Check this latest diary by Valtin, who’s been doing some enormously important digging into the history of psychology’s involvement in the development of modern methods of torture. I’ll provide a lengthy teaser, but suggest strongly you read the whole thing:
What if there was a book that dispassionately looked at the history and methodology of torture? What if this book looked at human physiology and psychology and tried to scientifically establish how to best break another human being and bend him or her to your will? What if this book were written by top behavioral scientists and published in the United States? And, finally, what if the studies published in this book were financed by the U.S. government?
Look no farther, there is, or rather was, such a book. Published in 1961 by John Wiley & Sons, The Manipulation of Human Behavior was edited by psychologists Albert D. Biderman and Herbert Zimmer. This book, unfortunately, cannot be found online, nor was a second edition or printing ever made (not surprisingly). But I will provide a review here, and an introduction into the nightmare world of science, torture, and politics that helped shape our modern world and today’s news.
This book represents a critical examination of some of the conjectures about the application of scientific knowledge to the manipulation of human behavior. The problem is explored within a particular frame of reference: the interrogation of an unwilling subject….
Much of the work in this book was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force…(p. 1)
Albert Biderman had researched the so-called brainwashing of American POWs during the Korean War. He worked as Principal Investigator of an Air Force Office of Scientific Research contract studying stresses associated with capitivity. Biderman was also Senior Research Associate at the Bureau of Social Science Research.
…the U.S. Air Force provided at least half of the budget of the Bureau of Social Science Research in the 1950s. Military contracts supported studies at this Bureau such as the vulnerabilities of Eastern European peoples for the purposes of psychological warfare and comparisons of the effectiveness of “drugs, electroshock, violence, and other coercive techniques during interrogation of prisoners.” (from a review of Chistopher Simpson’s Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960)
His associate, Herbert Zimmer, was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, and also worked at times as a consultant for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. When you read their book, The Manipulation of Human Behavior (MHB), the various essays by other authors include statements crediting research to grants from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology and the Office of Naval Research.
The titles of the book’s essays are bone-chilling in their scientific bland exactitude. Here they are, with authors, for the record:
1. The Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject as it Affects Brain Function, by Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr., Assoc. Professor of Clinical Medicine in Psychiatry, New York Hospital
2. The Effects of Reduced Environmental Stimulation on Human Behavior: A Review, by Phillip E. Kubazansky, Chief Psychologist, Boston City Hospital
3. The Use of Drugs in Interrogation, by Louis A. Gottschalk, Assoc. Professor of Psychiatry and Research Coordinator, Cincinnati General Hospital
[snip]
4. Physiological Responses as a Means of Evaluating Information, by R. C. Davis, Professor of Psychology, Indiana University
5. The Potential Uses of Hypnosis in Interrogation, by Martin T. Orne, Teaching Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard University Medical School
[snip]
6. The Experimental Investigation of Interpersonal Influence, by Robert R. Blake and Jane S. Mouton, Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, and Social Science Research Associate, University of Texas, respectively
7. Countermanipulation Through Malingering, by Malcolm L. Meltzer, Staff Psychologist, District of Columbia General Hospital
Six of the essay contributors were psychologists; two were psychiatrists.
Cui bono?
I cannot give a full review here of all the research and conclusions derived herein. The significance of the book itself is hard to gauge, because nothing of its like was ever published again. We can assume that the government agencies that financed the research passed along the results to those who could use it. Biderman himself in his introduction to MHB put it this way:
In assuming the attitude of the “hard-headed” scientist toward the problem, there is a danger in falling into an equivalent misuse of science….
The conclusions reached do in fact show that many devlopments can compound tremendously the already almost insuperable difficulties confronting the individual who seeks to resist an interrogator unrestrained by moral or legal [scruples]….
Several scientists have reported on the possible applications of scientific knowledge that might be made by eht most callous interrogator or power. The results of their thinking are availbale here for anyone to use, including the unscrupulous. (pp. 6, 9) (emphasis mine)
Spine feeling the shivers yet? When I first read the above, I thought I had stumbled into a fascist nightmare out of Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors. But then, I read on:
The alternative is to confer on the would-be interrogator a monopoly of knowledge by default. His success, as the various chapters of this book illustrate, depends heavily on the ignorance of his victims. [B. F.] Skinner has aruged that those who are most concerned with restricting the vulnerabilty of men to control others have the most to gain from a clear understanding of the techniques employed. (p. 9)
Was Biderman saying that publishing this material publicly was an oblique attempt to expose what was going on? Was there a twinge of guilt in these men and women, working for the military under the guise of medical and university establishments? I don’t know. But Biderman had a few other psychological observations about torture worth quoting (and think about President Bush as you read this, as he said the other day that he has spent a significant amount of time studying the issue of interrogations, torture, etc.):
The profound fascination of the topic under consideration may stem from the primitive, unconscious, and extreme responses to these problems, which gain expression in myth, dreams, drama, and literature. On the one hand, there is the dream-wish for omnipotence, on the other, the wish and fear of the loss of self through its capture by another. The current interest in problems of manipulation of behavior involves basic ambivalences over omnipotence and dependency, which, if projected, find a ready target in the “omniscient” scientist….
Conjectures concerning the prospects of “total annihilation of the human will” appear almost as frequently as those regarding the threat of mankind’s total destruction by thermonuclear of similar weapons…..
Viewing the problem in magical or diabolical terms is not an altogether irrational analogy, given the existence of those who simultaneously practice and seek perfection of the means for controlling behavior and conceive their efforts as directed toward “possessing the will” of their victims….
Thus, magical thinking and projections, as has been indicated, pervade prevalent judgments regarding the significance of the behavioral alterations that interrogators can effect. (pp. 4-6)
No matter whatever qualms these researchers had, they were sure of two things: “that some potentialities of interrogation have been overestimated”, particularly those that relied on old methods (extreme violence); and
There is no question that it is possible for men to alter, impair, or even to destroy the effictive psychological functioning of others over whom they exercise power. (p. 10)
The problem for the torturers, though, was the “elicitation of guarded factual information”. For this, something more scientific was needed, something better than the old, unreliable techniques. — In many ways, the disputes over interrogation now embroiling Washington are about the utility of methods, with Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney representing the old (omnipotence-craving) school, and McCain, Powell, and the military representing those who understand that psychlogical manipulation (often amounting to torture itself) gets them what they want, without the international treaty entanglements. The CIA is itself split within by a similar two wings.
The diarist goes on to describe in more detail the experiments described in the above book chapters. By all means make sure to read the whole thing. Valtin will hopefully continue to flesh this account of one of the dark sides to the behavioral sciences.
