"The War of the Ghosts" story had many references to the supernatural which is unusual for the English society. When asked to repeat the story, Bartlett found that many of the participants left out the parts of the story that were hardest to understand. They also included new aspects that were not in the original story, their own feelings towards the story, and sometimes the story was reordered. Bartlett concluded that all these distortions of the story were generally subconsciously done to make the story easier to understand from an English view, and to fit into an existing schema. .
However, Bartlett's studies were regarded as badly conducted and not designed well. Brewer and Treyens (1981) investigated a different aspect of schemas and reconstructive memory by asking 30 participants to wait in a mock office separately for 35 seconds. This "office" contained 61 objects, including obvious office objects, like a notebook, desk, and calendar, but it also included things like a skull and a brick. The participants were then unexpectedly asked to recall all the objects that were in the room. The majority were less successful at recalling the objects that were unusual for an office scene, and the most frequent mistake was "remembering" objects that would usually be in an office but were not present in this room, like a telephone or books. Also placement of objects tended to be falsely remembered, for example, a notebook was "remembered" to be on the desk which is where it would usually be, but on this occasion it was actually on the chair. .
These studies indicate that eyewitnesses are often misled by their own schemas, believing they saw something that should have been present but was in fact not. A crime may not be brought to court until over a year later, and an eyewitness testifying will have shared their experience many times over that period and had to reconstruct it each time, possibly resulting in an inaccurate testimony in court.
