War and Torture as 'Just Deserts

© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

WAR AND TORTURE AS “JUST DESERTS”

PETER LIBERMAN*

Abstract Ordinary citizens sometimes favor making foreign actors “pay” for their crimes at punishment levels that exceed the dictates of national security. In an online survey of adult U.S. citizens, individual differences in the general approval of retributive justice predict support for military responses to international crimes, but only when the casual-ties are mentioned. Retributivists also are more supportive of torturing captured terrorists. These relationships control for partisanship, ideol-ogy, humanitarianism, and hawkish foreign-policy beliefs, and occur only among citizens with low and medium levels of political sophistica-tion. Sophistication increased citizens’ reliance on instrumental hawk/dove beliefs, and—in the case of torture—their reliance on political ideology, thus attenuating the temptation to support policies aimed at retribution. These findings suggest that less sophisticated citizens’ gut-level desires for retribution heighten their support for the torture of ter-rorist detainees and for the use of military action to retaliate for vividly described international offenses.

Introduction

Despite the long-standing derogation of retribution by Christian theologi-ans, utilitarian philosophers, and modern states, it plays an important role in human psychology as well as in modern penal codes. “The instinct for ret-ribution is part of the nature of man,” the U.S. Supreme Court argued in its

Peter Liberman is a professor of political science at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Queens, NY, USA. The author is grateful to William Chittick and Jason Reifler for directing the collaborative project providing the survey data, and to other project participants for contributing to the questionnaire. The author also thanks Public Opinion Quarterly’s anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions. The data collection was sup-ported by a 2009 International Studies Association Venture Grant to Reifler and Chittick and by a grant from the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California to Brian Rathbun. *Address correspondence to Peter Liberman, Political Science Department, Queens College and Graduate Center, City University of New York, 65-30 Kissena Blvd, Queens, NY 11367, USA; email: [email protected].

Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 1, Spring 2014, pp. 47–70

doi:10.1093/poq/nft081 Advance Access publication February 27, 2014

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1976 reinstatement of the death penalty. Failing to satisfy this instinct would result in “self-help, vigilante justice, and lynch law” (quoted in Finckenauer [1988], 82). Although this justification emphasizes the negative social conse-quences of unmet desires for retributive justice, the desires themselves do not aim at public safety or stability. As it is typically understood by ethicists, legal theorists, and social psychologists, the central purpose of retribution is to give offenders the punishment they deserve, as a just end in itself.

Research on the psychology of punishment has provided ample evidence that retributive motives affect how harshly laypeople think criminals should be punished (reviewed by Carlsmith and Darley [2008]). Retribution also motivates punitive behavior. People willingly endure private costs in order to punish unfair play in ultimatum games, and sometimes engage in risky and self-defeating behavior to exact revenge for personal insults and injuries (e.g., Fehr and Gächter 2002; McCullough 2008). Powerful emotional mechanisms appear to underlie retribution; the desire for retribution is closely linked to anger, and its realization often brings satisfaction (de Quervain et al. 2004; Carlsmith and Darley 2008; Gollwitzer, Meder, and Schmitt 2011). That revenge is, in fact, “sweet” probably explains why so many Hollywood block-busters climax in the punishment of evil villains.

It is less clear whether retributive motivations affect popular support for punishing foreign actors. On the one hand, moral condemnation and details about atrocities frequently pervade political advocacy for the use of military force (Moerk 2002; Ben-Porath 2007). President George W. Bush repeatedly justified the Global War on Terror as essential to bring “evildoers” to justice, and Vice President Dick Cheney once remarked that withholding civil liberties from detainees would provide “the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve” (Cheney 2001). On the other hand, political lead-ers almost never explicitly justify war or torture in terms of “retribution” or “revenge,” and there has been little attention to the role of retribution in public foreign-policy opinion. Most research on public support for war has argued that the public has a more or less pragmatic outlook (e.g., Jentleson 1992; Page and Shapiro 1992; Herrmann, Tetlock, and Visser 1999; Eichenberg 2005; Gartner 2008; Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler 2009) or that the public generally echoes the positions of political elites (Zaller 1992, 1994; Berinsky 2009). In general, relatively little work has focused on symbolic, emotional, or justice concerns in foreign-policy opinion, and the research that does exist in this vein has focused on humanitarianism and specifically international or intergroup values like patriotism, nationalism, and ethnocentrism (e.g., Hurwitz and Peffley 1987; Kam and Kinder 2007; Herrmann, Isernia, and Segatti 2009).

However, some recent studies have produced evidence at least suggesting that retributive motives may shape public punitiveness toward foreign actors. Perhaps the most compelling of these is Carlsmith and Sood’s (2009) dem-onstration that information about terrorist detainees’ criminal pasts has as great an impact on support for torture as does the prospect of obtaining useful

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intelligence. Also suggestive are research findings that support for military force correlates with anger (Sadler et al. 2005; Skitka et al. 2006; Huddy, Feldman, and Cassese 2007), death-penalty support (Liberman 2006, 2007), and just-world beliefs (Henderson-King et al. 2004; Kaiser, Vick, and Major 2004), all of which are associated with retributive beliefs. Finally, another study using a college-student sample found that retributive beliefs predict sup-port for using state violence against both terrorist detainees and international aggressors (Liberman 2013).

