Does pain make you tell the truth?

[dstebbins]

In a lot of movies and, more recently, video games, I see people beating the crap out of other people to extract information from them. Their person being interrogated has their spirit broken almost instantly due to how massively painful-looking the torture is, and the information they give is almost always the truth.

 

Take, for example, this scene:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fR42WhYCqU

 

At 0:30, the interrogation begins. A mere eighteen seconds later, at 0:48, he's spilling the beans.

 

Well, maybe that's a result of several minutes worth of off-screen beatdown. But... what's TRULY impressive about this scene is that Joel knew the man was telling the truth, to the point where he didn't see any point in asking the other man to verify the information.

 

But maybe that's a bad example, so let's try another example from that same game:

 

 

From 0:08 to 0:21, this guy goes from "willing to die to protect the cure for mankind" to "giving the location to a crazy man who wants to damn mankind to an eternal living death" in thirteen secoonds flat.

 

But even more impressively, the guy ended up telling Joel the truth. Why? Couldn't he have just lied and said "she's... in the... basement!" With the last one, I can accept Joel not believing the guy when he said he didn't know any girl, but if the man had chosen to give the wrong location, how would Joel know?

 

I'd like to know... is there any legit science to this? Does pain, if severe enough, have any tendency to block out or in any way impede the human brain's ability to fabricate things?

[CharonY]

I am not sure whether that fits biological sciences at all, but you're suspicion is well-founded. It appears that the consensus is that it does not work (see e.g. Hajjar, Annu. Rev. Law Soc. Sci. 2009. 5:311–45) there are also many news articles in which interrogators make similar points.

[iNow]

I'd like to know... is there any legit science to this? Does pain, if severe enough, have any tendency to block out or in any way impede the human brain's ability to fabricate things?

I recommend this FAQ to you. It was compiled by experts in the field. Summary: Torture really doesn't work.

 

http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/educing.pdf

[John Cuthber]

Pain makes you do whatever you can to stop it.

If the "interrogator" wants you so say you are a spy from Mars, you will say it.

So it's useless for getting information, but relatively good at suppressing dissent.

That's why governments still do it.

[John Cuthber]

Just in case anyone needed evidence for that
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/12/09/senate-report-released-us-detained-and-tortured-innocent-people

which includes this
According to Feinstein, the four key findings of the report include:
1. The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” were not effective... "

[overtone]

The fact that torture is inevitably employed to terrorize and oppress, shock and awe, or even entertain and impress, rather than to gather information,

 

so that often the State doing the torture will do things like broadcast "confessions" everyone knows to be false, clearly uninterested in the truth, to demonstrate their ability to do that to anyone and strike fear into their targets of oppression,

 

is obvious when it's enemies and foreigners doing the torturing.

 

When it's one's own government and neighbors, it's harder to admit.

 

In the US, for example, the CIA publicized the confessions and information obtained by waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Muhammed despite obvious inconsistencies and even absurdities (he confessed to visiting and plotting to bomb a large bank building in the US that had not been built at the time of his capture, for example. Also to being on two or three different continents at the same time). It is not safe to infer failure from that - it depends on the actual goals of the torture program.

 

Torture does work. It's just not primarily a means of obtaining information - there are much better ways of doing that.

[swansont]

!

Moderator Note

A quick reminder that this is posted in Biology, meaning that a scientific discussion is expected; if you want to discuss the political aspects of it (e.g. motivation for doing so), you are free to do so in the politics section.

[overtone]

Scientifically: we note that the professionals who have studied torture, refined its methods and techniques, and established infrastructure and methodology for its employment to their purposes, do not use it to obtain accurate information or "truth".

 

We also note that in the physical situations we can reliably evaluate - sufficiently distant from us in some way (time, culture, distance) that we can hope to avoid the common political biases, and sufficiently well described that we can rely upon our information as to the facts - torture most commonly elicits fiction and falsehood and error and fantastic invention from its victims. Well known examples include the witchcraft trials of Europe, the criminal prisoner confessions of various authoritarian regimes, and the well-described difficulty of evaluating the information gained through torture interrogations of military prisoners in wartime situations such as WWII.

 

So from this physical evidence one can argue, scientifically, that the answer to the OP question is "no, not in general".

 

Now the biological explanation or foundation of this established fact remains open for discussion. One obvious factor to consider is confirmation bias and other observer effects in the torturer: it is possible that employing torture cripples the ability of the torturer to either perceive or evaluate elicited information, recognize and exclude their own possibly unconscious role in shaping the information obtained, and so forth. This observer effect (common in many arenas of scientific investigation, such as anthropological research in which the standard family structure of some island tribe turns out to be two parents, three children, four older adult relatives, and one or more anthropologists) might easily be grossly amplified in the case of investigation via torture, by reasons of human biology.

Edited December 10, 2014 by overtone