NYTimes | The
dogs wouldn’t jump. All they had to do to avoid electric shocks was
leap over a small barrier, but there they sat in boxes in a lab at the
University of Pennsylvania, passive and whining.
They
had previously been given a series of mild shocks and learned they
could do nothing to stop them. Now, they had given up trying. In the
words of the scientists, they had “learned helplessness.”
The release of a Senate report on interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency
has revived interest in that study, one of the most classic experiments
in modern psychology. It and others like it, performed in the 1960s,
became the basis for an influential theory about depression and informed the development of effective talk therapies.
Nearly
a half-century later, a pair of military psychologists became convinced
that the theory provided a basis for brutal interrogation techniques,
including waterboarding, that were supposed to eliminate detainees’
“sense of control and predictability” and induce “a desired level of
helplessness,” the Senate report said. The architects of the C.I.A.'s
interrogation program have been identified as James Mitchell and Bruce
Jessen.
“My
impression is that they misread the theory,” said Dr. Charles A. Morgan
III, a psychiatrist at the University of New Haven who met Mr. Mitchell
and Mr. Jessen while studying the effects of stress on American troops.
“They’re not really scientists.”
One
of the researchers who conducted the initial studies on dogs, the
prominent psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman, said he was “grieved and
horrified” that his work was cited to justify the abusive
interrogations.
It
is not the first time that academic research has been used for brutal
interrogations, experts said. After the Second World War, the
intelligence community began to study methods of interrogation, often
financing outside psychiatrists and psychologists.
“A
lot of the early work came out of psychoanalysis,” or Freudian
thinking, said Steven Reisner, a psychologist in New York and co-founder
of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology,
which opposes the profession’s participation in coercive
interrogations. “Studies of sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation
induced a psychosis,
in which people lost control of what they said and what they thought.”
At that point they might begin to cooperate — or so the theory went, Mr.
Reisner said.
