as possible. Most people had difficulty recalling the story exactly, especially where the elements failed to fit into their own schemata.

The U.K. Ergonomics Society awards a Bartlett medal in his honour, and the Experimental Psychology Society holds an annual Bartlett Lecture.

Biography

Bartlett studied moral science at St John's College, Cambridge as an undergraduate before joining the staff of the then Cambridge Psychological Laboratory. He took up his chair in 1931 and held it until his retirement in 1951. With Kenneth Craik he was responsible for setting up the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Research Unit (APU) at Cambridge in 1944, becoming Director of the unit after Craik's early death in 1945.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1932 (a rare distinction for a psychologist), and knighted in 1948 for services to the Royal Air Force, on the basis of his wartime work in applied psychology. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958.

One of his most famous studies was on the cognitive and social processes of remembering. He retrieved a series of short fables (the best known was the Native American fable called The War of the Ghosts), each of which comprised a sequence of events which were ostensibly logical but subtly illogical, and there were several discreet non-sequiturs. He would recite this story to subjects, then later (sometimes much later) ask them to recall as much of it as possible. He discovered that most people found it extremely difficult to recall the story exactly, even after repeated readings, and hypothesised that, where the elements of the story failed to fit into the schemata of the listener, these elements were omitted from the recollection, or transformed into more familiar forms.

Honours

In 1948 Bartlett was invited to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture on The Mind at Work and Play.

The U.K. Ergonomics Society awards a Bartlett medal in his honour, and the Experimental Psychology Society holds an annual Bartlett Lecture.

Books

• Exercises in logic (Clive, London, 1922)
• Psychology and primitive culture (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1923)
• Psychology and the soldier (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1927)
• Remembering (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1932)
• The problem of noise (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1934)
• Political propaganda (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1940)
• Religion as experience, belief, action (Cumberledge, London, 1950)
• The mind at work and play (Allen and Unwin, London, 1951)
• Thinking (Allen and Unwin, 1958)

Bibliography

• Johnston, E. B. (2001). "The repeated reproduction of Bartlett's Remembering". History of Psychology 4 (4): 341–366. doi:10.1037/1093-4510.4.4.341. PMID 11763888. 

External links

• Sir Frederic Bartlett Archive
• History of the Applied Psychology Unit
• Full text of The War of the Ghosts
• Bartlett in the digital age
• Complete bibliography
• Photographs