Torture prevalent, effective in popular movies, study finds
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Torture should be depicted for the pure atrocity that it is, not as an entertaining plot piece to imagine doing nasty things to a Russian/Middle eastern person.
Interestingly, cops shooting at fleeing suspects is very common in TV shows and movies, but generally considered unacceptable in real life.
I've sometimes wondered if the cops who grew up watching these scenes over and over again as children, might be inadvertently bringing that same behavior into their real life jobs.
Of course the challenge of proving this, is well stated in this quote:
"Does TV viewing really contribute to all those reactions? ...At the heart of the debate is the difficulty of proving that one thing causes another...Similarly, it has been difficult to prove that the violence shown on television causes crime and antisocial behavior...A Canadian psychologist wrote: “The scientific evidence simply does not show that watching violence either produces violence in people or desensitizes them to it.” However, the American Psychological Association Committee on Media and Society said: “There is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior.”"
Taken from: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102006362#h=13
However, among past social circles of mine, I can definitely say TV helped normalize behaviors that at one time weren't as common.
For example, I saw gangster rap, and all of the forms of entertainment that accompanied it's rise in the 90's, dramatically normalize arrogant and aggressive behavior among my peers in suburbia.
So to me, it's logical that TV and movies are one part of the cultural fabric that can indoctrinate new behaviors in the real world. Some of them really unfortunate.
Recently, cops have been getting in trouble for shooting suspects as they run "away" from the police.
TV/film was always ludicrously loose on use of deadly force by police. Even Bert the cop shot at an unarmed, fleeing George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life"!
In other words, I think there might be a causality chain, but one that can be easily broken.
I think series like 24 were no accident. They pushed the limit farther. Today even kid movies like Pets is more than slapstick comedy. Even there you see torture as valid means.
Don't violence rates vary quite a bit from country to country?
For example, parts of Central America are terribly violent.
I'm also not saying that TV is the sole contributing cause.
But that, I just wonder if cops are inadvertently affected by growing up watching how cops in TV shows routinely handle cases.
For example, a few months ago in Florida, cops got in a shoot out on a busy freeway and used bystander vehicles for cover.
Many were horrified, suggesting the cops should have let the criminals flee, rather than engaging in a shootout using civilian vehicles as cover.
But, how many TV shows and movies show cops ignoring bystanders.
Could it be that some inexperienced cops inadvertently slip into doing what they've grown up seeing in movies and TV shows?
I can't prove it, but I've just wondered if that's what's happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleeing_felon_rule
So at least some of those movies may have just been accurately portraying the practices of the time.
I can't think of a single one off the top of my head.
https://youtu.be/6SLDMMGzkyI?t=61
But regarding torture, in the 70's Christian/Roman era themed movie were commonly shown on TV. As a child I concluded that every man eventually gets tortured. While we were watching a particularly brutal scene I asked my dad if he was ever tortured and didn't believe him when he said "no". But if TV weren't enough, we had a crucifix in every room and I found the normalization and ubiquity of depictions of torture depressing and confusing, leaving me convinced I was born on the wrong planet.
Supposedly the patron saint of the tortured is Epipodius (just looked it up), but in my faith I actually believe there is no patron saint of the tortured. If you're tortured that's a cut above every other predicament and the only saint for you is the patron saint of all patron saints, Jesus, because he was the original Christian to get tortured for his faith.
Saw is a horror movie. Horror movies are a way to experience scary things without putting you in actual danger. And they are not going to achieve that by just showing kittens playing, getting you to be scared/horrified/disgusted/... when you know you are perfectly safe and that the story is fiction is hard enough. So they use an arsenal of techniques, from jump scares to phobias and gruesome deaths. And torture is great for this. We can imagine what it feels like, we get to see the blood and gore, we know it something that happens in the real world,... Well made, torture scenes are very effective at creating tension when it is called for.
And I don't think we should not use them just because torture is atrocious in real life. When we go see a horror movie or thriller, we know the game, we don't want it to go easy on us. Deep inside, we know we are safe, that's what allows us to have fun playing with our limits.
Is it healthy? I think so, most kids love getting scared at some point, and they don't become psychopaths as a result. And horror stories, even the most tasteless ones definitely don't glorify what they are showing.
I wouldn't stop anyone else from watching them, and those movies aren't shit or trashy either (like some commenter has said). But I know my reasons for not enjoying them, and preferring horror that is more subtle, psychological, and rooted in realistic trauma that I've experienced myself.
