Originally published as Krus, D .J. (1986) Russian cannibals: the case of the downed Korean airliner. Psychological Reports, 59, 3-9.

 
Validity of Arens' Atrocity Attribution Theory
David J. Krus
Arizona State University

Summary.—Validation of the Arens atrocity attribution theory was reported. Subjects read a fictitious passage about the crash of a New Zealand airliner en route to the South Pole, with passengers representing 21 different nationalities. Paired comparisons were used to evaluate subjects’ perceptions of the likelihood that survivors of each nationality would commit anthropophagy during the period of privation following the crash. The measurements were conducted prior to and following the downing of a Korean airliner by the Soviet Air Force. This incident provided the abrupt change in the attitudes of the American public toward the Soviet Union, necessary for empirical validation of the theory. Implications of the obtained results were discussed within the historical context of the use of the attribution of atrocity for attainment of political goals.
 

Throughout history, attribution of atrocity has been one of the most effective tools of attitude change toward people or a nation perceived as inimical. One of the most efficient attributions of atrocity has been the accusation of cannibalism. The term cannibal was coined in the time of Columbus after the name of the Caribs, a West Indian tribe with a reputation for eating their enemies. Historical records indicate that the official policy of the Spanish monarchy prohibited enslavement of the natives. However, the royal mandate for the West Indies contained a clause excluding cannibals from royal protection. Repeatedly, this clause was invoked to derive an economic advantage from human bondage. Subsequently, the cannibalism legend was used against the Spanish empire itself. During the century and a half of conflict between the Spanish and English empires (in the period following the Thirty Years War and preceding the American Revolution), the English published a series of books and pam­phlets accusing the Spanish of unspeakable cruelties, the leading of these being the accusation of abetting cannibals (Davenant, 1658; Las Casas, 1656). This propaganda on atrocity culminated with the English push into the Caribbean and acquisition of Jamaica (Powell, 1971).

The study of the British propaganda on atrocity is instructive. As Arens commented, one of the interesting things about confrontations between ‘cannibals” and non-cannibals is that, inevitably, the cannibals” disappear (Arens, 1979, p. 36). Invariably, enemies of the British empire—the African tribes, Chinese objecting to the East Asia Company pushing opium on their people, Napoleonic armies, &c. were defeated, while the British prevailed.

As argued by Arens (1979) cannibalism never existed as a socially sanctioned practice. Even though isolated instances of anthropophagy are well documented, as in the Donner Pass incident, to call a group of people “cannibals” on the basis of such isolated occurrences is not justified. The importance of Arens’ thesis is in calling attention to the basic propensity of man to ascribe nonhuman characteristics to an opposing or competing group and thus facilitate the impending hostilities. The quantification of this tendency is the subject of the present communication.

Method

The shooting down of a civilian airliner is a rare event, perpetrated only few times in the history of civilian aviation (Israel in 1973, Soviet Union in 1978 and 1983, Zimbabwe in 1978 and 1979). As such, it was judged likely to provide an abrupt change in public attitude toward the Soviet Union, and so facilitate empirical validation of Arens’ (1979) thesis of attribution of atrocity.

The method of paired comparisons, pioneered by Thurstone (1927), is one of the most precise psychometric instruments, capable of calibrating minute changes in measured entities. It was used to document elevated sensitivity of the public to offenses such as burglary, counterfeiting, libel, and forgery in the aftermath of Watergate (Krus, Sherman, & Krus, 1977). Following the downing of a Korean airliner by the Soviet Air Force, a question arose whether the method of paired comparisons would capture the perceived changes in public opinion toward the Soviet Union. Fortunately, a replication of the original Thurstone (1928) study of nationality preferences was conducted shortly before the Korean airliner incident (Krus & Kennedy, 1980) and so could serve as a reference measure.
 

The modified study of nationality preferences was administered to 39 Arizona State University students (Mage = 32.4 yr., SD = 15.3, 25 females and 14 males) immediately after the Korean airliner incident, with the expectation that the antipathy generated by real events would generalize to events purely fictitious. A list of 210 pairs of 21 nationalities was preceded by the following instructions: 
 

New Zealand airlines is arranging for weekly champagne flights over the South Pole. During the flight you may enjoy your Sunday brunch and observe the endless plains of the polar Antarctic. Recently, the New Zealand Boeing 747 was forced to make an emergency landing close to the Queen Maud Mountains during a prolonged series of snowstorms. Before a rescue mission could reach the plane, the polar night set in, making the location of the plane extremely difficult. When the rescue party arrived two months later, about half of the 264 passengers were dead and partially eaten. Some of the surviving passengers apparently resorted to cannibalism in order to stay alive. Since the South Pole trip is expensive, the recruitment of passengers was worldwide and the original 264 passengers were truly an international group. Knowing the nationality of particular passengers, you are to indicate who you think resorted to cannibalism. On the attached list of paired nationalities, please consider each pair and mark the one you believe would most likely resort to cannibalism in the situation described above.
 

Following administration of the questionnaire, the number of times each nationality was selected in each pair comparison was counted. The obtained frequencies were tabulated, converted to proportions (Table 1) and analyzed together with data obtained prior to the Korean airliner incident by the method for normal scaling of dominance matrices (Krus & Krus, 1977b) which is an alternative algorithm for the original Thurstone (1927) paired comparisons procedure.

Table 1. Proportion of subjects who judged nationals listed in columns as more likely to commit anthropophagy than nationals listed in rows of the dominance matrix.

