12 ms·

Torture prevalent, effective in popular movies, study finds

113 points by Shivetya 7y ago

eindiran 7y ago
Here is a copy of the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908
padseeker 7y ago
This reads exactly like an Onion headline
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  The onion is surprisingly accurate actually.
Ericson2314 7y ago
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/essays/special-journey-to-our-bottom-line/ https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/essays/special-journey-to-o...
Uhhrrr 7y ago
This would be fine and dandy and all part of an exciting narrative if not for the fact that torture in the real world is incredibly unreliable. Top Google results are mostly politicized so here's Wikipedia on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_torture_for_interrogation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_torture_for_i...
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Even if torture worked it still is immoral. It really doesn’t matter how effective it is.
  - tyre 7y ago
    immoral now, but not so definitively unethical. 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.
    - Ididntdothis 7y ago
      I don’t really like this example. Has there ever been a situation where things were things were so urgent that torturing somebody was the only option? I doubt it. And if torture is so useful why only apply it to foreigners and not criminals at home?
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      The problem with trolley problems (and utilitarianism in general) is that they assume a degree of foresight that rarely exists in the real world. You know there are more lives at risk on path A than path B, and you know that pressing a button will reliably allow you to choose between them. 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.
- squeaky-clean 7y ago
  This is literally the articles point. > “Evidence suggests that torture does not work, but media often show that it does,” Kearns said.
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    The only thing mention in the article is that torture can lead to false confessions, which are undesirable but very far from showing that torture is not effective on net. What's the best citation for ineffectiveness?
    - XorNot 7y ago
      The CIA engaged in a sustained campaign of black site torture under Bush and the subsequent report found that they obtained no actionable intelligence from "enhanced interrogation". They did get some intelligence - from conventional interrogation and debriefing of prisoners.
- devit 7y ago
  The problems seem to be that the person may not know the information and the information may not be easy to verify. 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?
  - XorNot 7y ago
    Not if they have a deniable secondary volume set up. Or only encrypted a partition (which you can't mathematically prove its actually data and not just empty space). 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?
  - tropo 7y ago
    Yes, and it is often effective even with those issues. 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.
    - XorNot 7y ago
      If you don't already know E, then how are you going to verify it? How do you even know they know it? 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?
      - winstonewert 7y ago
        The point is that you verify A, B, C, and D. If they are telling you the truth about those, they are probably also truthful about E. They could only effectively lie about E if they knew that was the one thing you couldn't verify.
        7y ago
kybernetikos 7y ago
And in my opinion, it's had a noticeable effect on public opinion. 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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- revicon 7y ago
  24 premiered on November 6, 2001, 56 days after the 9/11 attacks. My un-informed opinion is torture got a whole lot more popular because of that than the show
  - krapp 7y ago
    I remember it the other way around - I first heard about 24 from neo-cons saying the next 9/11 would never have happened if the government had more Jack Bauers willing to "do what needed to be done." Torture was already popular with the administration, at least. 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.
ljm 7y ago
24 was notorious for this, it practically celebrated it. It's so celebrated in film and TV that it even has tropes, like with the classic 'opening the bag of surgical instruments' kind of scene, if not the pure brutality of punching an answer out of someone strapped to a chair. Never mind the pure torture porn films like Saw and Hostel. 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.
- hyper_reality 7y ago
  You make a good point, but how would you implement this? Would you place artistic limits on directors? Why do you think that torture scenes are so popular in film and TV - is this an issue with filmmakers trying to satisfy a bloodthirsty audience?
  - jschwartzi 7y ago
    Stop watching movies that glorify torture as an acceptable means of gathering information.
    - filoleg 7y ago
      Not really a solution, because the people who need this advice the most are also very likely to be the ones to not follow it, as they like those movies.
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      I watch hardly any horror movies, and yet the continue to proliferate. Why? 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.
ekianjo 7y ago
Every simple solution is effective in popular movies.
_bxg1 7y ago
Interesting. The prevalence in even lighter films makes me think maybe the phenomenon is driven more by its utility as a plot device, or something along those lines. 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.
- npunt 7y ago
  The medium of film in general is just much more prone to using violence as a plot device - it’s a cheap & easy way to create conflict. Whereas books can describe inner emotional state more readily and thus cheap conflict can be emotional. 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.
oh_sigh 7y ago
