The Constructive Mind
Bartlett's Psychology in Reconstruction

An integrative study of Frederic Bartlett's work and legacy, describing his fundamental ideas of constructive remembering, schema and cultural dynamics.

Brady Wagoner (Author)

9781108729697, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 January 2019

239 pages, 10 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.1 x 0.7 cm, 0.36 kg

'… the book is a very broad and interesting presentation of Bartlett as a theoretician who combined psychology with anthropology a century ago. The combination of the historical and the presentist aims is successful …' Csaba Pléh, Culture & Psychology

The Constructive Mind is an integrative study of the psychologist Frederic Bartlett's (1886–1969) life, work and legacy. Bartlett is most famous for the idea that remembering is constructive and for the concept of schema; for him, 'constructive' meant that human beings are future-oriented and flexibly adaptive to new circumstances. This book shows how his notion of construction is also central to understanding social psychology and cultural dynamics, as well as other psychological processes such as perceiving, imagining and thinking. Wagoner contextualises the development of Bartlett's key ideas in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries. Furthermore, he applies Bartlett's constructive analysis of cultural transmission in order to chart how his ideas were appropriated and transformed by others that followed. As such this book can also be read as a case study in the continuous reconstruction of ideas in science.

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The life and work of a Cambridge psychologist
2. Experiments in psychology
3. Cultural diffusion and reconstruction
4. The concept of schema in reconstruction
5. The social psychology of remembering
6. Thinking about thinking
Conclusion: from past to future
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], Psychology [JM], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]