to last about ten days in the army: and hearty celebrations they used to be. On
Saturday, the 5th of January, I was engaged in having the quarters cleaned for
the orthodox Sunday-morning inspection, and contemplated having a quiet
day, and winding it up with a little more holiday celebration in the evening,
when I was summoned to the adjutant’s office, where the sergeant-major told
me to have my company paraded at 2 p.m. in marching order, for inspection.
No use asking questions.15
The Japanese attack on the US base in Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which
marked the beginning of US involvement in World War II, is similarly described
by powerful narratives that explain the commitment to fight the war. Forty years
later, people still remembered when they first heard the Pearl Harbor news:
UniHi classmate John Holmes still remembers precisely where he was and
what he was doing:
“In those days they sold newspapers on street corners. I was a paperboy
selling the Examiner at the corner of Pico and Prosser. I sold the paper that
reported Pearl Harbor had been bombed.
“But I didn’t realize what it meant, that it would change my life. I was too
immature.”
Joe Arnold was working, too, at a gas station at Glendon and Londbrook in
Westwood. “It had a big tower. It was foggy that day, and I climbed up to the
top of that tower to see if I could see anything. I don’t know what I expected
to see.…”
Barbara Ryan Dunham’s memory is typical of that of many Americans.
“We were at the breakfast table,” she said. “We had come home from
church, and we had the radio on.… Nobody could believe it at first.”16
Flashbulb memory is one aspect of the human tendency to become motivated
by seemingly random details of stories, even brief stories that are little more than
anecdotes. In the above examples, the stories involved what happened just
before or just after the shocking news, in the form of a sequence of mostly
meaningless events. In comparison, if we were to ask people to recount such
trivial details about another random day decades ago, they would have no
memory at all, precisely because the day was not connected with a famous or
infamous event.
A famous flashbulb memory event in recent US history is the September 11,

2001, terrorist attack that resulted in the destruction of the World Trade Center in
New York City and severe damage to the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Many
people in the United States today can remember a story about what they were
doing when they heard about the attack. The vividness of these memories is
testimony to the attack’s causal impact on their economic actions.
At that time, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER), the US economy had been in a recession since March 2001, following
the 2000 peak in the world’s stock markets and the subsequent financial crisis
and major decline. Right after the September 11, 2001, attacks, in which
terrorists crashed commandeered airplanes into symbolically important national
targets, there were widespread fears that the recession in the US economy would
be prolonged because people would choose to stay at home owing to their fear of
another such attack.17 Coming a year after the popping of the 2000 stock market
bubble, amidst numerous signs of recession, the terrorist attacks were the
“perfect storm” for the “economy to hit the wall.”18
But the attacks appear to have had just the opposite effect. In November
2001, the recession ended and the US economy almost immediately recovered,
making that recession one of the shortest in US history. How might we explain
the nation’s quick recovery? After the attacks, a narrative took hold that involved
a plea from national leaders asking the nation’s people to do symbolic things to
uphold national confidence. Two weeks after the attack, US president George W.
Bush gave a talk to airline workers and to the nation as a whole:
And we must stand against terror by going back to work. Everybody here
who showed up for work, at this important industry, is making a clear
statement that terrorism will not stand, that the evildoers will not be able to
terrorize America and our work force and our people. (Applause.) … When
they struck, they wanted to create an atmosphere of fear. And one of the great
goals of this nation’s war is to restore public confidence in the airline
industry. It’s to tell the traveling public: Get on board. Do your business
around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get
down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way
we want it to be enjoyed.19
President Bush also lavished praise on Americans: “This is a determined
nation, and we’re a strong nation. We’re a nation based upon fabulous values.”

Like a good sports coach, he was encouraging team spirit, both among the airline
workers and among the citizenry as a whole. His narrative suggested a script for
strong, courageous, inspired behavior. That narrative was expressly designed to
encourage the ideas that we all are watched by others and that we all must set an
example of courage. During the economic recovery, however, most economists
did not recognize the flashbulb quality of the September 2001 attacks, which
encouraged a contagious constellation of narratives and may have profoundly
affected US businesses and the US economy.20