Torture, unfortunately, has been a part of human behavior for as far back as we can peer. You need only look to the events in Libya or Abu Ghraib to see its continuing presence. Whether it's used to punish or to warn, its effects are terrible on those who are forced to endure it. And almost all of us would agree that torture is an immoral act. But to classify it as immoral, we first have to agree that an act is, in itself, painful enough to be considered torture. Here, can be surprising levels of disagreement. Is waterboarding torture? Is sleep deprivation torture? How about being forced to endure frigid temperatures?
In attempting to answer the question of what constitutes torture, Loran Nordgren, Mary-Hunter Morris McDonnell, and George Loewenstein have recently identified an important piece of the puzzle -- the hot-cold empathy gap. In brief, this view argues that people are quite poor at judging how much something hurts unless they are actually experiencing the pain themselves. Simply put, our minds tend to underestimate the pain an action would cause unless we are experiencing the pain and arousal of a similar action. It seems we just can't imagine that it would hurt as much as it does.
To test this view, the researchers conducted several clever experiments in which they subjected some people to several ethics-approved discomforts and then asked them to assess how much pain or distress related actions would cause as part of an interrogation. They then compared these answers to those of people who were not experiencing any distress. What they found was rather startling. For example, sleep-deprived individuals judged sleep deprivation to be a much more severe interrogation technique than did their non-fatigued counterparts. Similarly, individuals who were asked to stand outside in cold weather or to place their arms in a bucket of ice water judged similar techniques involving exposure to frigid temperatures to be much a more severe technique. What's more, not only did individuals in all the experiments judge the actions similar to those they were experiencing (e.g., sleep-deprived participants judging sleep deprivation) as more severe, they also were less willing to endorse them as valid interrogation techniques.
The upshot then, if you can call it that, is that what constitutes torture can be something of a moving target. Whether we believe any action reaches the bar to be called torture, and thereby stands as a violation of international law and human decency, can depend on whether we're experiencing similar distress ourselves. And herein lies the most troubling part. Leaders who allow the torture are usually not in a position to be experiencing it, which works against their realizing just how horrendous an action it is.
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