Hello, and welcome, to all the readers of ‘The Barrel’ blog, all five of you. This is now the sixth entry (six!) and after the positively astounding reaction to my last nail biting two-parter, which some have called a ‘viral sensation’, with four favourites and three retweets at the time of writing, I’m anticipating big things from this next instalment.

This week, I thought it would be cool to talk about a really interesting story I became reacquainted with a few days ago, which caused massive controversy a few decades ago. I’m sure we’ve all heard of the ‘War of the Worlds’. I’m not talking about the film version with Tommy Cruise and the spellbinding Dakota Fanning as his irriating little daughter. I’m not even talking about the novel by H.G. Wells. I’m talking about the radio broadcast which was adapted by Orson Welles, some relatively unknown actor and director who I think did a few small indies after this.

So let me lay out what happened briefly, and then I’ll talk a bit about a study that was published after it and then a few more recent events. In 1938, as the Halloween episode (this should have surely been a clue in itself) Welles broadcast an episode which was basically laid out as a series of news bulletins interrupting an Opera, which appeared to depict an alien invasion taking place in real time. The bulletins got progressively more disturbing as the show went on, and culminated in what sounded like the presenter of the news bulletins dying at the hands of the Aliens. I guess the episode as all very convincing for the time it was being broadcast, and they had a series of different experts coming in which added to the authenticity of it. If you have the time, you can find the broadcast below, all 57 glorious minutes of it, and it’s worth a listen just to understand how it all happened. Alternatively, you can skip through most of it till the man dies, like I did.

Anyway, this was all meant to be fairly light-hearted and was I would say pretty clearly intended to one big, twisted joke (and it is! It’s funny!). But sadly, people didn’t see the funny side, and FREAKED. OUT. According to reports, there were people praying in the street, crying and frantically fleeing. Some ran to rescue loved ones, while others phoned in tearful farewells or warnings. There were hundreds of calls to newspapers and the Police, trying to source more information on the impending alien attack. Apparently (more on this later), people LOST THEIR MIND.

So, this is quite interesting, isn’t it? Why did people just go so CRAZY, with very limited evidence? What does this show us about the human mind and how quick we are to lose our shit? It really made for a good study actually as the artificial situation of the broadcast provided a quasi-experimental conditions, which were really, really high in ecological validity. Luckily, a Psychologist called Hadley Cantril also noticed that it lay the perfect foundations for an analysis, and gathered information on 135 by way of interviewing them a few months after.

So what did he find in these interviews? Well, obviously, a lot of the people did not verify whether there were ACTUALLY any aliens ready to viciously kill them. It appears quite a few people merely sat in their kitchens, quietly bubbling away in sheer terror, paralyzed in fear, before snapping and running outside proclaiming the end of the world. They didn’t think it a good idea to just pop next door and ask Deborah for her thoughts, and didn’t actually make any kind of actions to verify with ANYONE. He found that many of these people were highly suggestible, often religious, and thought it was probably an act from God. In the interviews, people also indicated that they were highly influenced by of the recent war scare, and believed an attack by a foreign power was imminent. Many people thought it was Germans attacking and the announcers were just a bit confused.

Cantril also found that some of the people did make attempts to verify the situation, and STILL lost their mind. Some people did pop next door to Deborah, but found that Deborah was also freaking the hell out and took this as more evidence of their approaching doom. Some people also had weird ways of twisting information to act as verification. For example, people took the fact that other radio stations were not broadcasting any sort of warning was because they were simply trying to calm the situation, and by ignoring it, it meant everyone would be none the wiser and thus, more calm. Cantril concluded that often people would construct a context in which DEFINITELY involved death by alien, and then processed any relevant information as either supporting this belief, or to be ignored. We now call this the ‘Confirmation bias’, which you can read more about here.

Hadley also attempted to explain this mass hysteria as a consequence of the random events of the last decade. In the years preceding this broadcast, the country suffered a great economic depression. Many people were still out of work, and there was a prevailing sense of confusion and bewilderment. Why was the country still in this economic unrest? What was happening to drag them out of it? Why was no one seemingly bothered about helping them? Cantril posits that this alien invasion, therefore, fit entirely with the mysterious events of that decade. He says:

“The lack of a sophisticated, relatively stable economic or political frame of reference created in many persons a psychological disequilibrium which made them seek a standard of judgment for this particular event. It was another phenomenon in the outside world beyond their control and comprehension.”

I, for one, call BS on this explanation. Cantril is making out as if it’s like people thought, “I have no money, I have no job, an alien invasion? Yeah that makes sense”. A legitimate alien invasion seems so preposterous and inconceivable, that even if there was an existing sense of confusion, this would still have been met with a level of scepticism. Granted, there was a lower level of understanding of Space and Astrophysics than we have today, and I’m not denying that these probably did have an effect, particularly when considering that the majority of people who did engage in some sort of panic behaviour did have lower IQ’s. I just think that explaining as a consequence of a period of economic unrest is way off they actual root of this behaviour.

Anyway, back to the event. ‘War of the Worlds’ also has interesting points to consider when thinking about the malleability of memory. Cantril cites one deeply religious women suggesting that she saw “the sheet of flame that swept over the entire country. That is just the way I pictured the end”. There were also reports that people could smell the poisonous gas that was being reported on the radio, and one person even told Cantril that he felt a choking sensation from the imaginary “gas”. Other studies have reports of people suggesting that could hear the machine gun fire, and “swishing” sound of the Martians, and some, and I am just dumbfounded at this next one, told Police that they SAW the Martians ”on their giant machines poised on the Jersey Palisades”. People were creating memories that they genuinely believed and were a product of the genuine fear that they felt, which just goes to show the staggering effect of this simple radio broadcast.

A little bit of background to this study, though. In the years after this study, there have been criticisms and accusations that the extent to which this panic reached has been somewhat exaggerated. Cantril reports that out of the 6 million people that heard the broadcast, 1 million reported feeling disturbed by it. However, most modern experts suggest that while there was a level of panic, it was by no means nationwide, and was also very rarely irrational. Most experts agree that while some people appeared concerned, they were also very rational in their behaviour.

That being said, there have been several different, almost replications of this study. In 1949, an adaptation of the radio play was broadcast on a city-wide radio station in Quito, Ecuador. This elicited the same reaction, with panic ensuing and the military even being called into action. In some ways, the panic elicited was even more extreme than in Orson Welles version, and it eventually transformed into a riot when the crowd that formed on the streets of Quito found out that the story was false. Another adaptation was aired in Providence, Rhode Island in 1974, and led to similar amounts of panic.

Anyway, regardless of the level of original panic, this is all very interesting isn’t it? (yes). What I think would be even MORE interesting to see if events like this could happen in 2014. Could this level of hoax be pulled off in an age when we are ten times more technologically advanced? Where people can hear something, and immediately search the internet, scroll through twitter, or go on facebook for verification? I would say, no.

These days, people aren’t wiser or smarter (in fact probably the opposite) but people just have so more access to verification tools. “An alien invasion? I’ll check twitter and see if there is actual authentic confirmation of this. Maybe even a picture a shiny murdering alien which I can retweets to my followers to warn them.” People are just more able to disprove. Or more evidence is needed to sway their sceptical minds. Saying that, rarely a month goes by without some hoax about a celebrity dying is trending on Twitter, and so it’s obvious that to some level, people are still able to be duped, despite their access to a web of information and access to constant, accurate news. It’s likely that a greater level of effort would need to be put in to pull off something as extreme as the events described above.

To read a summary of Hadley Cantril’s paper, you can find it here.