Interrogational torture: Effective or purely sadistic?

While government officials have argued that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are necessary to protect American citizens, the effectiveness of such techniques has been debated. According to a recent study, when torture is used to elicit information, it is likely to be unexpectedly harsh yet ineffective. This study was published in a new article in Political Research Quarterly (PRQ) published by SAGE on behalf of the Western Political Science Association.

John W. Schiemann, author of the study and a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University, found that information gleaned from interrogational torture is very likely to be unreliable, and when torture techniques are employed, they are likely to be used too frequently and too harshly. Furthermore, he found that for torture to generate even small amounts of valuable information in practice, the State must make the rational calculation to torture innocent detainees for telling the truth in order to maintain torture as a threat against those who withhold information.

Schiemann wrote, "Interrogators will continue to use torture and to increase its intensity in an attempt to ensure the detainee's threshold is low enough to make him talk."

In order to assess the effectiveness of interrogational torture, Schiemann's study employed game theory, a widely-accepted theoretical approach in the social sciences to modeling social behavior. He then compared the outcomes generated by the model to the standards of success set forth by torture proponents in terms of the reliability of information and the frequency and severity of the torture used to get it.

Schiemann stated that while many believe that interrogational torture cannot be justified under any circumstances, those who do advocate for it claim that at times it is the only way gain critical information. He found, however, that under realistic circumstances interrogational torture is far more likely to produce ambiguous and false, rather than clear and reliable, information. "The use of torture makes it possible to extract both real and false confessions and no ability by the state to distinguish the two," wrote the author.

"The question as to whether—in reality—interrogational torture actually provides us with vital information we otherwise would not get—and at what human cost—is one of the pressing moral questions of our time," wrote Schiemann. "The debate over this question suggests that this reality needs probing, and the probing offered here suggests that torture games have no winners."

More information: Find out more by reading the article, "Interrogational Torture: Or How Good Guys Get Bad Information with Ugly Methods" by John W. Schiemann in Political Research Quarterly. The article is available free for a limited time at: http://prq.sagepub … ull.pdf+html

Provided by SAGE Publications

"Interrogational torture: Effective or purely sadistic?." March 28th, 2012. http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-interrogational-torture-effective-purely-sadistic.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

Inside the brains of jurors: Neuroscientists reveal brain activity associated with mitigating criminal sentences

Credit: Caltech

(Medical Xpress) -- When jurors sentencing convicted criminals are instructed to weigh not only facts but also tricky emotional factors, they rely on parts of the brain associated with sympathy and making moral judgments, according to a new paper by a team of neuroscientists. Using brain-imaging techniques, the researchers, including Caltech's Colin Camerer, found that the most lenient jurors show heightened levels of activity in the insula, a brain region associated with discomfort and pain and with imagining the pain that others feel.

The findings provide insight into the role that emotion plays in jurors' decision-making processes, indicating a close relationship between sympathy and mitigation.

In the study, the researchers, led by Makiko Yamada of National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan, considered cases where juries were given the option to lessen the sentences for convicted murderers. In such cases with "mitigating circumstances," jurors are instructed to consider factors, sometimes including emotional elements, that might cause them to have sympathy for the criminal and, therefore, shorten the sentence. An example would be a case in which a man killed his wife to spare her from a more painful death, say, from a terminal illness. 

"Finding out if jurors are weighing sympathy reasonably is difficult to do, objectively," says Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics at Caltech. "Instead of asking the jurors, we asked their brains."

The researchers scanned the brains of citizens (potential jurors) while the participants read scenarios adapted from actual murder cases with mitigating circumstances. In some cases, the circumstances were sympathy-inducing; in others, where, for example, a man became enraged when an ex-girlfriend refused him, they were not. The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a type of brain scanning that tracks increases in oxygenated blood flow, indicating heightened brain activity. The participants also had their brains scanned when they determined whether to lessen the sentences, and by how much.  

The team found that sympathy activated the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and temporo-parietal junction—brain regions associated with moral conflict and thinking about the feelings of others. Similarly, the jurors had increased activity in these regions during sentencing when the mitigating circumstances earned their sympathy. In those cases, they also delivered shorter hypothetical sentences.

In addition to Camerer and Yamada, coauthors on the new paper, "Neural circuits in the brain that are activated when mitigating criminal sentences," are Saori Fujie, Harumasa Takano, Hiroshi Ito, Tetsuya Suhara, and Hidehiko Takahashi of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences; Motoichiro Kato of the Keio University of Medicine; and Tetsuya Matsuda of Tamagawa University Brain Science Institute. Yamada is also affiliated with Tamagawa University Brain Science Institute and Kyoto University School of Medicine; she and Takahashi are additionally affiliated with the Japan Science and Technology Agency.

More information: http://www.nature. … mms1757.html

Provided by California Institute of Technology

"Inside the brains of jurors: Neuroscientists reveal brain activity associated with mitigating criminal sentences." March 28th, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-brains-jurors-neuroscientists-reveal-brain.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek

People know more than they think they do, study finds

A group of Utah business students was involved in a problem-solving exercise. Credit: David Eccles School of Business.

(Medical Xpress) -- The process of melding individuals into effective, problem-solving groups should involve empowering individuals to realize they have important ideas to share.

Dr. Bryan Bonner, an associate professor at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, believes the first step to building successful organisations is deceptively simple: self-realisation by each participant of his or her unique knowledge and experience.

Bonner co-authored “Leveraging Member Expertise to Improve Knowledge Transfer and Demonstrability in Groups” with Dr. Michael Baumann, an associate professor of Psychology at the University of Texas in San Antonio. The study, published in February’s edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, concludes that “for groups to be successful, they must exploit the knowledge of their (individual) members effectively.”

“It doesn’t take much. All you have to do is have people sit there for a while and think, ‘What is it I already know about this, and how can that help find the solution?’” Bonner says. “People find they often know more than they think they do; they realize that they might not know the whole answer to the problem, but there are a couple things they do know that might help the group come to a solution.”

The researchers used 540 University of Utah undergraduate students, assigning half to three-member groups on one hand, with the remaining 270 participants working as individuals. Their task: arriving at estimates closest to the correct answers to such questions as the elevation of Utah’s King’s Peak; the weight of the heaviest man in history; the population of Utah; and the minimum driving distance between Salt Lake City and New York City.

“We solve problems by using the many examples, good and bad, we’ve gathered through hard-won experience throughout our lives. The problem is that we’re not nearly as good at applying old knowledge to new problems as you’d think,” Bonner says. “Research over more than a century has tried, without much success, to figure out how we can do a better job.”

Bonner and Baumann, however, are convinced their study shows that “although the sheer amount of brainpower it takes to consistently and effectively transfer learning from old to new is beyond many individuals, groups of people working together can actually be very good at it.”

The answers to those study group questions? Kings Peak, the highest point in Utah, is 13,528 feet above sea level; the heaviest man of all time was 1,400 pounds; Utah’s population, at the time of the study, was 2,389,039; and the shortest route between Salt Lake City and New York City is 2,174.41 miles.

More information: To read the paper, visit: http://bit.ly/yHEruM

Provided by University of Utah

"People know more than they think they do, study finds." March 28th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-people.html

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Robert Karl Stonjek