<![CDATA[Torture And The Other]]>Ryan Sager's new neuroscience blog (an idea whose time has surely come) cites a fascinating study on how strongly we react to torture. A lot of it depends on who is being tortured - and people with brown skins, beards and funny names don't fare so well:

“Pursuing moral outrage: Anger at torture,” in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (PDF here; HTML here), looked at people’s responses to fictional accounts of torture (presented as actual news reports of torture), one scenario featuring a U.S. Marine being tortured by Iraqi insurgents and the other featuring a Sri Lankan soldier being tortured by Tamil rebels. The results were stark, if not entirely unexpected given what we know about human nature.

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