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posted by
martyb
on Sunday July 30 2017, @11:28PM
from the Rosenhan-Milgram-Dunning-Kruger-research dept.
from the Rosenhan-Milgram-Dunning-Kruger-research dept.
From Wikileaks (via Vinay Gupta):
Judge rules two psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, who made millions as consultants for the CIA's torture program can face trial.
How do you get into the business of being a torture consultant? Good question because when they started:
Neither man had ever carried out a real interrogation, had language skills or expertise on al Qaeda - the chief enemy in the war on terror - when the CIA handpicked Mitchell and Jessen to spearhead its supposed intelligence gathering program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Their psychology backgrounds were in family therapy; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure.
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Millionaire CIA Torture Psychologists to Face Trial
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Grelb's Reminder:
Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above
average drivers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @08:59AM
That's a given. Deciding to engage in organized war crimes is generally a top down thing.
At the same time, I think this is a good thing. That same top down hierarchy tends to result in a sense of protection. 'Wow, I can earn millions of dollars just helping carry out some orders from a military commander who's one step away from the white house?' That implies safety, then the cognitive dissonance kicks in. 'I mean this is awful stuff, and I'd never normally do this. But if I don't do it - somebody else will. I'll at least try to carry things out in the most efficient and safe fashion. It's dirty business, but I'll try to make it as clean as possible.' I think killing off the notion of safety is important. Make people understand that nobody who orders, tells, or asks you to do something - you can (and ideally will) still be held responsible for those actions yourself.
Ideally we'd get the guys at the top as well, but this is not so easy. But undermining their assurances, implied or otherwise, of safety goes a long way towards removing the disconnect between personal actions and personal accountability that I think is what the Milgram experiment fundamentally showed.