Trying to remember the name of this psychological behaviour..

Factual Questions
1

In one of the classes I attended on Organizational Behavior a long long time ago, I remember one in which the professor called out the names of 10 students at random and put them in a separate neighboring room.

He then showed a picture to the rest of us. We were asked to only watch and remain quite as the experiment was conducted. He then called one of the 10 students into our room, and showed him the picture.

The student was asked to study the picture properly and memorize it as best he could.

When the student felt that he had committed it to memory, the next student was called from the experiment group, and the first student was asked to take the newcomer aside and convey the content of the picture he had memorized to the next student .

This cycle was repeated with each member of the experimental group conveying to the successive member what he had heard from the previous member about the content of the picture.

When the chain of communication was complete with the experimental group, the last member was asked to describe the picture to the rest of the class.

It was amazing to find that the description given by the last person was almost nothing like the picture at all with only about 5 percent of the actual content of the picture in his description.

I have forgotten the name of the experiment and if there is a name to this type of psychological behavior. Can someone help me with any useful links on google that deal with this subject?

2

You might consider searching on “telephone game”. You also might want to search on “conceptual filters” or “selective perception”. One theory of miscommunication is that it has to do with one’s mind filtering out what one believes is extraneous information and only relaying the most important details.

3

It is a variation of The telephone game. (link gives the psychology behind it).

4

I’ve played a telephone-like game where one person drew a picture, the next person wrote a sentence to describe it, then the next person used the sentence to draw a new picture, then the next person used the last picture to write a sentence., and so on. Sometimes the content got bizarre.

Or maybe it started with a sentence - I think it did. But you get the idea.