The Copying Experiment

     Today I am going to describe an experiment I did periodically with some of my college classes over the years. I did it enough times that I think I got a good sample, at least for my purposes. At any rate, I saw a lot of variation in how the students did the exercises.

     First, I drew a made-up symbol on a card, something scribbly, but not so complex that it couldn’t be remembered at all. I showed one student the card with this mark on it for three seconds, then I asked him to try to copy it from memory.  I then took the card the first student had drawn on to another and repeated the instructions.  When the symbol had been sufficiently mutated but was still recognizable I put the cards on the chalk ledge of the blackboard, but not in order. I asked someone not involved yet to try and place them in the order in which they were done.  Most of the time, the students were quickly accurate in their ordering of the series.

      The next part of the exercise is meant to make them realize something in connection with the first part. I drew a casual pentagram on the board and asked everyone to copy “Exactly what they saw” before I erased it. When they had all "copied" my star, I took several of the cards from a random selection of students and displayed them.  Everyone’s star was different, but they were all recognizable as stars. No one had tried to draw my star exactly, but instead they all relied on their previously installed memes for “how to make a pentagram.”  Except for one, who relied on her previously installed meme for drawing a Star of David. Very carefully, I asked the woman who drew it if she had thought consciously about drawing a six pointed star, or if she had even noticed that my star was five-pointed. She thought for a minute and said, “I just drew a star after I saw you had drawn one, just like everyone else. Mine just came out the way I always draw them.”

     This was the only time that happened, but of course this was not the only time that a Jewish student participated in the exercise.  Significant to the evaluation of this variation was the age of the woman, who was in her early fifties, in contrast with most of the undergraduates who were twenty-somethings. I think we could say that she had a different meme for “drawing a star” than anyone else in class. This inspired me to look closer at all the ways the kids “wrote” their pentagrams.  Another time I asked several students to go to the board and make a star without thinking about it. We watched for similarities and differences in the way they did it. Everyone started at the top and drew the first line down to the left, even the left-handers.  The stars all looked a bit different, but in the way that everyone’s cursive letters look a little different.  The “instructions for making a star” meme had become an unconscious motion for them, in the same way that we don’t have to think of each word as we speak, even though we had to “learn” each word at some point in the past.

     There are several points demonstrated in this exercise. Our ingrained cultural habits become unconscious and influence the way we see and remember. Shapes that we learned through “instructions” are more stable, and the resulting uniformity makes them easier to copy. Left-handers learn to do some things the right-handed way. The order in which slight variations appear between “generations” of copying can be reconstructed.

     Now, students, you tell me: What does all this have to do with the study of history?