This article builds on prior work by using a population-based online sur-vey to investigate whether retributivism—operationalized as the abstract and general belief that those who hurt others deserve to be hurt in return—predicts U.S. public support for torture and for military responses to three hypotheti-cal international transgressions. An embedded experiment that manipulates information about the loss of life from the latter tests the boundary condi-tions of the association between retributive values and bellicose attitudes. The results show that retributivism predicts support for military responses to inter-national crimes, but only when casualties are mentioned. Retributivists also express above-average support for the use of torture on terrorist detainees. These relationships control for partisanship, ideology, humanitarianism, and hawkish general foreign-policy views, and hold only among citizens with low-to-medium levels of political sophistication.

In addition to expanding our limited knowledge about the role of retribution in public foreign-policy opinion, this article also contributes to broader litera-tures on the roles of values, symbolic attitudes, and political sophistication in public opinion. Values are useful constructs for understanding public opinion because they are more accessible than ideologies and instrumental beliefs, particularly for citizens possessing little political knowledge (reviewed by Feldman [2003]; Goren [2012]). Although distinct from other values that have been studied in research on political attitudes, retributivism potentially constrains attitudes in myriad social contexts. Moreover, its relatively strong constraint among less sophisticated citizens departs from patterns typically observed in political attitudes’ relationships to values and prejudice (e.g., Federico and Sidanius 2002; Goren 2012).

Although this article specifically addresses neither emotion nor framing, it has implications for both. Rather than being a consciously reasoned judgment, the desire for retribution is typically an intuitive, gut-level response, closely bound up with feelings of anger. Thus, evidence for retributive attitudes is con-sonant with theories that emphasize the roles of emotion and of affect-laden, symbolic attitudes like prejudice (Sears and Funk 1991; Brader 2006; Neuman et al. 2007). The experimental component of my study also contributes, in a modest way, to the literature on framing (for a review, see Chong and Druckman [2007]). Frames often highlight the relevance of citizens’ values to political issues, and information vivifying an international offense appears to play this role by highlighting its moral seriousness and the need for “just deserts.”

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QUESTIONS AND CONTExT

To date, retributivism as an individual-difference variable has been studied mainly in research on criminal-punishment attitudes, although retribution also has been studied as a motive for punishing interpersonal offenses, inter-ethnic attacks, war crimes, and other human rights violations (e.g., Gibson 2002; Petersen 2002; McCullough 2008). Retributive “punishment philosophy” or “sentencing goal” scales, which generally include items on both the propor-tionality of punishment (e.g., “the punishment should fit the crime” or “a life for a life”) and its justification (e.g., “the offender deserves it” or “required by justice”), strongly predict support for punishing criminals, controlling for beliefs about punishment’s social utility (e.g., Vidmar 1974; Warr and Stafford 1984; Okimoto, Wenzel, and Feather 2011). One such scale was found to cor-relate with the belief in one’s own entitlement and tendency to take revenge for personal injuries and slights, as measured by a “vengeance scale” (r = 0.22; McKee and Feather [2008]).

Retributivism differs from other value constructs that have been studied in political and social psychology. It is more transactional and focused on punish-ment, as well as being less narrowly personal, than any of Schwartz’s (1992) “basic personal values,” which include power, achievement, hedonism, stimu-lation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity, and security. Empirical analyses also suggest retributivism’s distinctiveness from these values (McKee and Feather 2008; Okimoto, Wenzel, and Feather 2011). Right-wing authoritarianism might seem like a closer construct, as it predicts penal attitudes and is measured in part using items on the importance of pun-ishing social deviants. But these items give instrumental rather than retributive justifications for punishment, and other items place greater emphasis on moral traditionalism and submissiveness to authorities. This may explain why the evidence is mixed on its empirical association with retributivism (McKee and Feather 2008; Okimoto, Wenzel, and Feather 2011). “Belief in a just world” is another construct that has been linked to justice-seeking punitiveness toward wrongdoers, but it is also associated with an anti-retributivist tendency to blame victims for their plight (Furnham 2003). Thus, retributivism appears to be a distinct value worthy of investigation.

Given retributivism’s relevance to both interpersonal and criminal pun-ishment, it may also shape people’s reactions to norm transgression in other social and political domains, including support for military punishment of interstate aggression. As noted, some evidence for this has already been found in a convenience-sample study, which found that retributivism predicted atti-tudes about war against transgressor states (Liberman 2013). Retributivism might also help explain why death-penalty support, belief in a just world, and anger also correlate with support for war against adversaries widely regarded as transgressors (Henderson-King et al. 2004; Kaiser, Vick, and Major 2004; Sadler et al. 2005; Liberman 2006, 2007; Skitka et al. 2006; Huddy, Feldman, and Cassese 2007). It thus seems reasonable to expect that retributivism

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heightens citizens’ support for the use of military force against states that have violated international norms (hypothesis H1).

Retributivism also may influence attitudes about torture. Carlsmith and Sood (2009) found that information about a prisoner’s terrorist past increased support for harsh interrogation methods regardless of the likelihood of obtain-ing useful intelligence. Moreover, this effect was mediated by perceptions of the prisoner’s moral character, and interrogation severity preferences corre-lated highly with stated desires to see the prisoner “punished.” This compelling case for the role of retributive motives did not address the role of retributivist beliefs. But it stands to reason that citizens who believe particularly strongly in “just deserts” would tend to favor harsher treatment of seemingly evil detain-ees, and evidence for this already has been found in a convenience-sample survey (Liberman 2013). It thus seems likely that retributivism heightens citi-zens’ support for the use of torture on terrorist detainees (hypothesis H2).

