Back in 1963 Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment where volunteers were asked to deliver electric shocks of increasing severity to a person whose responses to the shocks they could hear, but not see. The majority were able to continue delivering shocks, even when they could hear no response, which indicated that the subject was either unconscious or dead.
The experiment has been repeated recently, with similar results.
I suspect that one’s instinctive answer would be no, but bearing in mind the above, could you torture someone?
Milgram is a bit “unfair”, because from what I gather, you’re not in the same room with the actor. That makes it easier to bow down to authority. I doubt the results would be nearly as dramatic should the torturee be right in front of the torturer.
I know I’d be more empathic with a person whose face, eyes etc… I could see, just as I’m much more patient with real, live people as opposed to internet strangers. OTOH, I have deep-seated issues with authority, so I’d probably stop earlier than most. Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t shock a stranger “just because”, sadly :/. I just would stop as soon as he asks me to, ask him if he’s OK etc… At least, that’s the comforting fantasy I’ve held onto ever since I read about the original Milgram exp…
Sure. I could move to Istanbul too and wear a pink skirt too.
Would I? Nope because it’s wrong. It’s not something I’d chose to do. A person’s sense of morality is the final line. Just like my love of my home state keeps me from Istanbul, and my fashion since keeps away the pink skirt. It’d totally make my butt look big.
It depends on why I am torturing the client. Simply because someone in authority says to? No. It also depends on the torture. If it something more productive of theatricality than excruciation, then no; I deplore amateurism.
I haven’t gone “there” in my own psyche since an incident in childhood, but I know that the “there” exists. It seems to me I’ve constructed many layers of personhood that would need to be stripped away to take me there again; I don’t know what that process would involve. I hope I never find out.
Oh, I forgot something else which IMO skews the results of Milgram’s : the torturer assumes the actor is, like him, someone who’s willingly entered the scientific experiment, and did not refuse to take at least some shocks once he’d been told what to expect etc…
Which makes it a very different premise compared to “he’s a bad guy, make him confess against his will”, doesn’t it ?
Kobal, if I remember correctly, Milgram repeated the experiment in several different setting: one with bothe participant in different rooms, but laso with participants in the same room (or at least visible to each other) and I believe even in a setting where the hands of the ‘subject’ had to be pressed on a pad where the current was coming from.
It was found that people obeyed less when things got more personal, but there were still quite some people how obeyed the instructors.
As response to the OP, I don’t think that I would torture people this easily, butt if it was the choice between torturing someone or having somebody else torture me (or loved ones)…I don’t know.
BTW, i think the goal of the experiment was to show how peple respond to authority (and how they are willing to do things when responsability is taken away). It is at least some explanation why people kept the trains to Auswitz going… I am not sure at what I would stop listening to those who have (especially in the military) the authority to tell me what to do.
I’m a lefty liberal but that doesn’t really matter when it comes to my answer. While I believe very strongly that the state shouldn’t torture or execute people I do think that I could inflict pain or maybe death on someone without too much psychological damage to myself.
I’ve always considered my self to be quite a brutal person if needed and I can dismiss my empathy for people if required quite easily and just move on. Probably not a very healthy way to be but there you go
I regularly do inflict pain, while doing medical procedures. I don’t like doing it at all. It’s repulsive, frankly. Only the knowledge that I’m doing it out of necessity and to improve the overall situation, with the patient’s consent, enables me to do it with a clear conscience.
To do it without their consent, for no other purpose but to inflict pain? <<shudder>>
You might be surprised at how you react, if you are ever forced to. It’s all well and good to project how you think you’ll be able to handle such a situation, but until you’ve done it, you won’t discover just how much it’ll disrupt your sleep, your appetite, your dreams, etc.
At least that’s how it worked for me. I considered myself a hardcore pragmatist about these issues, but after the first time where I inflicted a lot of pain (necessarily, in the course of removing broken glass and metal from a leg) it surprised the hell out of me just how much my mind kept returning to what I’d done, and not in a good way either.
Inflicting pain definitely affects the people who inflict it; and has great potential for disturbing the psyche.
Would help to define “torture” I think. If you just set my dog on fire for a laugh I am going to kick your ass and once I have you down I am going to continue to beat the ever-loving shit out of you, stop for a breather and then start in again. I truly am close to as non-violent a person as you are likely to meet (the Amish have me beat) but a few things would send me into a rage I would not easily pull myself out of.
Technically I would say I am torturing you above.
Water boarding because my CIA boss said so? Not a chance. I’ll find a new job.
CIA boss puts a gun to my brother’s head and tells me do it or else? I really don’t know…I’d probably water board the guy but if it was something more gruesome (inserting glass under the fingernails or something) I doubt it…just don’t know.
In the lab situation I think I would presume everyone is there of their own accord and free to go/stop it if they want. So if I press the button and the other person howls I’d think it messed up but probably keep pressing the button for a bit. If I suspected the other person was an unwilling participant then no way.
Probably. I never suspected that I was capable of murderous, out-of-control rage until a piece of street trash bashed me in the back of the head with a club trying to rob me.
People tend to submit to authority and go along with the crowd. This is true even of people who pride themselves on questioning authority and not running with the herd.
If one of my family members had been abducted, I could torture someone if I thought they had something to do with it and it would help me. Or if someone had seriously harmed someone from my family, I would torture them just for revenge if I thought I could get away with it.
I suppose I could slap someone around a bit if he had some information I really, really needed, but I wouldn’t enjoy it, nor would I want to make a habit of it.
IMHO the fact that many people believe that they would never torture someone “because it’s wrong. It’s not something I’d chose to do” is part of what puts our world at constant risk of future genocides.
People are clueless as to the evil that they are capable of by mere virtue of their being human. Torture is generally not performed by sociopaths but by the same people would give up their seat on the bus to an old lady and who love their kids. They are, like most of us, socially compliant rule following individuals put in a circumstance in which the rules tell them that torture is the correct behavior. Define the subject as “an other”, have the order come from a trusted authority, impose an even very modest social cost on not complying with the command - oh yeah, you’d torture.
Easy for any of us to say from the comfort of our society that we’d resist, that only the amoral or evil or sociopathic would comply … but it isn’t true.
Sure, I’d love to indulge in the fantasy that I would be above it and would maintain my moral code. But I’m not stupid enough to allow myself to believe it. We prevent torture and genocide not by weeding out evil individuals but by creating a world in which the social structures (or lack of appropriate social structures) that allow torture to occur do not exist.
Performing one single act of torture is one thing; performing torture under duress is another. But what about people who do it for a living (using that word in its broadest sense)? And if reports are to be believed, some people appear to get enjoyment out of it. Could you do it regularly? Would you ever get satisfaction from it? If no, what do you think about the people who do? If yes, why?
