
In 1957, Albert Biderman conducted a comprehensive examination of false confession cases on behalf of the United States Air Force and the CIA and he focused on one major question: what happened to U.S. personnel captured in Korea that caused them to "confess" to non-existent war crimes? (Biderman has gained renewed notoriety in the last few years as editor of "The Manipulation of Human Behavior," what some have called the "Torture Handbook.")
In accordance with the findings of other well known researchers for the CIA, Wolff and Hinkle, as well as his own work, Biderman recognized that human behavior can be "manipulated" in a "controlled" environment, such as that in which a prisoner of war may find himself. The nation that holds prisoners of war has two major goals according to Biderman: to establish compliance and, in cases where prisoners may be used for propaganda purposes, to manipulate that compliance. The North Koreans and the Chinese, like their Soviet counterparts, gained compliance by undermining the prisoner's resistance, usually without the use of physical torture. Biderman organized the Chinese methods for gaining compliance into eight categories and those eight categories include the techniques, their "effects" and "variants."
Biderman contended that of all possible techniques, isolation works best to break down resistance in prisoners. Severe isolation can achieve the same results as other methods, such as starvation and sleep deprivation and can achieve those results in a shorter period of time. When prisoners are subjected to complete or almost complete isolation, their psychological well-being rapidly deteriorates. Long term solitary confinement can eventually induce psychosis and a complete mental breakdown and isolation has an added advantage in that it leaves no marks on its victims. Biderman's findings, however, suggest that if isolation is used at all, its use must be measured and monitored. Too much isolation is not likely to produce accurate intelligence from a subject, a finding relevant to today's interrogations.
Biderman found that two other specific techniques also work well to establish compliance: threats of physical violence and the use of stress positions. Stress positions, such as sitting at attention or standing for long periods of time, are particularly effective for compliance because the prisoner himself, not the interrogator or guard, is the source of the prisoner's pain. Stress positions cause the prisoner to "exaggerate" the power of the interrogator and convince a prisoner that his captor has the ability "to do something worse to him." Stress positions also allow the interrogator to assert that physical violence never entered the interrogation room.
Regardless of the interrogation techniques used, Biderman believed that no subject could resist a determined interrogator and he supported this assertion with a review of intelligence gathering during World War II and the Korean War. The greater problem for an interrogator, according to Biderman, is evasion by a subject after he begins to talk. As a result of his findings, Biderman supported a change in the Military Code of Conduct which would allow American prisoners of war to speak to interrogators instead of simply supplying name, rank and serial number. Biderman reasoned that most subjects will eventually talk and the military is wiser to train troops to evade their interlocutors, who were generally poor at detecting evasion or deception. Biderman’s assertions are still true today and supported by law enforcement research on this subject which suggests that law enforcement officers are over-confident in their ability to detect deception.
Biderman's overall findings suggest that isolation, at least in its more extreme forms, and stress positions are not conducive to eliciting actionable intelligence during an interrogation. Training and research may be better focused on deception detection which is still subject to many myths. A search on Amazon will reveal a number of books that purport to teach the secrets of flushing out lies and liars. Most research literature to date on this subject, however, counters the view that deception is easily detected in another human being by physical cues.