A 1994 study planted a false memory of being lost in a shopping mall in a quarter of participants

mind & bodyWellcome Collection1995

A 1994 study planted a false memory of being lost in a shopping mall in a quarter of participants

the gist

Elizabeth Loftus's Lost in the Mall study gave subjects summaries of four childhood events, three true and one invented: being lost in a mall and found by a parent. After repeated coercive interviews over several weeks, about 25 percent of participants reported clear memories of the fictional episode, some adding detail of their own. Loftus had earlier shown the misinformation effect, where leading questions or false details from an authority figure change what witnesses remember. Replications since then have produced false memories in roughly 30 to 50 percent of subjects, depending on the method. The finding shows memory is reconstructed each time it is recalled, not replayed like a recording.

so what

The research has reshaped how courts treat eyewitness testimony and how therapists handle suggestive questioning about recovered memories. It also raises concerns about how misinformation can alter what people believe they saw.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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