Torture is out of the picture because it's too often depicted as something the torturer can't wait to do, they're just held back by a system and they want to go rogue. You know, the trope of the torturer unfolding a cloth or a leather pouch to joyously reveal a bunch of surgical instruments. Or punching a guy in the face so hard it knocks their chair over; which in real life would probably put them in a coma.
Jack Bauer teaches us that torturing people is an effective way to make them tell us (true) information.
Alternatively, John Wick, and almost every other action movie, show us that violence - and killing people - is an effective and morally acceprable way of solving problems. The distinction between violence and torture depictions is not as obvious as you want it to be.
I don't think that's accurate. More like, John Wick implies that violence and murder of those above the law is an effective and morally acceptable way to solve the injustice they perpetrate. That's a much more reasonable position that will have plenty of people on both sides.
Spoiler warning:
I mean, yeah, there is some more food for thought in there :
-The violence endemic to the conflict between man and the system in which he operates: (Wick and the Continental)
-The face of violence embodied by the struggle between personal/professional loyalty: Wick, and the Manager of the Continental.
-The violent fruits of man's will to free himself of the constraints of a system designed specifically to constrain him: Wick's breaking of the code.
-The tendency of violence to beget and amplify itself in the absence of some braking force.
-That violence exists as a universal tool in the toolset of interpersonal conflict, and a view of the world if it were shaped around an organized deployment thereof outside of our current set of institutions that we entrust with controlling the application of violence.
C'mon though, let's not pretend the movie justifies anything. It's Art. It isn't there to be blamed as a causative factor, it's there to be appreciated and moved by. To make you think, feel, and give you a new perspective. If John Wick can be credibly pointed to as a causative factor of escalating violence, then clearly Andy Warhol caused obesity and consumerism with his soup can, Dali causes people to be tardy, Clive Cussler is a leading cause of totally badass and inexplicably effective oceanographer cum international crisis resolvers, H.G. Wells caused the atomic bomb, Orson Scott Card already laid out how we'll handle first contact, and Oscar Wilde created the surveillance hellscape in which we live.
We may be moved by what we see, but in the end it is we ourselves that are the causative factors. We react, we integrate, we sculpt spots for each other to settle into through what we knowingly and unknowingly do.
Does Art shape culture? Or culture shape Art? Are the Artists warning us of what is to come, or are they tangifying the steps in the direction society is already progressing towards? We can't say for certain, but in the absence of an authoritative answer, I'd wager there us a dynamic equilibrium at work that is starting to be compensated for, depending on where individual decisions of sentiment end up pointing.
The difference being that you are used to one of these and unused to the other?
The problem isn't portraying torture, but portraying it as something that always gets actionable, accurate information.
Torture is both ineffective and immoral.
Portraying it as effective is a problem.
Portraying it as morally acceptable is a problem.
One should not make relativistic moral calculations with fundamentally unacceptable acts.
That doesn't have any bearing on other people's moral frameworks, in which relativistic calculations may be the right thing to do.
It becomes at best a statement of opinion, and at worst it can be taken as dismissive of the values of others.
I don't believe this is a very useful property of a conversation which is about trying to understand how the world squares with opinions that people can hold.
My only point was that morality isn't necessarily related to effectiveness. But some moral positions could of course depend on effectiveness.
Tony Stark is a stone cold murderer sociopath, he kills a bunch of terrorists and then seconds after almost killing someone in a friendly fire incident, laughs about it with his buddy.
People can encourage filmmakers being responsible while not encouraging turning the government on them.
I can say Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow have done immense damage to the world without wanting them imprisoned or forced to stop making movies.
There's nothing wrong with condemning people who are doing bad things: criticism is a necessary part of the equation that allows free speech to work.
Responsible art? Give me a break. Leave art alone. Overly sensitive people have already ruined so much of internet already. I'd hate to see art destroyed as well. If you don't like the art, then don't consume it. Simple as that.
> criticism is a necessary part of the equation that allows free speech to work.
There is a difference between critiquing an art and trying to shame artists from abandoning their art.
Are you going to encourage libraries to be "responsible" and remove huckleberry finn or mein kampf? What I really worry about are the sneaky backhanded method of pushing censorship that I see online now. They are worse than the "won't you think of the children" types.
There is no big conspiracy in entertainment to make torture acceptable. It is primary dumb plot point that is easy to plug in to get cheap thrill. Just like dumb one dimensional characters characterized by one personality trait are not result of some kind of psychological conspiracy.
