From: elg@elgamy.jpunix.com (Eric Lee Green)
Date: 16 Dec 92 17:38:04 CDT
Newsgroups: sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Psychology and Interrogation
Distribution: world
Organization: Eric's Amiga 2000 @ Home

From article <DLB.92Dec15141727@fanny.wash.inmet.com>, by dlb@fanny.wash.inmet.com (David Barton):
> In article <1992Dec15.182414.16687@news.Hawaii.Edu>
> cravener@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Patty Cravener) writes:
>    There are reams data, Dave.
    [ about compliance training, that is.]

> Sorry, I've been out for quite some time.  I have read several
> psychology texts, and taken the introductory course.  They include
> various data on training and means of inducing various behaviors,
> which (superficially) match yours.  This included (to my eternal
> retrospective boredom) a fair number of education and learning
> courses.  I have seen no claims for a universal ability to train a
> particular subject, resistant or not, to do any specific behavior in
> six months time (which was, after all, your claim).

It wasn't her claim, but, rather, mine. Perhaps too sweeping of a claim,
now that I think on it -- intellectual behaviors are not observable to
external observers and thus not amenable to direct behavior modification --
but we have a wide range of data suggesting that training basic physical
behaviors in the presence of a set of contingencies is always possible,
given that the organism involved is capable of the actual behaviors
desired, and given that there are no confounding variables (such as, e.g.,
a female dog being trained going into "heat" and losing stimulus control
due to the change in chemical environment). Compliance is not itself a
behavior, but, rather, a set of behaviors under stimulus control. If the
organism is complex enough such that trained sufficient exemplars induce
generalization, i.e. the subject can figure out what we want, we can obtain
behaviors that we have not specifically trained. Thus we obtain
"compliance", where the subject follows directions that the subject wasn't
specifically trained to follow, as well as those directions that the
subject WAS specifically trained to follow.

> I have done a fair amount of personal interest reading, and have found
> nothing like what you said existed.  If this does indeed exist, and if
> you are too impatient to correct my poor ignorance, I hope someone
> else will.

I'd suggest that you go get any good book on behavior management and
modification. Try a college library or college bookstore. If you don't
understand what's being said, try some introductory work like, e.g., B.F.
Skinner's _About Behaviorism_ which will give you a conceptual framework
for tackling more complex works. I'd also suggest that you look back at the
data on "brainwashing" from the Korean war era, where the North Koreans hit
upon a very crude form of compliance training in order to interrogate GI's.
With near 100% success, I might add. After that, the Army specifically
changed its policy for enlisted men to "tell them whatever they want to
know," because it was obviously unrealistic to stick to "name, rank, and
serial number" in the face of a ruthless interrogator familiar with basic
behavioral techniques.

> Your post resembled the fevered dreams of what the CIA would wish for
> out of behavioral reinforcement techniques.  Try distinguishing
> between the Ludlum novels you are reading and the textbooks.

Who is Ludlum? Just curious. As for "fevered dreams of what the CIA would
wish", I suspect that things happen there that we don't know about.
Even then, though, I doubt that it's possible to train across sufficient
environments to "brainwash" someone... once the person was placed back into
his "normal" environment without the explicit contingencies enforcable in a
dank dungeon, he wouldn't be "normal" anymore, but he wouldn't be under
stimulus control either. At least, not to the point of following orders
like, say, "Shoot your mother and eat her heart." The punishment involved
there (emotional loss, grief, police, etc.) would far outweigh anything
that can be administered in a normal environment, and even a million-dollar
reward would fail to convince most people to do it. However, interrogating
someone is a far different topic indeed. I do submit that, if you have
enough information about the subject, and if you can get the subject to
answer even a few simple questions accurately, it is probably possible to
eventually get the subject to answer pretty much ANY question accurately.

--
 Eric Lee Green  elg@elgamy.jpunix.com   Dodson Elementary
 (713) 664-6446                             Houston, TX
                "Kids are kids, no matter what"
Xref: sparky sci.psychology:4843 sci.med:22844