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EXPERIMENT
The
Telephone Game (Or Chinese Whispers):
This
game shows how stories can change when they travel by word
of mouth, sometimes taking on a whole new meaning. The more
people the story is passed down to and the longer the time
between story telling, the greater it might change.
Have
a group of people sit in a circle. The first person thinks
of a message and whispers it to the person on her right. That
person then passes it along to the person on his right and
so on. This continues until the message gets back to the person
who started it. She then says the message aloud in its original
form and the way it was whispered to her by the person on
her left. Has it changed? You can do this with short and long
messages; the longer they are, the more likely they will change.
This game shows how imperfect our memories are, how urban
legends and rumors can get started and of course, how our
hearing can be fooled.
The
results of the game show why "hearsay" evidence
is not admissible in a court of law. Hearsay is when you're
repeating what you've heard someone say and as this experiment
shows, it can often be inaccurate.
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