Abstract
Erin Kearns and Joseph Young’s Tortured Logic addresses the question, as phrased in the subtitle, of “why some Americans support the use of torture in counterterrorism.” The main title, although clever, is slightly misleading: the study is not focused on individual or collective reasoning about torture, so much as trying to determine which factors influence individuals’ views on the subject. The book presents the results of a series of experiments designed to test which factors, if any, are able to shift individuals’ views on torture. The authors engage sensitively with the emerging, and often contradictory, literature on Americans’ views on torture, which largely takes such polls as their evidence base, and make a convincing case for the advantage of an experimental approach.
Their study aims to determine to what extent individuals’ views are malleable (over the course of their experiments they find that approximately 75 percent of their subjects hold fixed views on torture, while 25 percent have views that are subject to change) and which factors are most effective at moving those individuals whose views can be changed. Each chapter presents the results of a set of experiments testing the effect of certain factors on individuals’ views of torture. These include the effect of media (in particular viewing portrayals of terrorism in fictional television shows, and whether torture is portrayed as “effective” or not making a difference), the role of “mortality salience” (viewing scenes of violence), the race/ethnicity of the imagined torturer and suspect, the location (domestic or international) and the mode (physical or psychological) of torture, and whether “elite cues” can change individuals’ views of torture.
Some of the most interesting findings presented are the unexpected ones, particularly those relating to media depictions of torture. For example, the authors’ experiments found that, although watching portrayals that depicted torture as “effective” did make some individuals more likely to support the practice, seeing portrayals of torture as ineffective did not lead individuals to abandon their support. This is particularly interesting given that, as Kearns and Young note, large portions of the American public continue to express support for the practice despite the fact that expert opinion is fairly confident that torture is not an effective means of producing the truth. It further suggests that, despite the prevalence of a utilitarian logic in legal and political justifications of torture, these cannot be effectively countered simply by proving that the practice is ineffective.
A second surprising finding was that viewing depictions of “rapport-building” as an effective approach to interrogation did not have the expected effect of decreasing support for torture. Instead, the authors found that individuals were more likely to express support for torture after viewing a clip in which the “rapport-building” approach to interrogation was portrayed. How can we explain this? The authors suggest that perhaps “participants respond to seeing what amounts to ‘being nice to terrorists’ as an affront to their expectations” (p. 66). This argument, while quite plausible, highlights one of the key limitations of the book, which, while framed as investigating support for torture in counterterrorism, leaves the role of cultural frameworks about “terrorism” and “terrorists” relatively unexamined. I might suggest here that in order to explain this, we need to take seriously the possibility that the “war on terror” is not just the context in which torture occurs, but also the framework that makes support for the practice possible.
While this book thus represents a significant contribution to our understanding of the factors that shape individual views on torture, it also raises a number of significant questions that lie outside the scope of its analysis. The book’s framing of its key puzzle takes a somewhat paradoxical form, which is unable to be resolved within the project itself: it proposes both that support for torture is in some ways a “natural” response to violent attack (p. 4) but also frames support for torture as a puzzle in need of explanation, given what the authors describe as the “long history of humane treatment of the detained enemy” (p. 2). Part of the difficulty here is that the very phenomenon of “American attitudes about torture” is an artifact of a particular moment in time: it is not just that Americans became more likely to support torture after 9/11, but that the very question was not even asked (or even, I might suggest, askable) before this event. Kearns and Young are studying something (public opinion on torture) that has really only come into existence in the last 20 years—because prior to that there was (as the authors note) very little public debate on the subject. This does not invalidate their findings, but it does provide a necessary context within which they must be understood.
The key justification for the broader significance of the study is the presumed link between public opinion and public policy. It is implied, as well, that the research might be put to use in shifting public opinion; but given that the authors take a position of almost pained neutrality to avoid taking a moral or political stance on the legitimacy of torture, they do not state this outright, instead punting to “moral philosophers” as those who have the “job” of making arguments about the morality of torture.
A somewhat peculiar feature of the book is the inclusion of excerpts from “ten semi-structured interviews” with “former members of the intelligence community” (p. 19) in each chapter. Although the authors suggest that the purpose of these inclusions is “to better understand real-world counterterrorism interrogations and public perceptions of them” (p. 18), these excerpts come off as fairly anecdotal, in contrast to the meticulously developed experiments. The interview quotes are absolutely engaging and successfully draw the reader in, but cannot be taken as a reliable guide to “counterterrorism” more generally; and it is somewhat disingenuous of the authors to frame them as such. Instead, these excerpts instead point to the need for a deeper contextualization of the individual-level analysis that the book does so well.
Overall, Tortured Logic should be of great interest to scholars working on the still-emerging debates over the use of torture in the war on terror, as well as the broader literatures on human rights and the phenomenon of state violence and its legitimation. The text should also be of use for teaching in classes on human rights, the war on terror, and violence.