A situational factor affecting desires for retribution is vivid information about the observed offense. Mock-juror experiments have demonstrated this by having all participants read a short summary of a murder trial and showing a subgroup details about the crime that are graphic but reveal nothing about the defendant’s culpability. In one such study, seeing autopsy photos of a murder victim doubled the rate of guilty verdicts (Douglas, Lyon, and Ogloff 1997). In another, crime-scene photos increased anger and conviction rates, and anger mediated the photos’ impact (Bright and Goodman-Delahunty 2006). In a third, verbal descriptions of gruesome crime details heightened attributions of blame and conviction rates (Bright and Goodman-Delahunty 2004).

These vivid but non-inculpating details appear to heighten desires for retri-bution, even though they do not alter the logical case for retribution. One prob-able reason is that vivid details increase sympathy for the victim (Small and Loewenstein 2003). Sympathy in turn should increase outrage over the crime without affecting instrumental incentives for punishment. Anger also points to a role for retribution, although arguably anger can accompany instrumental as well as retributive responses to injustice. Indirectly supporting a retributive-motive explanation for the effect of vivid details is research on the “prosecuto-rial mindset effect,” which shows that observing a serious unpunished crime heightens perceptions of uninvolved suspects and offenders as blameworthy, and increases punitiveness toward them. Importantly, the effect is mediated by anger and desires for retribution rather than by desires for improved deterrence (Lerner, Goldberg, and Tetlock 1998; Goldberg, Lerner, and Tetlock 1999; Rucker et al. 2004; Tetlock et al. 2007).

Thus, it seems logical to expect that vivid details about an offense, even if irrelevant to the material utility of a tough response, heighten the effect of retributivism on support for international punishment (hypothesis H3). Moreover, if mentioning vivid details heightens retributivists’ bellicosity without a commensurate decrease in the bellicosity of non-retributivists, and if retributive values are widespread in society, then vivid details about the


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international offense should increase aggregate support for international punishment (hypothesis H4).

To the extent that vivid details heighten retributive more than instrumental motives for punishment, their manipulation provides a useful additional test of the retributive motivation for military force. People are often unaware of why they adopt certain positions, and they often misreport their motives for rea-sons of cognitive consistency and social desirability. One can experimentally manipulate motive-specific situational factors, as in the case of Carlsmith and colleagues’ studies of torture and criminal-punishment attitudes (Carlsmith and Darley 2008; Carlsmith and Sood 2009). But it is easier to rule out or experimentally manipulate incentives for torture and criminal punishment than it is for the military punishment of an international offense. Torture and the harsh punishment of individual criminals typically occur out of public view, and on already incarcerated subjects, and thus have little deterrent or threat-neutralizing effect. In contrast, interstate aggression occurs in plain view and usually indicates something about the future threat posed by the aggressor, making improved security almost always a plausible—if not neces-sarily compelling—benefit of military punishment. Thus, manipulating vivid but strategically irrelevant details about an international crime, analogous to the crime-scene photos in the mock-juror experiments described above, offers a particularly useful method for differentiating retributive from instrumental motives for military force.

There is also good reason to expect that political sophistication moderates the impact of retributive values on support for military force and torture, and in ways distinct from other values. Political sophistication generally has either scant or moderately strong positive effects on political attitudes’ associations with values, emotions, and symbolic beliefs (Federico and Sidanius 2002; Feldman 2003; Miller 2011; Goren 2012). This is generally thought to be due to the simplicity and familiarity of core values, which makes them easier for uninformed citizens to relate to policy questions.

However, there are a few reasons why political sophistication might instead diminish retributive support for international punishment. First, sophisticates probably base their foreign-policy opinions more on instrumental beliefs and concerns than do non-sophisticates, as they tend to possess greater information and prior beliefs about policy consequences (e.g., Lau and Redlawsk 2006). Thus, sophisticates’ greater awareness of instrumental and ideological consid-erations is likely to limit their reliance on gut feelings, especially regarding high-stakes issues such as war. Consistent with this, a prior study found that foreign-policy experts’ positions on whether the United States should have continued the 1991 Gulf War to topple Saddam Hussein were more weakly linked to their death-penalty positions than was the case for average citizens and elites (Liberman 2007).

Second, sophisticates’ greater awareness of the situational causes of unwanted behavior also ought to diminish blame and desires for retribution

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(Gomez and Wilson 2006). People who are too uninterested in the political world to acquire basic facts about it are more likely to attribute unwanted behavior to the simplest, most obvious explanation: the offender’s evil nature, which is a principal source of anger and the desire for retribution. Consistent with this, people who are high in “need for cognition”—i.e., who more habitu-ally engage in reflective deliberation—tend to respond to crimes with more complex attributions and lesser punitiveness (Sargent 2004).

Third, political sophisticates are relatively likely to take policy cues from elite discourse. As a result, they tend to support consensual elites’ positions more strongly than do non-sophisticates, and tend to polarize over issues when elites are also polarized (Zaller 1992; Berinsky 2009). People who adopt a position simply because a trusted opinion leader has endorsed it are less likely to be swayed by their own relevant values, although political discourse can also sway opinion by framing policies in terms of values (Nelson, Oxley, and Clawson 1997; Chong and Druckman 2007).

