Neutralization and Torture

April 22, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Techniques of Neutralization” (Sykes and Matza, 1957) is a classic article in the sociology of deviance. Neutralizations, according to Sykes and Matza, are ideas that delinquents use to neutralize the rules against some deviant act. Sykes and Matza argue that neutralizations enable the delinquency and come prior to the delinquent act.

I’m not so sure – a kid might well commit crimes even without these rationalizations – but these neutralizations certainly work as after-the-fact justifications. At the very least, the list of neutralizations gives students something to think about and memorize (and it gives teachers something to use in multiple-choice exam questions). In case you’ve forgotten them (or never heard of them), here they are:

• denial of responsibility (I didn’t mean it; it wasn’t my fault)
• denial of injury (no harm, no foul)
• denial of victim (they deserved it; who cares about them)
• condemnation of the condemners (cops are corrupt)
• appeal to higher loyalties (I had to help my buddies)

I hadn’t thought about this article in a long time, but torture is in the news, and the rationales put forward by highly educated and sophisticated people defending the torture sound exactly like the ideas Sykes and Matza heard from criminal kids over 50 years ago. Today’s editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal hit four out of five.

Denial of Injury

Contrary to the claim that the memos detail “brutal” techniques . . .what they mainly show is the lengths to which the Justice Department went not to cross the line into torture. . . .

Denial of Victim

“Zubaydeh has become accustomed to a certain level of treatment and displays no signs of willingness to disclose further information” (quoting a memo from legal counsel Bybee).

Condemnation of the Condemners

the ICRC [Red Cross] has become as much a political, as humanitarian, operation. . .
the liberal mob . . .Mr. Obama . . . may try to sate the mob by going after Bush officials who wrote the memos. . . . Mr. Obama seems more than willing to indulge the revenge fantasies of the left, as long as its potential victims served a different President.

Appeal to Higher Loyalties

to break a terrorist they believed had information that could potentially save American lives.

The fifth neutralization comes from former CIA director Michael Hayden, quoted in today’s New York Times)

Denial of Responsibility

I have said to all who will listen that the agency did none of this out of enthusiasm. It did it out of duty.

That’s just from two major newspapers in one day. I’m sure that if I’d reviewed O’Reilly, Hannity, Coulter, et al., I would have found many other examples that seem to come straight out of the delinquents’ script. However, delinquents seem reluctant to use the one justification for crime most favored by the supporters of torture: It works; it’s a great way to get what you want.*

As I said, I’m somewhat skeptical that these neutralizations always precede the juvenile delinquency and make it possible. The torture gang, however, provides a much better illustration of Sykes and Matza’s theory. For the most part, those involved in any way made sure that the neutralizations were in place (and in writing) before they started the “enhanced interrogations” (they also made sure the euphemisms were in place). That’s the difference between criminal gangs on the street and those in government and other formal organizations.

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*The justification that torture works is, like the denial of injury, simply not factual. (See here, for example.) But as with all these neutralizations, what is important is not accuracy but rather plausibility, however slim. A plausible justification allows the neutralizers to fool themselves, at least partially, and perhaps to fool others, so that they can repeat their act again. And again. And again. (One victim was warterboarded 183 times. That's takes a lot of neutralizing, though presumably these neutralizing ideas become part of a taken-for-granted background reality.)

Where the Boys Are and Aren't

April 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Jonathan Soma claims to have gotten a D+ in statistics in college. But he has created the coolest interactive statistical tools. The best known is his corrective to the usual map of where the singles are.* In February of 2007, National Geographic published this map.

(Click on the map for a larger view.)

Looks like things are pretty good for single guys, especially here in the Northeast – 195,000 more single women than single men in the New York metro area. On the West Coast, not so much.

Soma was skeptical, probably because he lives in Brooklyn and wonders where all those single girls are. So first, instead of using absolute numbers, he adjusted for population size to make a ratio.


If you go to his site, you can toggle back and forth between numbers and ratios. Better than that, he has a slider at the top that you can move so as to select the age range you’re interested in.

The original map included ages 18-64. But most single guys in their twenties probably don’t care much about the over-thirty women, and to a great extent that’s who’s represented in red circles.

