Does torture work? The research says, “No”
The article mainly discussed whether torture is useful from the psychological point of view.
The researchers developed a new experimental method, participants were instructed to keep specific information hidden from an opponent while their hand was in varying temperatures of ice water (a cold pressor test that causes pain). Further, their opponent (actually a confederate) verbally pressured them to reveal the information. Participants could choose to give false information to their opponent, true information, or a combination of both.
Results suggested the potential usefulness of this method to examine the effectiveness of using pain for information retrieval in a scenario similar to interrogation: Analyses revealed that participants were more likely to reveal false information when exposed to the cold pressor test, and this effect became more pronounced as manipulated water temperatures became colder (from 10 degrees to 5 degrees to 1 degree).
I found this paper quite interesting. It describes a new experimental method to ethically investigate one component of torture: The influence of physical pain on people’s decisions to reveal secret or false information, and future researchers could adapt this method to study this topic in more depth.
Professor Easley talked about game theory in class. So this article has caused me to think about the relationship between human psychological state and game theory. When people are being tortured, they may be more inclined to think that telling the truth is not a good choice. They might think that I have already suffered a lot of pain of not telling the truth, and if I tell the truth I still have the possibility to be sentenced. Why don’t I continue to tell the lies? So I think it might be another unusual Nash Equilibrium. (Just a personal guess)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281274173_The_influence_of_physical_pain_on_decision-making_processes_in_experimental_interrogation_scenarios