# Torture & confession **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 22, 2012, 11:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/torture-confession/629034 "2012-07-22T11:09:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![grude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47774/32.png) [@grude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/grude)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2012, 5:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/torture-confession/629034/61 "2012-07-26T05:39:13Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > The whole “this is America” thing? Come on, you and I KNOW no one can torture people and not end up in handcuffs. I’d be going along with the joke, mugging for the cameras and waving to Alan Funt. Which makes me wonder how you could make people think it was real… What if you somehow faked the idea that they had left the USA? Maybe fly them to a facility in the Florida keys while telling the subjects they were actually being flown to Guantanamo Bay Cuba? ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2012, 6:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/torture-confession/629034/62 "2012-07-26T06:21:23Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > The whole “this is America” thing? Come on, you and I KNOW no one can torture people and not end up in handcuffs. I’d be going along with the joke, mugging for the cameras and waving to Alan Funt. Come on! This is Germany!! Country of poets and musicians. You and I know that all this talk about exterminating the jews is just so much rhetoric. No, they are just being relocated. ---
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2012, 7:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/torture-confession/629034/63 "2012-07-26T07:43:15Z")
> [@jtgain](#): > > No. Those are two different things. If you torture the guy long enough, he will tell you that the Virgin Mary herself conspired with him to commit the crime. That is unreliable evidence. He will simply tell you who you are looking for. > > But the location of a body is verifiable. It’s there or its not. He will eventually give up the location of the body to make the torture stop, because if he keeps telling you bad information, you will come back and torture him more. > > \*Note, I only agree with torture in the “ticking time bomb” scenario and no other. But for these very limited types of inquires, torture certainly works. Surely the inquisitors were just sick bastards that wanted to justify what they were doing. Do you have an observational evidence that torture can work under such circumstances? Others have poked holes in your scenario. Another problem that hasn’t been mentioned here is that torture tends to crowd out more effective police techniques. In Peru, they tortured a lot of people when hunting down the Shining Path, but didn’t capture Guzman until they applied… standard police investigative techniques. I understand that the Israelis also struggled with a crowding out problem. It’s intuitive that reaching for the tongs would surely work on a reluctant prisoner. But as Sherwood Moran pointed out -and big city police investigators will tell you- there are more effective techniques. > [@dracoi](#): > > I don’t think this is backed up by modern research, including [Stanley Milgram’s experiments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) and the [Stanford prison experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment). Everyone is capable of being a torturer and we’re deluding ourselves if we think otherwise. In the Milgram experiment many did not go to the top of the scale and a few refused to participate at all. So I wouldn’t say “Everyone”: that’s not backed by the study. Oddly enough, most of those who cooperated and pressed the shock switch showed signs of being stressed out: they sweated, they mumbled about what a terrible experiment this was. Then they pressed the lever. All of this occurred in 1961, before Candid Camera and when the US was less lawsuit-happy. ---
**Author:** ![Strassia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e8c25b/32.png) [@Strassia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Strassia)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2012, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/torture-confession/629034/64 "2012-07-26T13:17:18Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > The whole “this is America” thing? Come on, you and I KNOW no one can torture people and not end up in handcuffs. I’d be going along with the joke, mugging for the cameras and waving to Alan Funt. So, nothing but your own feelings of exceptionalism. The experiments pre-dated Candid Camera. I have never heard of any participant claiming to know it was fake. The results were a huge deal at the time. It shocked the public and scientists. They rewrote the rules on human experimentation because of it. With all that going on, no one seemed to question that the results were real, but 50 years later you “know” that can’t happen because “this is America?” In case you weren’t aware, “this is America” was the whole point of the experiment. After WWII, it was a common assumption that Nazis and the Holocaust happened because there was something uniquely wrong with the Germans. Milgram’s experiment was expected to show that American’s wouldn’t kill someone just because the person in charge said it was okay. This is a widely known, studied, and repeated experiment (modified in various ways). It is taught in every Psychology 101 class. But I am sure it is all a huge misunderstanding and a gag played on Migram and the test subjects have been too shy to come forward and admit it. > [@Measure\_for\_Measure](#): > > It’s intuitive that reaching for the tongs would surely work on a reluctant prisoner. But as Sherwood Moran pointed out -and big city police investigators will tell you- there are more effective techniques. In the Milgram experiment many did not go to the top of the scale and **a few refused to participate at all**. So I wouldn’t say “Everyone”: that’s not backed by the study. Oddly enough, most of those who cooperated and pressed the shock switch showed signs of being stressed out: they sweated, they mumbled about what a terrible experiment this was. Then they pressed the lever. All of this occurred in 1961, before Candid Camera and when the US was less lawsuit-happy. Do you have a cite for the bolded portion? Everything I have read indicated that everyone participated up to the severe shock level in the original experiment. In later versions it seemed that the level of compliance went down the later the experiment. I personally would have liked to see some way to correlate knowledge of the Migram study with the results of the later studies. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2012, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/torture-confession/629034/65 "2012-07-26T13:42:06Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Bah. In one case it’s “psychological torture” in another it’s mild pain, and in all case,\* both sides know that the “victim” can say “Enough of this shit” at any time\*. > [@DrDeth](#): > > No, they werent. Come on, this is America. All the dudes in that study knew full well that you cant really kill people or torture them. They were acting. So, it’s apparent that you _aren’t_, in fact, familiar with the Milgram study, and didn’t read the links. > [@Strassia](#): > > Have you ever read the Milgram papers? They were not about mild pain. They were about escalating pain. The “victims” (who were actually researchers pretending to be hooked up to the learning machine) begged the subjects to stop, faked extreme agony and even death: > > [URL=“[Milgram Shock Experiment | Summary | Results | Ethics](http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html)”] > > That means every person who participate was willing to cause severe pain, and 65% were willing to kill. Just because someone in authority told them it was ok. The video was taken down from Youtube, but that site has audio clips if you want to judge for yourself: Indeed. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/torture-confession/629034.md?page=3)