Acting like this stuff is inappropriate to comment upon is what allows those to stay. Criticizing and commenting on bad cgi and bad acting raised quality of those too.
This meme needs to die.
Really, this idea of shifting personal behavior and hoping the market/economy as a whole will follow is advanced for some many problems, and in general it is a dismal failure. Why would you even expect it to work? Theaters might stop booking movies that are unpopular, but there is zero social penalty for going to see a movie; and in any case, most movies are watched at home, as is porn.
Where is the evidence for this working? Over what timescale? How is it to be measured, especially when streaming video viewership is far less transparent than even old-fashioned box office and movie rental receipts? It's little more than a statement of religious faith in the market, and doesn't even engage with the possibility that vicious as well as virtuous cycles exist and can be manipulated.
Imagine how many people in Guantanamo have been subjected to over a decade of this treatment under the utterly delusional belief that they must have some information to offer and cannot, under any circumstance, be innocent, so therefore they deserve it.
As a counter-example, Antichrist features some scenes that could be seen as torture if the story was reframed. Same with Nymphomania. While that kind of shock value is par for the course for Lars von Trier, it doesn't necessarily celebrate it. I'm sure plenty wanted to ban or censor that; I just wanted to see something genuinely disturbing.
Some examples, both specific and general:
* Smart people always immediately know solutions to problems and are 100% confident about these solutions
* If someone's heart stops beating, just use a defibrillator
* Hacking is an active activity
* Modern medicine is "white box" -- just scan your body, see the problem and get meds that fix it
* "Someone" (a government, a company, an evil mastermind etc.) is always in control of any given situation involving a large number of people, regardless of how chaotic the situation is and how many stakeholders are involved
For example (just taking a wild guess), if we assume:
- There is an antagonist (individual or organization)
- The characters need to stop whatever the antagonist's plan is, but lack some necessary information
- The antagonist sends some type of minion to stop them from stopping the plan
Defining "torture" as broadly as it seems to be defined here, it would be a very natural plot mechanism for enabling the main characters to accomplish their goal in this scenario. And this scenario, really, is incredibly common. Almost more common in children's movies compared to other movies, because of its simplicity.
Also, it seems even more appealing in this scenario if we assume the characters aren't going to kill anybody (again, for children's movies). If there's a big fight or chase which ends with the protagonists having captured the minion, what do they do with him/her? They can't just let them go, that would be anticlimactic. They can't kill them. Squeezing information out of them before letting them go is satisfying and purposeful and progresses the plot, while still being merciful and family-friendly.
Skilled directors and writers in movies can of course create conflict in all sorts of ways but all the hacks out there are just going to reach for the gun.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it felt to me like everyone knew that torture was wrong before the first series of 24 came out, and then a few years later, everyone thought it was often the right thing to do.
Americans, meanwhile, were angry and many just wanted Muslims to suffer, and their government was telling them that torture (sorry, "enhanced interrogation") was not only just, but necessary and effective, and that opposing it was not only cowardice but borderline treason, and would lead to the next 9/11.
[1]https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908
You write that as if it is an indisputable law of nature. It's been debated in philosophy/ethics forever. Like most controversial ethical issues, it's unsettled at best.
> It really doesn’t matter how effective it is.
Many would disagree. If proven effective, you could easily argue it is moral to torture an evil-doer to save the lives of many.
Life isn't black and white. It's a lot of gray. You are free to believe what you want, but I just don't like the absolute moralizing - especially when it comes to controversial topics.
Neither of these things are an actual argument. Just because some people disagree it does not make a fact untrue. Just because you can argue something does not make that arguement correct.
The argument that many good lives would be saved is defeated by the fact that a society that tortures people is making a mockery of human dignity and the values that can underpin human happiness. When one person can be tortured for extreme need, soon anyone can be tortured for any reason. There are countless examples of this kind of slippage, from the terrors in France and Russia to the use of extreme surveillance by local authorities in the UK (to determine if school places should be allocated). How can anyone be happy when they might be taken and tortured at any moment? How can the preservation of people in terror be a goal to be accomplished by an intrinsically evil act.
We are defined by how we dispense mercy and compassion, that is what makes society worth preserving.
Yeah no.
If one person were tortured to save the lives of 100, is that unethical. Possibly, but also possibly not.
The classic thought experiment around this is the trolley problem, where murdering innocents can save more lives than non-action.