Thus, despite the weight of past research showing negligible or positive sophistication interactions with values in predicting political attitudes, on balance it seems likely that political sophistication decreases the impact of retributivism on support for international punishment and torture (hypoth-esis H5).

DATA AND MEASURES

The data for this study were collected in an internet-based survey conducted by YouGov Polimetrix from January 28 through February 7, 2011.1 To measure sup-port for U.S. military force against states that have committed deliberate aggres-sive acts, respondents were first asked, “Would you support or oppose the use of military force by the United States in response to the following situations?” They were then randomly assigned to one of two conditions, with one group receiving simple descriptions of three offenses, and the other seeing these descriptions plus the additional fatalities information that appears in brackets below:2

1. A North Korean submarine sinks a U.S. Navy warship [killing all aboard].

2. Pakistan sponsors a terrorist attack in India [that kills hundreds of inno-cent civilians].

3. China invades Taiwan [and executes its top elected leaders].

Responses were combined into an additive Support for Force scale, which—along with all the other variables discussed below—was scaled to range from

1. Further details about the survey data and measures appear in the appendix at the end of this article.2. A randomization check found no significant association between condition assignment and any of the independent variables or additional demographics, such as income, age, and marital status.


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0 to 1. An indicator variable Fatalities was coded 0 for subjects receiving the shorter descriptions and 1 for those who received the additional fatalities detail.

The fatalities information was designed to heighten the vividness of the aggressive acts without significantly affecting U.S. strategic incentives for a military response. It is difficult to see how the death of U.S. sailors from an attack powerful enough to sink a warship, or the fate of Taiwan’s leaders after a Chinese invasion, would affect these attacks’ security implications for the United States. In theory, the fatalities detail could have had a greater impact on the perceived security implications of a Pakistani-supported terror attack. If the non-fatalities version was interpreted as a relatively minor attack or dem-onstration shot against a deserted target, mentioning a large number of casual-ties could substantially alter the perceived magnitude and aims of the attack. However, this possibility can be tested by examining the three scenarios sepa-rately to see if the fatalities detail had a stronger interaction with instrumental beliefs about force in the terrorism scenario than in the other two.

Support for torture was measured by a seven-level agree/disagree item on whether “[w]e should use torture [when questioning captured terrorists] because it could lead to information that will save American lives.” The addi-tion of the justification complicates interpretation somewhat. But because “saving lives” is an instrumental justification, it is unlikely to prime specifi-cally retributive considerations. If anything, it would tend to prime utilitarian thinking about torture.

Retributivism was measured with a single seven-level item on agreement or disagreement with the statement that “those who hurt others deserve to be hurt in return” (the mean response was just below “somewhat agree”).3 The item’s wording avoids loaded terms like “retribution,” “vengeance,” and “revenge,” whose negative connotations might exacerbate social desirability response bias (Holbrook, Green, and Krosnick 2003). In addition, asking about deserv-ingness presumably would better capture the non-utilitarian motivation of ret-ribution than would asking about the principle of proportionality. Items like “for a terrible crime, there should be a terrible punishment” would seem more likely to elicit beliefs about the societal benefits of a “tit-for-tat” punishment strategy.

Though arguably superior to reliance on proxy measures like death-penalty support or just-world beliefs, using a face-valid measure of retributivism does not obviate controlling for covariates. People who favor negative reciprocity because they think it generally “works” might endorse retribution as a moral rationalization. In addition, humanitarian aversion to causing human suffering

3. Although the retributivism item appeared before the Support for Force and Torture items, question-order effects are unlikely to have primed retributive responses. Respondents saw over 50 items on varied topics before receiving the Support for Force items, and eight unrelated items before the Torture item appeared.

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might heighten opposition to both violent punishment and retributivism. Thus, failing to control for these and other covariates could bias the estimated effects of retributivism.

To control for humanitarianism, a scale was constructed from items on fed-eral spending on welfare and foreign aid, on donating agricultural surpluses to poor countries, and on protecting the global environment.4 The data offer two distinct measures of beliefs about the utility of military force. Hawk1 is an additive scale combining items on force as a solution to international prob-lems, the importance of demonstrating resolve, and the advantage of offense over defense. Hawk2 is a reverse-coded item on whether military force’s ten-dency to provoke hostility and fear sometimes makes it counterproductive. The two measures are relatively distinct (r = 0.30).

As general beliefs about the value and efficacy of violence, Hawk1 and Hawk2 are likely closely related to beliefs about the utility of torture for intel-ligence collection, and thus can control at least partially for the latter. To the extent that they capture beliefs about the desirability rather than just the effi-cacy of force, and the belief that force can solve not only international security problems but also moral ones, these measures might capture some retribu-tively motivated hawkishness, resulting in more conservative tests of retribu-tivism/belligerence relationships.

Measures of partisanship, left-right ideology, and patriotism were used to control for political identities and beliefs.5 In addition, a measure of political sophistication was used to test cue-taking effects. Cue-taking is much more likely to have shaped positions on the hotly debated torture issue than on scarcely raised hypothetical conflict scenarios. Conservative elites defended the Bush administration’s use of torture as necessary for intelligence collec-tion and national security, whereas liberals held that it yields false informa-tion, damages U.S. prestige, undermines the global norm against torture, and is inhumane (Jackson 2007). This elite debate was echoed in ideologically polarized public attitudes on the issue (Malka and Soto 2011), so controlling for sophistication interactions with partisanship or ideology provides a more stringent test of the retributivism hypotheses.

