Review of: The Invasion from Mars

Reviews the book, The Invasion from Mars by Hadley Cantril (with the assistance of Hazel Gaudet and Herta Herzog) (1940). In the fall of 1938, it will be recalled, the Mercury Theater of Orson Welles broadcast his version of H. G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds." It will also be recalled that the next day's newspapers carried accounts of local panics complete with choked telephone switchboards, harassed police forces, and fleeing citizens. A special grant of funds made it possible for the Princeton group to get investigators into the field without undue delay and to make an intensive study of a sample of frightened persons in the nearby region. The analysis of the results of this survey provides the materials for this volume. The result will be of direct interest and importance to all those who hold that social psychology is evolving along lines which demand empirical evidence in place of speculation on the basis of uncontrolled observation. In general the study shows that those who were frightened were those who failed to make adequate checks on the veracity of the performance. The authors conclude that they have found "no single observable variable consistently related to the (panic) reaction, although a lack of critical ability seemed particularly conducive to fear in a large proportion of the population."