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The reported research uses an extension of Bartlett's method of repeated reproduction to provide data on the sociocultural processes underlying reconstructive remembering.Twenty participants worked in pairs to remember the War of the Ghosts story 15 minutes and one week after presentation. The observed transformations were comparable to previous research with individuals. Going beyond previous research, we analyse participants' discourse to provide a window on the processes underlying these transformations. Textual excerpts demonstrate how imagery, narrative coherence, deduction, repetition, gesture, questioning and deferring contribute to the transformation and conventionalization of the material. These diverse sociocultural mediators are integrated into a partially coherent recollection by participants self-reflecting, or as Bartlett termed it, turning around upon their schemas. We demonstrate that this selfreflection is both a social and a psychological process, occurring because participants are responding to their own utterances in the same way that they respond to the utterances of other people. These empirical findings are used to make a case for using discursive data to look not only at discursive processes, but also at socially situated and scaffolded psychological processes.

The claim that memory is constructive or reconstructive is no longer controversial in psychology. However, in the last decades it has generally been taken to mean that our memories are inaccurate or distorted. In the locus classicus of the constructive memory idea-Bartlett's Remembering-we find a different meaning: Constructive is there understood as a future-oriented and adaptive characteristic of remembering, which can also lead to accuracy. His notion of constructiveness was even earlier elaborated in relation to group dynamics in his book Psychology and Primitive Culture. How did we get from one meaning of constructive to another? This question is explored through a serial reproduction analysis of experiments purporting to replicate Bartlett's study. The focus is on the transformation of terminology used to describe qualitative changes introduced by subjects into reproductions. In this history a diversity of terms, coming from different intellectual sources, is gradually subsumed under the single term 'distortion'. Thus, psychologists have reconstructed Bartlett's work based on their own background, other influences and their own project for the discipline, illustrating the very constructive processes Bartlett theorized.

The concept of schema was advanced by Frederic Bartlett to provide the basis for a radical temporal alternative to traditional spatial storage theories of memory. Bartlett took remembering out of the head and situated it at the enfolding relation between organism and environment. Through an activity of “turning around upon schemata,” humans can create ruptures in their seamless flow of activity in an environment and take active control over mind and behavior. This paper contextualizes Bartlett’s concept of schema within broader theoretical developments of his time, examines its temporal dimensions in relation to embodied action and memory “reconstruction,” shows how these temporal dynamics are later abandoned by early cognitive “schema” theories which revert to the metaphor of storage, and explores strategies by which we might fruitfully bring schema back into psychology as an embodied, dynamic, temporal, holistic, and social concept.

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Castro and Batel's (2008) study points to some important strategies of resistance to social change in the transformation of transcendent to immanent representations. We contextualize this study within a broader cyclical model of social change, in which their focus is one of the four phases in the cycle. The expanded model is exemplified in the shifting representations of science communication in the UK from the `deficit model' of public understanding of science to the dialogic representation of `public engagement'. Within each of the four proposed phases, the dialectic of adoption/rejection is central, although it is modulated by strategies of resistance and the selective distribution of resources.

In the midst of a pandemic, the efficacy of official measures to mitigate the COVID-19 crisis largely depends on public attitudes towards them, where conspiracy beliefs represent potential threats to the efficacy of measures such as vaccination. Here, we present predictors and outcomes associated with a COVID-19 vaccination conspiracy belief. In a representative survey of Germany, sociodemographic predictors of this belief were found to include age, federal state, migration background and school leaving qualification. The study revealed correlations with trust in scientific and governmental information sources, respondents’ self-assessment of being informed about science, general conspiracy mindedness, the frequency of using Twitter and messaging apps, as well as willingness to voluntarily take the COVID-19 vaccine. Our results cohere with and build on the general literature on conspiracy mindedness and related factors. The findings provide an evidence base for more effective health and crisis communication in Germany and beyond.

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