Imagine you're on vacation. You run into a couple of locals, and ask them a few questions about local food and customs to satisfy your curiosity, but they immediately get suspicious. In fact, they think that you're a spy, and promptly knock you
unconscious. When you awake, you're in a small room with a bare light overhead. A humorless man wants to know why are you spying and though you deny his accusations, he remains unconvinced. He suggests that maybe he can motivate you to talk and gestures to a table full of knifes.
So it's to be torture. And now you're faced with one of two choices. You can evince as much pain as possible, crying and wailing, or you can be stoic, trying to act like the torture isn't so bad. Which do you do?
Research out of my lab suggests that you should suck it up as best you can. Together with Dan Wegner, we had people come into the lab where they met someone suspected of cheating at a task. This person – call her “Carol” – was then “tortured” by having their hand put into ice water for 80 seconds. Carol either evinced significant pain, whimpering and pleading, or reacted stoically to the freezing water. When participants rated how likely it was that Carol cheated, they thought she was more guilty after experiencing more pain. In other words, more pain meant more guilt.
These findings suggest torture may not uncover guilt so much as lead to its perception. It is as though people exposed to the victim's pain must somehow convince themselves that it was a good idea - and so come to believe that the person who was tortured deserved it. Not all torture victims in pain appear guilty, however. When study participants only listened to a recording of a previous torture session - rather than taking part as witnesses of ongoing torture - they saw the victim who expressed more pain as less guilty.
These two opposite results stem from two different levels of involvement. Those who feel complicit with the torture (e.g., a prison guard) have a need to justify the torture, and so link the victim's pain to blame. On the other hand, those distant from torture (e.g., a newspaper reader) have no need to justify it and so can sympathize with the suffering of the victim.
These divergent effects can help explain part of the debate on torture - those ideologically aligned with torturing administrations may feel complicit and then see those harmed as guilty - making torture a self-justifying system. For people who feel more distant, the pain of torture victims leads to the inference of innocence, which makes torture seem unacceptable.
Whether torture can actually makes victims more likely to tell the truth is an open question, but this research suggests that the mere fact that someone was tortured leads observers to think that the truth was found. To see the original press release, click here. This research is being published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and was supported by funding from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Institute for Humane Studies.