None of this obtains in the torture case. Suppose you learn with certainty there is a bomb somewhere on Main Street, and you capture X, the evil bomber, with only 10 minutes to go. You want X to give you the exact location, because you don't have time to evacuate the whole street.
So you torture X...but what if he just gives you the wrong location? It will take you several minutes to check it out, and while you're doing so, the bomb goes off. You've failed. Even when you know for sure that the torture subject has the information you want there is delay between getting an answer and verifying it. In any ticking clock scenario the original malefactor can build in a plan for a diversion or the equivalent o a warrant canary to warn co-conspirators.
So what do you do? Send someone to check but act like you don't believe them and keep torturing X anyway? X knows it will take non-zero time to validate any answer and can structure the evil plot to take account of that. If you keep torturing X, you might just get a second decoy, plus there's now a strong argument that you're just doing it because you like it, and have picked a job which provides you with the excuse of necessity.
And ticking-clock-with-captured-terrorist scenarios are so rare in reality as to be nonexistent. Almost invariably torture is deployed either to terrorize people or to fish for information which the subject might or might not have. Generally, if prisoners won't supply the information an interrogator desires, they don't have it; and if they do have it, they're sufficiently strong-willed to withstand the torture. In a good many cases, the fact of torture motivates them to hold out, because it validates their moral opposition to a power that tortures people in the first place.
> “Evidence suggests that torture does not work, but media often show that it does,” Kearns said.
They did get some intelligence - from conventional interrogation and debriefing of prisoners.
Wouldn't that make torture potentially effective in cases without those issues, such as torturing someone to get them to reveal a password to an encrypted device that you know they use daily?
That this is awful does not make it untrue.
If it makes everyone feel better, the tech to simply "read" your secrets out of your brain with no torture whatsoever will likely soon exist (or already does).
That said, a lot of torture is performed not to extract information but to instill terror, etc.
Suppose you know facts A, B, C, and D. You want to know E. You ask about all 5 facts. You can verify 4 out of 5, but you don't reveal that. After getting the 5 answers, you trust fact E if the other facts are verified. If not, torture, but don't reveal how exactly you are sure about lying, and then try again.
Given that they don't want to tell you E in the first place, how many of the hundreds of answers they'll scream at you are you going to be able to follow up on?
What you're actually going to do is here the answer you already know, stop the pain and ask something else, and thus tell the person exactly what to say to make the pain stop - while having no actual ability to know if there answer for E is truthful or if they even know it. Eventually you'll get an answer you like, and that will be the only answer they give because again, it made the pain stop.
The items A, B, C, and D are all known. (from other sources of information) They are used as an honesty test.
To make the pain stop, the only way out is to reveal E and to correctly reveal A, B, C, and D. Lying isn't going to work, because the fact that E is special is not revealed.
It isn't reasonable to guess that E is the unknown.
That's the stakes here when you're at that point: fear of death is not enough motivation, fear of not dying quickly is.
In this situation there's no reason the person isn't going to lie for an extended period of time about A, B, C and D. So why wouldn't they then lie about E? Because you think you're going to have broken them by that time? Gotten them suitably fearful of what you'll do next that they don't also just start lying about E? Are you so sure that after whatever horrors you've inflicted their psyche will be intact enough to even give a coherent answer? Keeping in mind, that sleep deprivation and extended interrogation has been shown - repeatedly - to be enough to make otherwise innocent people confess to brutal crimes they did not commit.
EDIT: People keep thinking torture is effective because if I broke your fingers with a hammer, you'd give me your car keys. What's actually happening is I'm breaking your fingers one by one with a hammer, and saying I'll stop if you tell me where your family is so I can go murder them all.
> In this situation there's no reason the person isn't going to lie for an extended period of time about A, B, C and D. So why wouldn't they then lie about E?
You seem to be thinking about this in chronological sequence, as if we ask about A then B then C then D then E. If that was the case, then yes, your logic would work. They might have lied about A for a long time, then B for a long time, then C for a long time, then D for a long time, then E for a long time and you'd never know if they were telling the truth about E.
But that's not what is being proposed. We ask about A, B, C, D, and E altogether. As in you have conversation and asked them about A, B, C, D, and E before doing any torture. If they lied about A, B, C, or D we torture them. Then we have the same conversation again, and torture them again. Eventually, they start telling the truth about say C. Why C? They are just choosing something at random to tell truth about in hopes of making the pain stop. But nothing changes, we keep torturing them because we know they are still lying about A, B, and D. Eventually they also start telling the truth about A, then E, then B, then D. Then we stop torturing them because they are being honest about everything we can verify. They can escape without divulging the information only if they keep E until last.
