Neuroskepticism - Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense - page 182

phenomenon may interfere with a person's ability to consider critically the underly-
ing logic of that explanation. Weisberg found that nonexperts judged explana-
tions with logically irrelevant neuroscience information to be more satisfying,
particularly in the case of bad explanations. The authors try to explain the results
in a number of ways. They suggest that the seductive details effect may be in play.
According to this theory, seductive details that are related—but logically irrel-
evant—make it more difficult for subjects to code and later recall the main argu-
ment of a text. They also hypothesize that lower level explanations, in particular,
may make bad explanations seem connected to a larger explanatory system and
therefore more insightful.
Contemplating the implications of the Weisberg study, J.D. Trout (2008) has
argued that placebic neuroscientific information may “promote the feeling of intel-
lectual fluency” and that “all too often humans interpret the positive hedonic experi-
ence of fluency as a mark of genuine understanding.” Trout suggests that “neurophilic
fluency flourishes wherever heuristics in psychology are reductionist,” that is, where
they focus on a small number of local factors with apparent causal significance in
order to explain a complex problem. Although more work may be required to pro-
vide a full account of explanatory neurophilia—that is, our blind (or at the very
least blinkered) love for neuroscientific explanations—there is little doubt that the
phenomenon has been persuasively demonstrated.
In the national security domain, there is also a temptation to believe that a claim
is true because it carries the label HUMINT or is similarly packaged in the special-
ist language of national security. Many senior administration officials appear to have
believed (or wanted to believe) that “EITs”—so-called enhanced interrogation tech-
niques—were, as the name suggested, “enhanced.” But, as experienced interrogators
have repeatedly asserted, the products of aggressive interrogation tactics such as
waterboarding, exposure to temperature extremes, stress positions, and the like tend
not to be reliable, whatever one calls them (see, e.g. Bennett 2007; Soufan 2009).
This is because interrogatees under pressure tend to say whatever it is they believe
their captors want to hear, or anything just to stop their abuse. Numerous detainees
in the Bush administration's “war on terror” retracted claims they had made during
torturous interrogations, once they were removed from their high-pressure interro-
gation environments—most notably, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was water-
boarded 183 times in March 2003 (CIA Inspector General 2004, 90-91) and later
told the Red Cross:
During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in
order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the
ill-treatment stop. … I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order
to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time. (International Committee of
the Red Cross 2007)
Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were the principal architects of the
post-9/11 interrogation regime to which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others were
exposed (Mayer 2008; SASC 2008). But as Scott Shane observed in the New York
Times ,