I just started watching Better Call Saul, and I was happy to see that when they tortured a character, he told them what they wanted to hear, but then others were like "You had wirecutters to him...he would have said anything".
lacker 7y ago
I think this study is misleading. They are classifying a huge variety of situations as "torture". 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.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  Yea, under this definition, every time someone points a gun at someone it's torture. This sort of re-definition of terms reduces the public's trust in academics on an important topic.
  - throwaway4220 7y ago
    From article: “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-rhythm-will-revive-patient/ http://www.aed.com/blog/tv-myth-shocking-a-flatline-heart-rh... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4258134/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4258134/
  - jobigoud 7y ago
    It's not a redefinition, a "mock execution" is classified as psychological torture.
njarboe 7y ago
Link to the study, "Wait, There's Torture in Zootopia?: Examining the Prevalence of Torture in Popular Movies"[1]. [1]https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908
anon84598 7y ago
I've taken to calling this phenomenon (for a lack of a better word) "Popaganda" -- beliefs that are spread and mutually reinforced throughout popular media and the general population. If something seems believable, it makes its way into popular media and is therefore made more believable in an endless feedback loop, regardless of how inaccurate it is and regardless of how damaging it is for society to believe such a falsehood. The reason for singling these concepts out, and lumping it together with something as insidious as propaganda is that, similar to propaganda, once someone believes one of these concepts and sees it repeated around them so many times, it is almost impossible to convince them otherwise. 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 (not a great list, but you get the idea)
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  FYI, prose inside code blocks is hard to read on mobile because it doesn't wrap. It's generally better to just make each list item its own paragraph.
  - tsherr 7y ago
    Agreed. I wasn't sure what caused the lines to be truncated.
- ScottBurson 7y ago
  That's a great word!
WilsonPaige 7y ago
What real evidence do we have that torture is ineffective? 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).
qwerty456127 7y ago
I find it curious there even are people who would consider torturing someone. I wonder what's the difference between people who would and who wouldn't. I.e. I would certainly prefer to die peacefully than to attack anybody, let alone hurt somebody just to achieve a minor goal.
- antepodius 7y ago
  Are you saying you wouldn't defend yourself if someone attacked you? You have that strong an aversion to committing violence?
gentleman11 7y ago
Famously, in the past, in popular media, only bad guys used torture. After 9/11 and the show 24, the good guys started doing it more and more frequently. It’s an awful societal norm
- jobigoud 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is recency bias. Remember the TV show "The pretender"? (1996-2000). It was fairly formulaic and every single episode ended up with Jarod, the protagonist, finding out the bad guy and putting him in a convoluted setup of psychological torture (usually threatening their life or their family in the same way they had killed the innocent person) until they admitted the crime.
pyuser583 7y ago
Torture makes for a convenient plot device. It allows a way for an antagonist to help the protagonist without lessening tension or creating any sort of reconciliation. 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.
- Synaesthesia 7y ago
  When you look at Hollywood plot lines, they’re often with a singular hero, who goes nuts, breaks laws to do what’s necessary. You rarely see communal action or a society standing together. There are exceptions, like Selma. They definitely have a certain political agenda
dahdum 7y ago
I’m always shocked at how many people will argue that torture is always ineffective. I’m 100% sure I’d cave under torture, providing a mix of everything I know and what I think they want to hear. They just need to look for falsifiable statements. Rubber-hose cryptanalysis comes up as a topic here often and is a perfect example. 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.
- foreigner 7y ago
  When people say it doesn't "work" they don't mean that the victims don't "cave", they mean that the information the torturer gets isn't useful because as you say the victim will tell the torturer anything they want to hear. Also in movies usually the purpose of torture is to make the victim divulge something we already know they know, like where they hid the treasure we saw them steal in an earlier scene. In real life we don't know if the victim knows anything in the first place - they may be guilty or they may be totally innocent.
- naasking 7y ago
  > I’m always shocked at how many people will argue that torture is always ineffective. 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.
  - dahdum 7y ago
    Verification can be as simple as decrypting a drive, identifying collaborators, revealing new crimes, new investigatory pathways (bank accounts, travel movements, etc.. These can be impractical or impossible to discover without additional information. 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.
antepodius 7y ago
I'm somewhat surprised at how many censor-happy people I see in this thread. I'd be interested to see a survey of the ages of the people here...
econcon 7y ago
There is also arms race between police and criminals who can run grams of steroid and look more jacked. Steroid use is very common in police
domador 7y ago
I was particularly upset, after watching Zero Dark Thirty, to find out that it was nominated for various Academy Awards, given its justification of torture. Portraying torture positively is particularly more troublesome than on "24", for instance, since Zero Dark Thirty claims to be based on history and thus is more likely to affect people's perception of reality and the justifiability of torture.

