The article The Invasion from Mars: Radio Panics America, author and source unknown, is a review of the Orsen Wellss, War of the Worlds phenomena, and the first mass communication study researching this event, Hadley Cantrils (1940) The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. The event referenced above was a dramatic radio broadcast of a fictional alien invasion. The broadcast aired on October 30th, 1938, and created wide spread panic among many people who believed it to be a factual news account. The phenomenon has been traditionally used to support theories that believe mass communication has a powerful effect on its audience. Although the early communication research of this event is generally considered faulty, the event itself was believed to cause panic with at least a million people, and the research into it was the first of its kind.
The article first provides us with some background as to the social environment of the audience during this first broadcast. Radio Broadcasting in 1938, although it had been around for over two decades, had only recently reached critical mass and acceptance among American Society. It had replaced the newspaper as the medium of choice for news and information. The country itself was coming out of the great depression, facing signs of war in Europe, and the emergence of both communism and fascism. Science Fiction broadcasts were not very common, and radio broadcasting had just developed the technique of on the spot reporting.
The broadcast itself was masterfully written to appear as a music program with emergency news broadcasts interrupting regular programming to tell the story of an alien invasion. Although the program was proceeded by a disclaimer, many people tuned in during the program, and believed it to be a real news broadcast. The dramatization included an emergency broadcast by the secretary of the interior, interviews with experts in the military and universities, and on the spot reporting. Despite the fact that the story took place with an unbelievable time line, reporters moving twenty miles in a matter of minutes, and was interrupted four times to give disclaimers that it is fictional, it still inspired panic in over a million people.
The research into the phenomenon was conducted on three fronts. The first was through personal interviews of 135 people. The second was through two different surveys, one by CBS covering 920 people a week after the broadcast, and another by AIPO covering many thousand and was done much later. The third was by review of newspaper accounts and mail volume to CBS and the FCC. Based on the surveys the researcher believed that over 6 million people heard the broadcast, and over a million in a half were panicked by it.
The method itself was flawed in many areas. First of all the AIPO study took place 6 weeks after the fact and the interviewers personally sought out the interview subjects. There was a huge discrepancy between the first and the second survey, the researcher thought this was because the second survey included smaller communities. It could also have been because after six weeks of the event being reported and criticized in the newspapers, subjects potentially had a lot of social desirability factors motivating their answers.
The results of the study concluded there were four different responses within people who heard the broadcast: people who successfully checked the internal evidence of the broadcast, people who successfully checked external information with the internal broadcast information, people who unsuccessfully checked external information, and people that didnt critically check the information at all (those who just panicked). The researchers felt that the people who panicked had little critical ability, and felt the cause was lack of education. They also decided that critical ability can be overpowered by personal belief, susceptibility, source confirmation, or unusual situations. From a critical perspective, I have a problem with there critical ability being linked to lack of education, for their was a higher percentage of people with college degrees being frightened then those without.
With the blatant research mistakes performed within the original study. And the fact that subsequent research has proven much of the results and theory wrong, this paper is of more historical importance to the communication field then applicable. It could be said that the events that took place on October 30th, 1938 were caused less by the Wellss broadcast and more by the social/political situation of the audience. Compound that with the naivete of the populace towards the belief that broadcasting was a pure medium, and we could see how such a panicked situation could occur. I wouldnt argue that War of the Worlds was a brilliant broadcast, but I find it unlikely that any contemporary fictional mass communication could inspire such mass hysteria, no matter how brilliant.
