The Other Side

What about the torturer? What effect does it have on a person to treat other people like animals? To do your best to break their will and reduce them to something less than human? There is, unsurprisingly, not as much study into the perpetrators as there is the victims, but we do have a few points of reference.

First: Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske have published an article in the Journal of Psychology titled "Dehumanized Perception: A Psychological Means to Facilitate Atrocities, Torture, and Genocide?" In it, they describe two studies they performed, the first to test how participants perceived dehumanized targets, and the second to use neuroimaging to study which parts of their brains participants used when considering dehumanized targets. Their conclusions are not surprising.

"Participants spontaneously think about the minds of dehumanized targets less often than the minds of other social targets. Moreover, these human-perception dimensions correlate with parts of the brain implicated in disgust, conflict resolution, and attention, in addition to social-cognition neural regions" (180).

What does this mean for us? While the study does not address those engaged in torture specifically, we would expect that torturers would dehumanize their targets, considering their minds less often, and allowing their actions to have less of an impact on their own psyches.

Another source of insight is the (in?)famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which psychology professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo took eighteen healthy, psychologically normal young men and split them into two groups: prison guards, and prisoners. He put them into a make-shift prison and observed how they interacted--how the guards grew into their roles, and how the prisoners were affected by their loss of control. As Dr. Zimbardo states:

"The Lucifer Effect is my attempt to understand the processes of transformation at work when good or ordinary people do bad or evil things. We will deal with the fundamental question 'What makes people go wrong?'" (Ch 1).

Dr. Zimbardo's original intent was that the experiment would last two weeks; instead it lasted only five days as the guards became sadistic and began abusing the prisoners, and half of the prisoners were released early because of "severe emotional and cognitive disorders, transient but intense at the time" (Ch 10).

In his conclusions, Dr. Zimbardo emphasizes the role of the situation in pushing the young men into their actions--how their expectations of what it took to be an effective guard encouraged the young men to exercise their power and how that exercise of power became increasingly cruel and dehumanizing; how the prison smocks and numbers caused the other young men to shift into a role of what Dr. Zimbardo calls "learned helplessness." Dr. Zimbardo also discusses the increasing dehumanization with which the guards characterized the prisoners.

There have been other similar studies into dehumanization and what people will do when responding to authority figures. Another (in?)famous experiment is the Milgram experiment conducted in 1961. In it, people were ordered by an authority figure to administer electric shocks of increasing severity to another person. What these subjects do not know is that the person they are supposedly administering shocks to is actually a part of the experiment, and that they are not inflicting physical pain on anyone.

Milgram found that 26 of 40 subjects were willing to administer the most severe shocks, but notes the response of the subjects (those who believed they were administering severe shocks to others):

"Many subjects showed signs of nervousness in the experimental situation, and especially upon administering the more powerful shocks. In a large number of cases the degree of tension reached extremes that are rarely seen in sociopsychological laboratory studies. Subjects were observed to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan, and dig their fingernails into their flesh. These were characteristic rather than exceptional responses to the experiment" (375).

Fortunately, it is no longer considered ethical to perform experiments of this nature, and Dr. Milgram following each subject's experience to ensure they understood the hoax that had been perpetrated, and that they were not in fact responsible for another person's suffering. However, it gives us valuable insight into what happens when a normal person is required to make another suffer: it is a significantly emotionally disturbing experience that requires an external stimulus before people will become abusers (in this case, the experiment's authority figure; in Dr. Zimbardo's experience, the roles and situation the students found themselves in).

Finally, I will leave you with a story that Jennifer Harbury recounts about a young man that was forced to torture.

"Like many others, he had been forcibly recruited at the age of fifteen, and somehow survived a particularly brutal basic training. After his first battle, the sergeant had become enraged and dragged a young boy out of a nearby village, beating him and demanding to know where the weapons were hidden. The soldier quickly realized that they [sic] boy did not understand Spanish. The sergeant then tied him to a tree and ordered the soldiers to take turns burning his feet with flaming logs. The young soldier refused, but was told to obey or take his own boots off and suffer the same treatment. He burned the boy's feet.

"Everyone was upset afterward, but slowly their protective mechanisms began to form. The young soldier's did not. He felt he would lose his mind, and at the next battle he lay down and played dead. Afterwards he stripped off his uniform and ran naked to a nearby village to beg for help. The locals understood and smuggled him to a church in the capital. A priest asked if I could help, but by the time I arrived the young man had gone quite mad and was in the basement, barking like a dog" (156-157).

One could argue that the young soldier was tortured just as much as the young boy, and one wonders what the effects of this incident were on the other soldiers as well. I admire his initial resistance to being a part of the abuse, particularly in such a brutal unit where we can be fairly confident that he was physically abused prior to the threat of his own torture.

What does this tell us about the soldiers that perpetrated the abuse at Abu Ghraib, or those in other countries responsible for torture? First, while individuals should never be excused for their behavior, we must understand that a willingness to abuse is rarely the result of a "bad apple," as was the claim following the Abu Ghraib abuses, but rather situational pressures and direction from authority figures that cause otherwise normal soldiers to go to shocking extremes. Second, the long-term psychological effects on a person that is required to torture for a significant period of time certainly deserve study--one wonders if it would ever be possible for these people to live "normal" lives.

I am sure you are all thoroughly depressed by this extensive discussion of torture. In my next couple of posts I will discuss what is being done to reduce the amount of torture in the world, and what we can do to help.


References:

Harbury, Jennifer K. Truth, Torture, and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.

Harris, Lasana T., and Fiske, Susan T. "Dehumanized Perception: A Psychological Means to Facilitate Atrocities, Torture, and Genocide?" Journal of Psychology. 219.3 (2011): 175-181.

Milgram, Stanley. "Behavioral Study of Obedience." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 67.4 (1963): 371-378.

Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House, 2008.