Pain Of Torture Can Make Innocent Seem Guilty

sciencedaily.com

22 points·amichail··5 comments

This result is absolutely predictable by anyone who understands cognitive dissonance.

http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/cognitive_dis... has a decent explanation of cognitive dissonance. The same phenomena is what causes many programmers to protect their self-image of being good programmers by being unable to find the bugs in their own code, acknowledge that the bugs are their fault, and then to be upset afterwards.

For a classic reference on that phenomena and what to do about it I recommend The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald M. Weinberg. (Yes, it is several decades old. But human nature hasn't changed and its advice is still good.) I also wrote up an explanation of the phenomena at http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=270083 some time ago.

A couple of centuries late but it never hurts to reinforce common knowledge with a new study.

> Gray explains the different results as arising from different levels of complicity.

Or as Upton Sinclair famously put it, it is difficult to get a man to understand something if his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.

Sounds pretty similar to the Milgram Experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment).

Related, although Milgram was showing that people can explain away their own complicity by being within a chain of authority, while this experiment teases apart the perceptions of the complicit (or non-complicit) agent.

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