If you slide the brackets to the left to select 18-29 crowd, the world resembles a Bud Light commercial – a lot of desperate single guys, not so many girls.

But for more mature men, things look better, just so long as they’re not trying to pick up 23-year-olds.



Go to Soma’s site, move the slider, and watch the bubbles change size and color.

* I found it via Sociological Images, but it’s been linked to by some of the blogosphere biggies – The Wall Street Journal, Gawker, Andrew Sullivan, etc.

Seeing and Believing

April 18, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Who you gonna believe – my write-up or your lyin’ eyes?

The film of the Milgram experiments shows that the subjects, who thought they were inflicting severe and possibly lethal shocks on another human being, were under considerable stress.*

Now The Situationst has published an appreciation of Milgram’s work written by no less than Philip Zimbardo, himself no stranger to stress-inducing experiments. The bold-faced emphasis is my own addition to justify my translation above (the first line of this post). Zimbardo writes:

I believe that it was seeing his movie, in which he includes scenes of distress and indecision among his participants, that fostered the initial impetus for concern about the ethics of his research. Reading his research articles or his book does not convey as vividly the stress of participants who continued to obey authority despite the apparent suffering they were causing their innocent victims. I raise this issue not to argue for or against the ethicality of this research, but rather to raise the issue that it is still critical to read the original presentations of his ideas, methods, results, and discussions to understand fully what he did. That is another virtue of this collection of Milgram’s obedience research.

*The Times today notes that some of the CIA torturers had a similar reaction.

. . .watching [Zubaydah’s] torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.
Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.”

I wonder if Bybee, Yoo, and the others who wrote the legal opinions saying that torture was not torture would have written them if they had actually seen what they were justifying rather than merely reading abstract descriptions. Actually, I don’t wonder. They would have done what Cheney told them to do, no matter what.

Stanley Milgram - Ghost Writer for the Bush-Cheney Lawyers

April 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I showed the Milgram film in class this week. So when I looked at the New York Times this morning, I still had the echoes of the “Experimenter” fresh in my mind.

EXPERIMENTER: Although the shocks may be painful, they’re not dangerous.

There’s another version of this line that was in the script the experimenter used, though it doesn’t appear in the film

EXPERIMENTER: Although they may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.

The Times published excerpts from the legal memos that justified the torture.



The torturers deprived detainees of sleep for as long as eleven days.

It is clear that depriving someone of sleep does not involve severe physical pain . . . so long as sleep deprivation (as you have informed us is your intent) is used for limited periods, before hallucinations or other profound disruptions of the senses would occur.

Waterboarding has long been recognized as torture, even by the US when other countries used it. [Christopher Hitchens, a journalist who supported the Bush Iraq policies, had himself waterboarded (he's in the right-hand picture), and immediately concluded that it was obviously torture.] Nevertheless, the Bush lawyers wrote,

The waterboard does not inflict physical pain. . . . . .In the absence of prolonged mental harm, no severe mental pain or suffering would have been inflicted, and the use of these procedures would not constitute torture within the meaning of the statute.

Detainees were doused with water as cold as 41 degrees Fahrenheit.

Given that there is no expectation that the technique will cause severe physical pain or suffering . . .

“Stress” positions.

Any pain associated with muscle fatigue is not of the intensity sufficient to amount to ‘severe physical pain or suffering’ under the statute, nor, despite its discomfort, can it be said to be difficult to endure.

What a charade. The people who ordered the torture surely let it be known to their hand-picked lawyers which legal opinion they wanted the lawyers to come back with. And just to make it easier for the lawyers to justify the unjustifiable, they minimized and lied about the suffering they would inflict. The lawyers wrote the desired opinions, and now everyone can use these opinions to avoid being held accountable.

For eight years, the Bushies and the conservatives spoke with great self-righteousness about individual responsibility. All the while, they rigged the system to make sure nobody would be held responsible. They weren’t even as honorable as Milgram’s Nazi-in-a-labcoat.

TEACHER: But he’s hollering. He can’t stand it. What’s going to happen to him? . . . .
Who’s going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?
EXPERIMENTER I'm responsible for anything that happens to him. Continue please.
TEACHER: All right. (Consults list of words.) The next one’s “Slow” – walk, truck, dance, music. Answer, please.