Political sophistication was measured by adding a self-reported political-interest item to the number of correct responses to five factual questions about domestic and international politics, and then dividing the resultant scale

4. This measure is similar to Rathbun’s (2007) measure of the “community” principle, which predicts political elites’ support for humanitarian intervention but opposition to more strategic uses of force. It is also similar to the basic value of “universalism”—caring for the welfare and fair treatment of all people—in Schwartz’s (1992) inventory.5. Preliminary models also controlled for right-wing authoritarianism (using six items from Altemeyer’s [1988] scale) and religiosity, but these were not strongly related to Retributive (r = 0.17 and –0.08, respectively) and did not affect the results, and so are dropped from the data analysis below. For further details on these measures and results, see the online appendix.


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into thirds. The more knowledgeable groups are indicated by the variables PS-medium and PS-high, and the least knowledgeable group serves as the reference category for these indicators.

RETRIBUTIVE SUPPORT FOR U.S. MILITARY FORCE

According to bivariate regressions, Support for Force is unrelated to Retributive when fatalities were not mentioned but significantly related when they were (respectively, b = 0.01, p = 0.83 versus b = 0.17, p < .001).6 Hypothesis H1 gains support from the finding that retributivism predicts support for a military response to aggressive international acts described as taking lives. However, I expected that retributivists would have been at least somewhat more likely to favor force than non-retributivists even when not explicitly informed about fatalities, given the aggressive acts’ seriousness and probable bloodshed. The evidence for hypothesis H3 is clearer: mentioning fatalities significantly heightened the relationship between Retributive and Support for Force.

Table 1 presents a series of multivariate regression models of Support for Force. The first four models are estimated only for the group given the addi-tional fatalities information, which appears to be a necessary condition for a retributivism effect. Model 1A shows the results of regressing Support for Force on the demographic and political control variables. When added in model 1B, Hawk1 and Hawk2 are strong predictors of support for punishing international transgressors, but Humanitarian is not.

Even when controlling for all of these variables, individuals’ retributivism still predicted support for military force when fatalities are mentioned, as can be seen in model 1C. The most retributive citizens expressed on average about half of a step more agreement with a military response (e.g., from “slightly agree” to just over halfway to “agree”) than did the least retributive. The addi-tion of Retributive also increases explained variance of Support for Force, as indicated by an increase in the adjusted R-square over that of model 1B. These results are not dependent on one or two of the scenarios, as the Retributive coefficients for all three were virtually identical in separate regressions for each scenario (see table 5 in the online appendix).7

To test whether political sophistication affected the retributivism/war support relationship, model 1D includes interaction terms between Retributive and the indicators for medium and high levels of political sophistication.8 Retributive is especially strongly related to support for international punishment among

6. See the online appendix for zero-order correlations between all the key variables.7. Nor are they dependent on dropping cases with missing data from the models. Dropping Republican, the variable with the highest missingness by far (5 percent), increased the model 1E sample to 96.5 percent of the full sample (N = 1,200) and did not alter the results.8. The mean and distribution of Retributive was invariant across the three levels of sophistication (Ms = 0.57–0.61; SDs = 0.27–0.29).

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Tabl

e 1.

OL

S R

egre

ssio

n M

odel

s of

Sup

port

for

Mili

tary

For

ce

1A -

Fat

aliti

es

men

tione

d1B

- F

atal

ities

m

entio

ned

1C -

Fat

aliti

es

men

tione

d1D

- F

atal

ities

m

entio

ned

1E -

All

case

s

PS-m

ediu

m0.

01

(0.0

3)0.

01

(0.0

3)0.

01

(0.0

3)0.

02

(0.0

8)0.

03

(0.0

2)PS

-hig

h0.

05

(0.0

3)0.

04

(0.0

3)0.

04

(0.0

3)0.

18*

(0.0

7)0.

04*

(0.0

2)Fa

talit

ies

–0.0

7 (0

.04)

Rep

ublic

an0.

08

(0.0

5)0.

03

(0.0

5)0.

03

(0.0

5)0.

13*

(0.0

6)0.

06

(0.0

3)R

epub

lican

x P

S-m

ediu

m–0

.17*

(0

.08)

Rep

ublic

an x

PS-

high

–0.1

9*

(0.0

9)C

onse

rvat

ive

0.06

(0

.06)

–0.0

0 (0

.06)

0.00

(0

.06)

0.01

(0

.06)

0.01

(0

.04)

Patr

iotis

m0.

19**

(0

.06)

0.03

(0

.07)

0.03

(0

.07)

0.03

(0

.07)

0.04

(0

.04)

Haw

k10.

26**

* (0

.06)

0.23

***

(0.0

6)0.

24**

* (0

.06)

0.26

***

(0.0

5)H

awk1

x f

atal

ities

–0.0

4 (0

.07)

Haw

k20.

19**

* (0

.06)

0.18

**

(0.0

6)–0

.02

(0.0

8)0.