The key assumption here is that the person being tortured reveals the truth in a random order. It is improbable that they happen to keep the one thing we cannot verify until the end.
This is not to say that this procedure would be effective, but its not ineffective for the reason you suggest.
On the theory side, the probability of keeping E until the end is 1/5, which isn't that low.
On the practical side, this requires that the person being tortured has no idea what you can and can't verify. If, instead, they have some idea of what you can and can't verify, they'll be able to keep the hardest to verify information till the end preventing this scheme from working.
People have been arrested and held because they had Truecrypt installed but never actually used it.
Basically if you decrypt the device what are you looking for? What if you don't find it?
It may be an immoral human rights violation, and not the best first line interrogation tactic, but I see it as undeniably effective. It seems like wishful thinking to believe otherwise.
It's effective at getting the victim to say whatever they think will make the torture stop. People aren't stupid though, they know the truth won't necessarily achieve that goal. Sometimes the truth will simply encourage more torture.
Falsfiable statements then require verification, presumably against a more reliable source of information. But if you have a more reliable source of information, what additional confidence did the torture provide? And if you don't have a more reliable source of info for verification, then the torture still provided no confidence in the information.
The best interrogators know that befriending your captives provides considerably better information, and it doesn't produce more enemies or escalate the conflict. Imagine if torture had been routine during the Cold War.
Befriending captives is no doubt a better first line interrogation tactic for all the reasons you state. Torture can still be effective yet not worthwhile due to negative externalities.
I’m not a proponent of using it, I just think the argument against should acknowledge why it’s still being used around the world.
Having been awake during some particularly excrutiating medical procedures, my mind was not creative or clear or able to access memories in any meaningful context (being in a panic state). If I was being tortured and what they wanted to hear was the truth, I can be assured to tell it to them in broken english under the right duress. So this "be friendly" approach is typical social engineering. Ok, thats nice.
Except you also just said that you weren't able to access memories in any meaningful context, so how are certain you would or even could be truthful?
And even if you were truthful, they would then torture you more to "be sure" you were being honest, which they can never be sure of, so where does it end?
And then your information might conflict with information they obtianed elsewhere, so they torture you some more to ascertain the truth, but there's no end point at which uncertainty disappears.
Ultimately, your panic-addled brain realizes that the truth isn't actually useful in this context and grasps at any straws thus diluting the signal to noise ratio. This progression is simply inevitable. The confidence in anything the victim says is basically nil.
"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.
The only claims I have read are of limited tortures (e.g., waterboarding, freezing, isolation, playing bad music, etc.) that are allowed by Western democracies sometimes.
I simply cannot believe that more intense torture techniques (say, those used by criminal elements) will not result in an individual revealing whatever he knows (or dying).
A lot of writers are faced with “so how does the good guy get the bad guys minions to turn on him in a short amount of time?”
A common trope in movies is “working your way up the food chain” ... getting low level guys to flip on their bosses.
There aren’t many ways to do that, and the alternatives create distraction.
They definitely have a certain political agenda
From their paper, they describe one example in Zootopia:
Officer Hopps needs to find the drop-off location for "night howler" flowers (a poisonous flower that has been weaponized to turn animals "feral"). She turns to an organized crime boss to extract information from a lackey of the antagonists. The crime boss's polar bear enforcers hold the lackey over a hole in iced-over water, threatening to throw him in (and ostensibly kill him) if he doesn't give up the location. "Ice him," says the crime boss. The lackey quickly gives up the desired information and our heroes go on to (spoiler alert) save the day.
Cartoon animals were threatening to throw someone into the water. Is that really "torture"?
Later in the paper, they describe that they include any "threat of pain" to be torture, as long as it isn't self-defense. So a schoolyard bully saying "I'll punch you unless you give me your lunch money" is considered to be torture.
Naturally, with this sort of definition of torture, they discover that most movies contain torture.
“As citizens of a democracy, our suggestion here is certainly not to constrain how media depict interrogations and torture .... Rather, our aim is to draw attention to the prevalence of this trope and hope that screenwriters will exercise more caution in using torture as a plot device.”
IMO this is not different from shocking a flatlining patient; it does not work, and {may be a missed public education opportunity, may lose some credibility points}
http://www.aed.com/blog/tv-myth-shocking-a-flatline-heart-rh...