113 points by Shivetya 7y ago

Here is a copy of the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908

padseeker 7y ago

This reads exactly like an Onion headline

TaylorAlexander 7y ago
The onion is surprisingly accurate actually.

Ericson2314 7y ago

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/essays/special-journey-to-our-bottom-line/ https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/essays/special-journey-to-o...

Uhhrrr 7y ago

This would be fine and dandy and all part of an exciting narrative if not for the fact that torture in the real world is incredibly unreliable. Top Google results are mostly politicized so here's Wikipedia on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_torture_for_interrogation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_torture_for_i...

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Even if torture worked it still is immoral. It really doesn’t matter how effective it is.
- tyre 7y ago
  immoral now, but not so definitively unethical. 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.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I don’t really like this example. Has there ever been a situation where things were things were so urgent that torturing somebody was the only option? I doubt it. And if torture is so useful why only apply it to foreigners and not criminals at home?
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    The problem with trolley problems (and utilitarianism in general) is that they assume a degree of foresight that rarely exists in the real world. You know there are more lives at risk on path A than path B, and you know that pressing a button will reliably allow you to choose between them. 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.
squeaky-clean 7y ago
This is literally the articles point. > “Evidence suggests that torture does not work, but media often show that it does,” Kearns said.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  The only thing mention in the article is that torture can lead to false confessions, which are undesirable but very far from showing that torture is not effective on net. What's the best citation for ineffectiveness?
  - XorNot 7y ago
    The CIA engaged in a sustained campaign of black site torture under Bush and the subsequent report found that they obtained no actionable intelligence from "enhanced interrogation". They did get some intelligence - from conventional interrogation and debriefing of prisoners.
devit 7y ago
The problems seem to be that the person may not know the information and the information may not be easy to verify. 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?
- XorNot 7y ago
  Not if they have a deniable secondary volume set up. Or only encrypted a partition (which you can't mathematically prove its actually data and not just empty space). 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?
- tropo 7y ago
  Yes, and it is often effective even with those issues. 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.
  - XorNot 7y ago
    If you don't already know E, then how are you going to verify it? How do you even know they know it? 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?
    - winstonewert 7y ago
      The point is that you verify A, B, C, and D. If they are telling you the truth about those, they are probably also truthful about E. They could only effectively lie about E if they knew that was the one thing you couldn't verify.
      - 7y ago

kybernetikos 7y ago

And in my opinion, it's had a noticeable effect on public opinion. 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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
revicon 7y ago
24 premiered on November 6, 2001, 56 days after the 9/11 attacks. My un-informed opinion is torture got a whole lot more popular because of that than the show
- krapp 7y ago
  I remember it the other way around - I first heard about 24 from neo-cons saying the next 9/11 would never have happened if the government had more Jack Bauers willing to "do what needed to be done." Torture was already popular with the administration, at least. 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.

ljm 7y ago

24 was notorious for this, it practically celebrated it. It's so celebrated in film and TV that it even has tropes, like with the classic 'opening the bag of surgical instruments' kind of scene, if not the pure brutality of punching an answer out of someone strapped to a chair. Never mind the pure torture porn films like Saw and Hostel. 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.

hyper_reality 7y ago
You make a good point, but how would you implement this? Would you place artistic limits on directors? Why do you think that torture scenes are so popular in film and TV - is this an issue with filmmakers trying to satisfy a bloodthirsty audience?
- jschwartzi 7y ago
  Stop watching movies that glorify torture as an acceptable means of gathering information.
  - filoleg 7y ago
    Not really a solution, because the people who need this advice the most are also very likely to be the ones to not follow it, as they like those movies.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    I watch hardly any horror movies, and yet the continue to proliferate. Why? 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.

ekianjo 7y ago

Every simple solution is effective in popular movies.

_bxg1 7y ago

Interesting. The prevalence in even lighter films makes me think maybe the phenomenon is driven more by its utility as a plot device, or something along those lines. 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.

npunt 7y ago
The medium of film in general is just much more prone to using violence as a plot device - it’s a cheap & easy way to create conflict. Whereas books can describe inner emotional state more readily and thus cheap conflict can be emotional. 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.

oh_sigh 7y ago

I just started watching Better Call Saul, and I was happy to see that when they tortured a character, he told them what they wanted to hear, but then others were like "You had wirecutters to him...he would have said anything".

lacker 7y ago

I think this study is misleading. They are classifying a huge variety of situations as "torture". 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.