Resulting scales were area transformed to T scales (McCall, 1922) to permit inter-distributional comparisons (Krus & Kennedy, 1977a).

Results and Discussion

The scales of judged likelihood of anthropophagy for each of the 21 judged nationalities are presented in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Judged likelihood of anthropophagy for 21 nationalities, as shown by the dominance scale on the right. The dominance scale on the left shows nationality preferences measured three years prior to the 1983 Korean airliner incident.

The abrupt shift in Russia’s scale location, as compared to the order of preference obtained before the Korean airliner incident, is apparent. The media coverage of the Korean airliner incident influenced the public to the extent that people felt the Russians were the most likely, of the nationalities listed in the survey, to commit cannibalism. 

Was Arens’ thesis of attribution of atrocity validated by the study? It may be argued that the presented evidence is circumstantial and associative, far from the “experimentum crucis” to strive toward. Nevertheless, the empirical findings lend plausibility to the chain of reasoning, implicit in the present experiment.

It should be stressed that the reported results should be interpreted aside from the issues implicated in the course of the validation process. The core question of the experiment was whether a sharp change in public attitudes, following a media campaign, increased the probability of ascribing inhuman characteristics to a group of people. The obtained data support this hypothesis.
Quantification of Arens’ thesis of attribution of atrocity is obviously a difficult task. Results obtained from the present study indicate that at least partial empirical scrutiny of the theory is possible. Perhaps further studies will present its strengths and limitations in sharper contours.
 

References
Arens, W. (1979) The man-eating myth. New York: Oxford University Press.
Berndt, R. M. (1962) Excess and restraint: social control among a New Guinea mountain people. Chicago, IL: Univer. of Chicago Press.
Casas, B. de las (1971) History of the Indies. New York: Harper & Row. (Original work published in 1656) 
Davenant, Sir W. (1658) The cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru. London.
Krus, D. J., & Kennedy, P. H. (1977a) Lost: McCall’s T scores: Why? Educational and Psychological Measurement, 37, 257-261.
Krus, D. J., & Kennedy, P. H. (1977b) Normal scaling of the unidimensional dominance matrices: the domain-referenced model. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 37, 189-193.
Krus, D. J., & Kennedy, P. H. (1980) Dimensionality of hierarchal and proximal structures. Applied Psychological Measurement, 4, 313-321.
Krus, D. j., Sherman, J. L., & Kennedy, P. H. (1977) Changing values over the last half-century: the story of Thurstone’s crime scales. Psychological Reports, 40, 207-211.
McCall, W. A. (1922) How to measure in education. New York: Macmillan.
Powell, P. W. (1971) Tree of hate; propaganda and prejudices affecting United States’ relations with the Hispanic world. New York: Basic Books.
Rosenthal, E. (1983) Myth of the man-eaters. Science Digest, 91(4), 10-14.
Schmeck, H. M. (1978) First worldwide study of fatal virus diseases shows it occurs in mysterious clusters. New York Times, July 31, pA16.
Thurstone, L. L. (1927) The method of pair comparisons for social values. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 21, 384-400.
Thurstone, L. L. (1928) An experimental study of nationality preferences. Journal of General Psychology, 1, 405-425.
 

Notes
[1] This statement contradicts a generally held opinion. Perhaps the strongest argument for the existence of cannibalism as a societally sanctioned practice was asserted by Gajdusek, who won the Nobel prize for his work on kuru, a disease similar to AIDS and common in a New Guinea tribe, practicing ritual homosexuality. Gajdusek origi­nally maintained that kuru gets transmitted by eating infected brains during a cannibal­istic ritual. This practice, he believed, spreads kuru, caused by a “slow virus,” mani­festing its presence only years after the infection occurs. Gajdusek never actually observed this cannibalistic ritual. Moreover, subsequent experiments with chimpanzees failed to show that they can get this disease by being fed infected brain tissue of people who died of kuru. Gajdusek himself recently stated in an interview with Schmeck (1978, p. 16) that “there has been so far no convincing evidence that the infection can be acquired by eating or drinking affected material or by any means other than direct invasion of the bloodstream.” 
 

[2]  The Arens argument has been meticulously investigated and documented. When text­book quotes were traced to the original sources, stories of cannibalism turned out to be invariably based only on reports of informants on some other tribe, not direct observa­tion. Moreover, the context of these reports often was unbelievable. Thus, an informant may report that the neighboring tribe practices cannibalism and also that the cannibals are women who are able to turn themselves into birds. The contexts of other cannibal stories are equally fantastic. For example, Berndt (1962, p. 283) described a scene in which

a married couple is carving a corpse; the wife is cutting the upper half of the body, and the husband is copulating with the bottom half. As the wife begins to butcher the pubic area, she accidentally cuts off her husband’s penis. As he says, “Now you have cut off my penis! What shall I do?” She removes the end of the penis she had cut off, pops it into her mouth, and eats it.

As commented by Arens in an interview with Elizabeth Rosenthal (1983), “I don’t care if Berndt claims to have seen this; it’s beyond normal human capability.” An additional point is that sometimes, what seems obvious when observing an alien culture from outside, is hard to discern for the inside observer. In a recent interview with Science Digest (Rosenthal, 1983), Arens related an incident which occurred in Zambia. A copper mining company, employing African workers, was stocking in the company store canned beef that had a picture of someone like Aunt Jemima on it. It was widely believed among workers that Europeans not only killed Africans, but had the audacity to sell them back in cans. Absurd? Think about us talking about our enemies, past or present.