Cannibals Priced

For how much money, paid in cash, would you eat a quarter of a pound of cooked human flesh, supposing that the fact . . . will appear next day on the front page of all the New York papers?

Such was one of the questions which Columbia's famed Psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike lately put to 40 unemployed young men and women. The men asked a median price of $260,000,000, the women $1,375,000. Next Professor Thorndike promised them secrecy in their cannibalism. Promptly the men lost their squeamishness, dropped their price to $50,000. The women still wanted $750,000. Finally Dr. Thorndike made the same offers to 24 unemployed men and women over 40. Two-thirds of them flatly refused to practice cannibalism at any price. Professor Thorndike wanted chiefly to find out whether oldsters get set in their ways. Last week he published the results of nine years of research along that and other bypaths of his theory that oldsters are as educable as youngsters.*

For spitting on a picture of George Washington or Charles Darwin, a deed which nearly half the younger subjects would do for $10, the oldsters set a median price of $10,000.

But sex lines were generally sharper than age lines. For loss of the left arm, young women wanted $1,000,000, young men $1,000,000,000. Men said they would be willing to fall into a trance during the month of October every year for $2,000,000 or become insane every July for $95,000,000. Women wanted $200,000 for an October trance, $4,500,000 for July madness. For $10,000,000 each, men would spend their lives in a Manhattan apartment. Women wanted $62,500,000. To abandon all hope of life after death the men wanted $1,000, the women only $10. Men would get thoroughly intoxicated for $25, women for $98.

Professor Thorndike, nursing a suspicion that many of his subjects were liars, wished he had real money to offer them. Wrote he: "A person setting $1,000,000 as the price for eating an earthworm might well do it for $100 if someone actually put the cash before him."

* ADULT INTEREST--Macmillan ($3.25).

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