jessriedel 7y ago
Yea, under this definition, every time someone points a gun at someone it's torture. This sort of re-definition of terms reduces the public's trust in academics on an important topic.
- throwaway4220 7y ago
  From article: “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-rhythm-will-revive-patient/ http://www.aed.com/blog/tv-myth-shocking-a-flatline-heart-rh... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4258134/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4258134/
- jobigoud 7y ago
  It's not a redefinition, a "mock execution" is classified as psychological torture.

njarboe 7y ago

Link to the study, "Wait, There's Torture in Zootopia?: Examining the Prevalence of Torture in Popular Movies"[1]. [1]https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908

anon84598 7y ago

I've taken to calling this phenomenon (for a lack of a better word) "Popaganda" -- beliefs that are spread and mutually reinforced throughout popular media and the general population. If something seems believable, it makes its way into popular media and is therefore made more believable in an endless feedback loop, regardless of how inaccurate it is and regardless of how damaging it is for society to believe such a falsehood. The reason for singling these concepts out, and lumping it together with something as insidious as propaganda is that, similar to propaganda, once someone believes one of these concepts and sees it repeated around them so many times, it is almost impossible to convince them otherwise. 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 (not a great list, but you get the idea)

frosted-flakes 7y ago
FYI, prose inside code blocks is hard to read on mobile because it doesn't wrap. It's generally better to just make each list item its own paragraph.
- tsherr 7y ago
  Agreed. I wasn't sure what caused the lines to be truncated.
ScottBurson 7y ago
That's a great word!

WilsonPaige 7y ago

What real evidence do we have that torture is ineffective? 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).

qwerty456127 7y ago

I find it curious there even are people who would consider torturing someone. I wonder what's the difference between people who would and who wouldn't. I.e. I would certainly prefer to die peacefully than to attack anybody, let alone hurt somebody just to achieve a minor goal.

antepodius 7y ago
Are you saying you wouldn't defend yourself if someone attacked you? You have that strong an aversion to committing violence?

gentleman11 7y ago

Famously, in the past, in popular media, only bad guys used torture. After 9/11 and the show 24, the good guys started doing it more and more frequently. It’s an awful societal norm

jobigoud 7y ago
I'm pretty sure this is recency bias. Remember the TV show "The pretender"? (1996-2000). It was fairly formulaic and every single episode ended up with Jarod, the protagonist, finding out the bad guy and putting him in a convoluted setup of psychological torture (usually threatening their life or their family in the same way they had killed the innocent person) until they admitted the crime.

pyuser583 7y ago

Torture makes for a convenient plot device. It allows a way for an antagonist to help the protagonist without lessening tension or creating any sort of reconciliation. 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.

Synaesthesia 7y ago
When you look at Hollywood plot lines, they’re often with a singular hero, who goes nuts, breaks laws to do what’s necessary. You rarely see communal action or a society standing together. There are exceptions, like Selma. They definitely have a certain political agenda

dahdum 7y ago

I’m always shocked at how many people will argue that torture is always ineffective. I’m 100% sure I’d cave under torture, providing a mix of everything I know and what I think they want to hear. They just need to look for falsifiable statements. Rubber-hose cryptanalysis comes up as a topic here often and is a perfect example. 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.

foreigner 7y ago
When people say it doesn't "work" they don't mean that the victims don't "cave", they mean that the information the torturer gets isn't useful because as you say the victim will tell the torturer anything they want to hear. Also in movies usually the purpose of torture is to make the victim divulge something we already know they know, like where they hid the treasure we saw them steal in an earlier scene. In real life we don't know if the victim knows anything in the first place - they may be guilty or they may be totally innocent.
naasking 7y ago
> I’m always shocked at how many people will argue that torture is always ineffective. 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.
- dahdum 7y ago
  Verification can be as simple as decrypting a drive, identifying collaborators, revealing new crimes, new investigatory pathways (bank accounts, travel movements, etc.. These can be impractical or impossible to discover without additional information. 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.

antepodius 7y ago

I'm somewhat surprised at how many censor-happy people I see in this thread. I'd be interested to see a survey of the ages of the people here...

econcon 7y ago

There is also arms race between police and criminals who can run grams of steroid and look more jacked. Steroid use is very common in police

domador 7y ago

I was particularly upset, after watching Zero Dark Thirty, to find out that it was nominated for various Academy Awards, given its justification of torture. Portraying torture positively is particularly more troublesome than on "24", for instance, since Zero Dark Thirty claims to be based on history and thus is more likely to affect people's perception of reality and the justifiability of torture.