Severe Pain - Essay Example

Torture has been prohibited in different countries across the world. However, the legal definition of torture varies sharply based on the judgment involving pain. The law enforcers have been accused of using excessive force to retrieve information from the suspects despite the existence of laws that prohibit inhumane torture. There exists a gap between what can be defined as torture and the parameters of measuring pain inflicted on someone’s body. Therefore, people who have been put in mild pain have accused the authority of torture. This is because there is an underestimation of the pain by people who are not in pain. Many countries define torture based on pain severity. Nevertheless, determining whether a certain interrogation tactic constitutes torture requires an in-depth and accurate assessment of how much pain the tactic inflicts. This research tried to establish pain which can be defined as torture.

The research found out the participants with social pain condition thought that the pain was very severe. Many of the participants opposed the confinement as they argued that it inflicted more pain than body torture. This indicated that people feared social pain rather than physical pain. Therefore, many of the participants argued that jails inflict very severe pain on the inmates because of social exclusion from the rest of society.

The participants who participated in testing whether sleep deprivation inflicts pain recorded that the act was more severe than physical pain. They also stated that the method was not ethical and should be banned because it was inhumane. They related the interrogation with temperature-related interrogation.

The third study involved the exposure of the participants to very cold temperatures. The participants judged that the tactic was very painful than the previous tactics. They inclined the method towards torture and argued that it would be unethical to use such methods on other human beings. However, one important finding in this study was that an empathy gap arose between the cold and prior-cold conditions. It was noted that experiencing cold temperatures did not affect the participants’ answers. This is an indication that those that have experienced pain before are in a good position to determine torture and whether it observes the ethical guidelines.

The fourth study tested real versus stimulated pain. The results indicated that there was an overall effect of the condition on both estimates of pain severity. The participants who were put under mild conditions underestimated the pain severity of standing in the cold in comparison with those who actually experienced cold weather.

 The overall results indicate that empathy gaps for physical and psychological pain undermine people’s ability to evaluate interrogation practices. As a result, even when people were experiencing a small degree of pain, they were likely to rate it as unethical. As a result, even a small degree of pain bridges the empathy gap. Therefore, people who have experienced torture before are likely to rate even a small degree of pain as torture. As a result, the definition of torture should be based on the initial experience of the participants.