"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
This grant supports a program of research to explore the underlying principles that guide individual attitudes about aggressive interrogation. Despite the national attention devoted to this issue, very little is known about the basis for individual attitudes regarding the use of aggressive interrogation. Based on prior empirical findings, this work tests whether support for torture-interrogation hinges on perceptions of the target's moral standing. That is, is torture deemed more acceptable when the target deserves punishment for some prior bad act? According to the project's investigator, coercive interrogation is employed as a proxy for punishment, rather than as a tool to achieve a desired end. Indeed, it is hypothesized that support for enhanced interrogation techniques might be based more on the deontological goal of achieving retributive justice than on the utilitarian goal of preventing future harm. The investigator contends that supporters of aggressive interrogation will express utilitarian justifications for such actions, yet reserve their support of such methods exclusively for those targets that "deserve" to be punished based on their moral standing.
This project includes five sets of studies which when taken together build upon the PI's initial work in this area. The experiments conducted include representative samples of U.S. citizens that permit examination of whether these findings extend from military settings to civilian settings, and whether people are consciously aware of the motives that drive their opinion. Importantly, the experiments will test whether the recommended intensity of a given interrogation is determined by its potential utility, or rather by the perceived moral status of the target. This proposal has direct theoretical implications for social psychology, but also promises to provide intellectual bridges across the disciplines of psychology, law, political science, and public policy. The RUI component of this proposal will specifically emphasize the training of undergraduates, particularly underrepresented groups, for advanced study in the natural sciences. This training will include skill acquisition, mentoring, research supervision, conference attendance, and formal presentations of findings at both regional and national conferences.