13**

(0

.04)

Haw

k2 x

PS-

med

ium

0.44

***

(0.1

2)

(Con

tinu

ed)


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1A -

Fat

aliti

es

men

tione

d1B

- F

atal

ities

m

entio

ned

1C -

Fat

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es

men

tione

d1D

- F

atal

ities

m

entio

ned

1E -

All

case

s

Haw

k2 x

PS-

high

0.25

(0

.13)

Haw

k2 x

fat

aliti

es0.

03

(0.0

7)H

uman

itari

an–0

.00

(0.0

7)0.

01

(0.0

7)0.

02

(0.0

7)0.

01

(0.0

5)

Ret

ribu

tive

0.10

* (0

.05)

0.21

***

(0.0

6)–0

.07*

(0

.04)

Ret

ribu

tive

x P

S-m

ediu

m–0

.13

(0.1

0)R

etri

butiv

e x

PS-

high

–0.2

1*

(0.1

0)R

etri

butiv

e x

Fat

aliti

es0.

17**

(0

.06)

Con

stan

t0.

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low and medium sophisticates; the magnitude of the effect is equivalent to one and a quarter levels of agreement (i.e., from “slightly agree” to just over “agree”). In contrast, political sophisticates’ support for force is unrelated to their endorsement of retributive justice, suggesting that political sophistication decreases retributive support for punitive foreign policies (i.e., hypothesis H5).

The model also controls for parallel sophistication interactions with Republican and Hawk2, that is, the belief that force’s benefits outweigh the risks of arousing hostility or fear. (Preliminary models found that sophistica-tion interactions with Conservative, Hawk1, and Humanitarian were non-sig-nificant and could be dropped without any substantive impact on the results.) The positive Hawk2 x PS-medium and Hawk2 x PS-high terms indicate that belief in the efficacy of force was a stronger predictor of military belligerence among medium and high sophisticates than among less sophisticated citizens.9 Although there is no comparable interaction effect for Hawk1, this finding is consistent with sophisticates’ thinking in relatively instrumental terms about the use of military force.

Due to the lack of elite debate over the hypothetical international con-flicts, cue-taking theory predicts neither mainstream nor polarization effects on support for force. In fact, the data reveal an unusual partisan convergence among sophisticates: unsophisticated Republicans’ relatively strong war sup-port disappears for medium and high sophisticates. Possibly, unsophisticated Republicans and Democrats expressed their respective parties’ characteristi-cally hawkish and dovish views, whereas these tendencies were counter-bal-anced by sophisticated Republicans’ distrust, and sophisticated Democrats’ trust, in President Barack Obama resulted in more similar positions on the use of force by a Democratic commander in chief.

The significant Retributive x Fatalities term added in model 1E shows that mentioning fatalities increased the association between Retributive and Support for Force.10 In contrast, Fatalities interactions with Hawk1 and Hawk2 are insignificant. The fact that the fatalities details did not increase the effect of hawkish attitudes on bellicosity strongly suggests that the added details were not perceived as a security challenge.11 This reinforces the interpretation of the Retributive x Fatalities interaction as evidence that the fatality details aroused retributive rather than instrumental motives for a military response.

9. However, Hawk2 was a relatively strong predictor for less sophisticated citizens in the non-fatalities Pakistan and China scenarios (see the online appendix, table 5).10. The slight negative association between Retributive and Support for Force in the non-fatal-ities condition is due to a suppression effect, the apparent result of the tendency of retributivists to be relatively isolationist in their general foreign-policy outlook. Controlling for isolationism reduces the Retributive main-effect term to statistical insignificance, and slightly increases the Retributive X Fatalities and Hawk1 terms (results not shown).11. Fatalities did not have significant interactions with either Hawk1 or Hawk2 in separate mod-els for each scenario (results not shown), indicating that the fatalities detail did not alter the per-ceived strategic incentives for force even in the Pakistan-supported terrorism scenario.


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The importance of vivifying details is also evident from the results of regress-ing another experimentally manipulated item from the survey on the same set of independent variables. The baseline scenario was that “Iran tests a nuclear weapon,” to which was added “in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.” The interaction between Retributive and this legal detail was not sig-nificant, indicating that violations of international law matter less than death and destruction to retributive support for war.12

However, the logic of retribution cannot explain the slight impact of men-tioning fatalities on aggregate Support for Force (M = 0.56 versus 0.59; F[1, 1192] = 2.20; p = 0.14). This result was not due to one or two of the cases, because the fatalities manipulation did not significantly affect bellicose attitudes toward North Korea, China, or Pakistan when the three scenarios are analyzed separately. This finding contradicts the hypothesis that disturbing details about an international crime ought to increase support for force among a population with a significant number of retributivists (i.e., H4). However, this anomaly does not undermine the other findings that retributivism appears to be an important influence on support for punishing a violent international attack, at least among low and moderately sophisticated citizens, when the attack’s seriousness is vivified by fatality information.

RETRIBUTIVE SUPPORT FOR TORTURE

A parallel analysis of attitudes about torture, this time absent any vivifying condition, is presented in table 2. Consistent with prior work, Conservative and Republican were significant and sizable predictors of support for torture. Patriotism was also a strong predictor, whether due to patriots’ tendency to defend U.S. actions or their prioritization of national interests over interna-tional norms. As can be seen in model 2B, humanitarianism and beliefs about the efficacy of military force also had the expected associations with attitudes about torture.

