Some Psycho-Social Correlates of US Citizen Support for Torture
Nordic Journal of Human Rights 30.1: 63-95, 2012
33 Pages Posted: 21 Oct 2012
Date Written: October 20, 2012
Abstract
We use an original survey to both ascertain US citizens’ attitudes about the use of torture, and to begin to explore why they have these views. While there exists widely-agreed-upon findings regarding the state-level determinants of government respect for human rights such as torture, much less is understood about either the distribution or formation of individual citizens’ attitudes about human rights. Our investigation of the formation of citizen attitudes about torture goes beyond the overly-simple explanation of respondents’ party identification used in the media by examining how respondents’ exposure to violence, and their levels of empathy, tolerance, as well as general conformity-related attitudes might affect their views about torture. Further, we go beyond asking abstract questions about torture and, instead, ask respondents about their attitudes towards particular torture techniques. We use this information to construct the Torture Acceptability Index (TAI) to measure individuals’ overall level of acceptance of torture.Our findings from empirical analysis confirm our hypotheses that there exists a statistically significant relationship between several psycho-social factors and individual attitudes towards torture, even accounting for one’s party identification.
Keywords: human rights, torture, public opinion, scaling, psychology, social psychology, family violence
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