Invasion From Mars: The Anatomy of Panic
In 1938 Orson Wells spooked the American nation with his classic War of the Worlds broadcast. A psychology study of the event makes me wonder if we could be hoodwinked again.
On October 28, 1938 many Americans believed they were being invaded by Martians. This was the result of a Halloween stunt orchestrated by Orson Wells in which he adapted H. G. Wells' 'War of the Worlds' to the radio and broadcast the play as though it was actually happening.
It is estimated that of the 6 million people who heard the broadcast, fully 1.7 million thought it was the news, not a play, while a further 1.2 million were frightened. A few even bought train tickets or drove off in the opposite direction to New York, the supposed epicentre of the alien invasion.
For Professor Howard Cantril of Princeton University and colleagues, this provided the perfect opportunity to investigate the anatomy of panic (Cantril, Gaudet & Herzog, 1940). Shortly after the event he interviewed 135 people in New Jersey to try and understand how they had reacted and what might have affected how they reacted. Broadly he found people could be categorised in four ways:
- Those who rejected the Martian story from internal evidence. E.g. people questioned the story's claim that military units had arrived as rapidly as reported.
- Those who checked up on the story and found it was false. E.g. they turned to another radio station and found no panicking voices.
- Those who unsuccessfully checked the story.
- Those who made no attempt to check the story.
The most surprising category of people are those who failed to check the broadcast. Cantril found that those who fell into this category were also those who were most fearful.
Probably the most interesting results from the research were the stories people told about how they interpreted the invasion. One very religious woman saw the invasion as divine retribution against what she believed was a disgusting and morally corrupt society. Meanwhile, a student at Princeton University, despite his intelligence and education, was convinced it was impossible for the authority figures in the broadcast to have lied. As a result he accepted every word.
All this sparks the question of whether this trick would work again today. The temptation is to think that people are more hardened and cynical to this sort of media manipulation. We're all used to questioning the 'truth' as it is presented to us. We also have many more channels of information to go on. It's not just the radio nowadays, it's TV and the internet. Could you really ever convince a substantial group of people we were about to be invaded by some foreign power?
Surely not.
Not nowadays.
Never.
Or perhaps...
» Read more weird psychology studies.
Reference
Cantril, H., Gaudet, H., & Herzog, H. (1940) The invasion from Mars: a study in the psychology of panic. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
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Actually, if you think it well, those who claim 9/11 was an inside job, orchastred by the US Government, are saying that the media (and the Gov.) are making people believe they are being attacked by forign forces...
That's their claim.
SAM
That's the whole point of this guy's blog. He wants to say that Bush got us into Iraq the same way Orson Wells got people to buy train tickets away from NY.
What he ignores, however, is that super majorities of both houses of congress, in possession of all the available evidence, also backed the war.
He is another Bush hater who wants to equate Bush with every unsavory character in history. First Hitler, then Nixon, now, apparently, Orson Wells.
No intelligent person would buy his thesis. Apparently he's appealing to the under-100 IQ crowd. Anyway, he'll only get about half of them. Fox News has the other half bottled up.
I don't detect a hidden agenda in this article.
One thing I found interesting in reading the source material (I've always been fascinated by this event) was that people who heard the broadcast in groups were more likely to realize it was a fake; those in smaller groups, or alone, were more likely to panic.
To me it shows an age-old bit of wisdom: that people who are able to put their heads together with others deal with a crisis more sensibly.
Now, as to the blog's thesis--could this happen again now?
I think not. We are too accustomed to tuning in to many sources for news, especially crisis news. Of course, if all the news is fixed, then our increasingly unsocial society may have a problem.
The recent run on Northern Rock on this side of the Herring Pond revealed a surprising and (I think) significant fifth group - those who knew that the story was false, but behaved as if they believed it.
Of course we had people queuing just for the opportunity to tell a TV crew that they didn't trust politicians, but in the first few days there was another most curious group of vox-pops: people who knew that the line of credit advanced to NR by the Bank of England was sufficient to cover all their deposits, but who were nonetheless taking their money out to put it in a bank which didn't have that guarantee. Strange. Scary.
As for whether a practical joke like Welles' broadcast could happen today: it does, all the time. People believe that manipulated-reality TV portrays reality, don't they? The reason a large-scale panic won't happen is not because it couldn't, but because the networks know they couldn't afford the ensuing lawsuits....