Nevertheless, when added in model 2C, Retributive is a significant predic-tor and increases the total explained variance of Torture. Consistent with the hypothesis that retributivists more strongly favor torturing detained terrorists (i.e., H2), the most retributive citizens were on average slightly more than one level of agreement (e.g., from “slightly agree” to “strongly agree”) more supportive of torture than were the least retributive. As with support for force, this effect occurred primarily among those having low-to-medium levels of political sophistication (supporting hypothesis H5). The main effect term of

12. Another possible explanation, however, is that respondents thought more strategically about the Iranian case. Between 60 and 72 percent of U.S. citizens say that Iran’s nuclear program is a “major threat to the well-being of the United States” (Pew Research Center for the People & the Press 2009, 20). Consistent with more security-based thinking, Hawk1 and Hawk2 were particu-larly strong predictors of support for force in the Iranian case.

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Table 2. OLS Regression Models of Support for Torture

2A 2B 2C 2D

PS-medium –0.04 (0.02)

–0.05* (0.02)

–0.04* (0.02)

–0.20*** (0.06)

PS-high –0.06** (0.02)

–0.09*** (0.02)

–0.07** (0.02)

–0.19** (0.06)

Republican 0.21*** (0.04)

0.12*** (0.03)

0.13*** (0.03)

0.12*** (0.03)

Conservative 0.21*** (0.05)

0.05 (0.05)

0.06 (0.05)

–0.11 (0.07)

Conservative x PS- medium

0.27** (0.09)

Conservative x PS- high

0.32*** (0.08)

Patriotism 0.31*** (0.05)

0.08 (0.05)

0.07 (0.05)

0.07 (0.05)

Hawk1 0.34*** (0.04)

0.30*** (0.04)

0.19** (0.07)

Hawk1 x PS- medium

0.11 (0.09)

Hawk1 x PS-high 0.18* (0.09)

Hawk2 0.26*** (0.04)

0.25*** (0.04)

0.22*** (0.04)

Humanitarian –0.24*** (0.06)

–0.21*** (0.06)

–0.18** (0.06)

Retributive 0.19*** (0.03)

0.29*** (0.05)

Retributive x PS- medium

–0.07 (0.08)

Retributive x PS- high

–0.27*** (0.07)

Constant 0.03 (0.04)

0.18** (0.06)

0.08 (0.06)

0.16* (0.07)

Adj. R2 0.25 0.37 0.39 0.41N 1,101 1,101 1,101 1,101

Note.—The figures in the table are unstandardized coefficients with robust standard errors in parentheses. All variables range from 0 to 1. All models control for gender, African American iden-tity, and education level (coefficients not shown) and utilize sampling weights and listwise deletion of missing data. Two-tailed significance levels are indicated by: *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.

Source.—2011 YGP survey.


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Retributive was substantively and statistically significant, and the Retributive X PS-medium term was small and insignificant. The effect of Retributive among low and medium sophisticates is nearly a third of the Torture scale, equivalent to two increments in level of agreement (e.g., from “slightly agree” to “strongly agree”). In contrast, sophisticates’ retributivism was unrelated to their support for torture, as indicated by the Retributive X PS-high term having the same magnitude and opposite sign of the main-effect term.13

This pattern of sophistication interactions did not represent spurious effects of sophistication interactions with political identity, ideology, or beliefs about the efficacy of force. Model 2D controlled for sophistication interactions with Conservative and with Hawk1, and preliminary models found that added inter-actions with Republican, Hawk2, and Humanitarian were non-significant and could be dropped without any substantive impact on the results. Unsurprisingly, in light of the polarized elite debate over torture and given Malka and Soto’s (2011) prior findings, liberal and conservative political sophisticates were rela-tively polarized over the issue of torture. A parallel interaction between Hawk1 and the dummy for high levels of political sophistication were also significant. It thus appears that sophisticates’ opinions on torture were more grounded in instrumental hawk/dove beliefs and cue-taking from elite discourse than was the case for non-sophisticates, whose opinions on torture were more apt to express their desires to give terrorists their just deserts.

Discussion and Conclusion

This article’s central finding is that citizens’ retributivism predicts their level of support for the use of force against offending foreign states and—especially—against captured terrorists, after controlling for the most likely covariates. In the case of interstate aggression, information about casualties was required to link retributivism to war support. In addition, these retributivism effects occurred only among citizens with low-to-medium levels of political sophis-tication. Two plausible explanations for this heterogeneity received support in the data. Sophisticates’ greater instrumental thinking and greater tendency to adopt the positions of trusted elites may have attenuated the temptation to support policies aimed at retribution.

Retributivism was more strongly related to attitudes about torture than to attitudes about war. Although not specifically tested here, there are two likely explanations for this difference. Despite the absence of graphic details about the terrorist detainees’ crimes, U.S. citizens undoubtedly still associate detain-ees with the horrific crime of 9/11. Interstate aggression scenarios that are

13. These results are not an artifact of listwise deletion of missing data. Dropping Republican increased the N of models 2C and 2D to 96 percent of the full sample size (N = 1,200) and did not alter the results.

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only hypothetical future possibilities are less likely to arouse such strong emo-tional and moral responses. In addition, prudential considerations are likely to weigh more heavily on decisions on war than on torture, because the costs of war are generally so much higher.

