“Hmm, interesting way to report that story. Another way to report it would be : 42% of non-church attenders fall into the “often / sometimes” justified category, but only 33% of mainline protestants answered that way (it’s at the bottom of the article). So there’s a group of people for whom church attendance gives them a +12% likelihood of supporting torture… and another group of people whose church attendance correlates with -9% on supporting torture. Why is the predictive factor in the headline ‘church’, as though all churches have the same position on this?”

That’s a good point! Good catch, I had not picked up on that.

Re your question about empathy being rare or not, I think it’s not that it’s rare, it’s that it’s *selective*. Almost nobody empathizes with onions, for example, even though millions get ripped out of the ground every year. Only a few more empathize with mosquitoes. More empathize with cows, but even a lot of vegetarians (myself included) don’t any sleep over the slaughter of cattle. Onions, mosquitoes, and cows are definitely not in my in-group. I think the big difference between me and torturers is where we draw the in-group/out-group line.

It’s also likely that they have empathy, but they view torture as a necessary evil. It’s easy to have a value system that says that torture is not as evil as killing, yet the US has been at war for years and years. To kill, people have to believe that the killing will save lives (usually in-group lives) at the expense of out-group lives. I bet people who support torture do so because they believe that it will save lives — definitely in-group lives, but also quite possibly out-group lives.

(I don’t. I think torture makes things worse for US citizens, but I haven’t been brainwashed by Jack Bauer’s torture porn.)

I laughed out loud at the image of the Canadian torturers apologizing!

I had heard that Canada was way more urban than the US. Indeed, around 80% of Canadians live in urban areas:
http://www.sustreport.org/signals/canpop_urb.html
I had heard that the US was around 50% urban/50% rural, but I was surprised to find that the US is around 80% urban/suburban:
http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/files/table-4.pdf
Those links also give historical data, and the historical data looks quite similar for the US and Canada. So apparently I was completely wrong about relative urbanization rates.

You live right next to the Canadian bible belt. I brought a buddy native to the South through it, and he couldn’t believe I was serious.

I’ve managed to overly-amuse myself at the thought of a stereotypical Canadian trying to torture someone, and repeatedly interrupting to apologize profusely. Would a similar poll reveal Canadians think torture is wrong because it’s rude?

It feels sick to make a joke involving torture, but at the same time it’s all so horrifying that it’s hard to take straight-on. All our theories for trying to explain why the poll said torture was fine don’t actually help me internalize that people really think about it, and still say it’s acceptable. Is empathy that rare?

“Even the most conservative anti-gay anti-other-religion Christians I know don’t support torture. They may support being tough on crime and think our legal system is too liberal, but torture is a whole ‘nother thing. Maybe the US Bible Belt is different, but in my neck of the Biblical woods (conservative or liberal), torture is most definitely not cool.”

This does not really surprise me, as Canadians are more urban and therefore more liberal than their US counterparts. (I think that cities, where you have many different, potentially non-overlapping in-groups (neighbours, work colleagues, religion colleagues, club colleagues, etc) foster a greater appreciation for the liberal virtue of fairness; I think that rural areas, with their distance from services promote a greater appreciation for the conservative virtue of in-group loyalty.)

Now if only they had waterboarded Jesus, then they might have gotten somewhere…

(I’m kidding, I’m kidding!)

Spacemika — interesting that Emma draws lines at disgust-driven vs. harm-triggered. I don’t think that those with with strong in-group loyalty are actively antagonistic towards people who are different. For example, I don’t hear a hue and cry to torture Mongols, people from Papua New Guinea the San people of Botswana, even though they are probably more different from the general US populace (along just about any axis) than Arabs are. The hue and cry seems to be to “get” people who they think are out to “get” us.

Magic’s a lot more knowledgeable about the current status of in-group-vs-the-world research than I am so hopefully he’ll jump in, but I think that stronger in-group loyalty results in not just apathy to the rest of the world, but active antagonism towards them. “If you aren’t one of us, not only is torture not wrong, it’s downright encouraged because you deserve it for not being one of us.”