The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

state cannot credibly commit to playing according to the signal, and is at risk of accepting false
information from both the rare ignorant captive who must lie, and from the common knowledgeable
captive who prefers to. In other words, the crucial moment in torture is not the one most often seen in
films and television shows, where the captive, after suffering to the limit, 'breaks' and offers the
unvarnished truth – rather, the crucial moment occurs when the interrogator believes that the captive
has broken. At that moment, the state loses its ability to credibly commit to investigating the captive's
story – and the knowledgeable captive is presented with a perfect opportunity to lie.
The prospects for successful torture diminish as well when we consider that there is very likely
to be an agent-principle dilemma between the state and its interrogators: if interrogators are rewarded
by the amount of information they bring in, and not the quality of that information, then we can expect
even conscientious torturers to eventually cease investigating (and throwing away good information) or
be weeded out of the system as cynical torturers proliferate. Furthermore, if knowledgeable captives
are able to coordinate a false story in case of capture, then each subsequent knowledgeable captive will
find it easier and easier to feed misinformation to an increasingly credible state. 31 This incentive
structure derives precisely from the difficulty in judging empirically the information given under
torture, and provides us with another way to judge the utility of a torture regime. Where torturers are
rewarded for quantity over quality, this is an indication that the state is not in a position to distinguish
between good and bad information; where this is the case, not only does the torturer have the incentive
to cheat, so too does the knowledgeable captive.
If we extrapolate from an individual instance of torture to a campaign, where each previous
round of torture affects the following one, then we find a further complication. If the prior round of
torture has resulted in the state gaining useful information, then we can assume that the state is in a
better position to investigate in the next round, while previous misinformation would negatively affect
the state's investigative ability (as its priors become farther removed from reality, other forms of
misinformation should appear more plausible, and true information that does not fit the (false) priors
should appear less trustworthy. Thus, we would expect two evolutionary equilibria in the long term: a
31 There are in fact examples of exactly this phenomenon. Commander James Stockdale instructed his fellow PoWs during
the Viet Nam War, to “resist to the point of permanent injury or loss of mental faculty, and then fall back on deceit and
distortion.” (Arrigo, p. 12) This strategy was successful enough that, according to him, only 5% of his men ended up
cooperating with the enemy. (p. 7) Similarly, Rejali argues that members of the FLN, when tortured by the French in
Algeria, were instructed to name members of the moderate opposition (the MNA) as their confederates – leading the
French to help eliminate the FLN's main rival in the Nationalist movement. (pp. 481-2)
30