Two findings ran counter to theoretical expectations. Retributivists were no more belligerent than non-retributivists in response to serious international crimes when fatalities were not mentioned, and mentioning fatalities did not increase the aggregate level of public belligerence. These anomalies remain puzzles to be investigated in future research.

Because participants in opt-in panels sometimes have more highly struc-tured political attitudes than average citizens, future research ought to try to replicate and extend the present findings in probability samples. However, three other features of the research design were likely to limit retributive motives and their detection. First, using a single item to measure retributivism entails measurement error that would have attenuated the variable’s associa-tions with support for force and for torture. Second, the terse and hypotheti-cal descriptions of the international aggression scenarios and the absence of inculpating information about the terrorist detainees limited the potential of these stimuli to arouse emotions and moral intuitions. Real media coverage of actual transgressions, especially when involving significant bloodshed and tales or images of atrocities, is likely to arouse stronger desires for retribution. Third, controlling for hawk/dove orientations may have overcorrected the esti-mated effect of retributivism. Although these items were selected because they address the utility of force, they also may tap broader attitudes about force that themselves could have been shaped by retributivism. Some citizens might generally approve of force, in other words, because they want to make foreign actors pay for their transgressions. These three considerations suggest that the results might underestimate the importance of retributivism in public support for violence against foreign wrongdoers.

This article’s findings lend weight to a retributive-motivation interpreta-tion of prior findings using death-penalty support and belief in a just world as proxies for retributivism (Henderson-King et al. 2004; Kaiser, Vick, and Major 2004; Liberman 2006, 2007). Given the connection between anger and retribution, the results also imply that retributive motives played a role in observed correlations between anger and post-9/11 support for force against Afghanistan and Iraq (Sadler et al. 2005; Skitka et al. 2006; Huddy, Feldman, and Cassese 2007). They also reinforce Carlsmith and Sood’s (2009) conclu-sion—based on experimentally manipulated situational factors rather than on natural variation in individuals’ retributive beliefs—that laypeople endorse torturing terrorists in large part to punish them for their crimes rather than merely to extract intelligence for national security purposes.

More broadly, this article contributes to a growing understanding of the role of retribution and retributivism in diverse types of punitive opinion and behavior, including revenge for personal slights, criminal sentencing, and the


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prosecution of human rights violations. That a formulation of retributivism as abstract as “those who hurt others deserve to be hurt in return” constrains atti-tudes as substantively remote as foreign policy and criminal punishment sup-ports the notion—already evident from personal values research (Schwartz, Caprara, and Vecchione 2010)—that even very general, non-domain-specific values can lend structure to political attitudes. However, the finding that retributivism only constrains punitiveness among citizens with low to medium levels of political sophistication represents a departure from past research on values, prejudice, and emotion (Federico and Sidanius 2002; Feldman 2003; Goren 2012; Miller 2011). Although the data suggest some possible explana-tions, further research will be needed to better explain this unusual pattern of value-attitude constraint.

This article does not lend much support to arguments that political lead-ers and states sometimes go to war in pursuit of revenge (e.g., Löwenheim and Heimann 2008; Lebow 2010). Leaders’ and elites’ high levels of political knowledge, far higher than those of most politically sophisticated citizens, would tend to limit retributive feelings and their impact on decision-making. Leaders who are highly retributive and who rely heavily on their intuitions might be swayed by retributive impulses; but even such leaders–in democra-cies at least–face strong domestic political incentives to avoid policies that are unpopular or could become so over time (Reiter and Stam 2002). Policies on war and torture might still be swayed by public pressure stemming from desires for retribution. But the present findings testify to the ability of elites to manipulate these desires by highlighting or ignoring outrage-inducing details in their political discourse about international conflict.

Appendix: Data and Measures

Data Collection

The data were collected by YouGov Polimetrix (YGP) between January 28 and February 7, 2011, as part of a multi-investigator study on values and foreign-policy opinion. YGP invited 3,645 adult members of its large opt-in panel, originally recruited by online advertisements, to complete the survey. These solicitations resulted in 1,324 completions, for a within-panel response rate (RR1) of 36.3 percent. YGP then matched down this sample on the basis of gender, age, race, education, party identification, ideology, and political inter-est to provide a more nationally representative sample of N = 1,200. YGP then weighted the matched set of survey respondents to known marginals for the general population of the United States from the 2006 American Community Survey.

In opt-in panels, U.S. households lacking internet access tend to be under-represented and people interested in completing online surveys are overrep-resented, generating results that tend to be less generalizable than those from

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probability samples (Baker et al. 2010; Yeager et al. 2011). But at a minimum YGP results are significantly more representative than those provided by other types of convenience subject pools and are very useful for conducting the ini-tial tests of hypotheses about experimental effects and the interrelationships of personal characteristics and attitudes (Iyengar and Vavreck 2012). Moreover, YGP surveys employed by the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies were as accurate as the American National Election Studies in predicting turn-out and vote choice in the 2006, 2008, and 2010 elections. A detailed explana-tion of the sample-matching procedure, and evidence for the validity of the method in producing results generalizable to the population, can be found in Ansolabehere and Rivers (2013).

SURVEY QUESTIONS AND MEASURES

All the variables below range from 0 to 1.

Support for force: Participants were asked, “Would you support or oppose the use of military force by the United States in response to the following situa-tions?” They were then randomly assigned to one of two groups and given the questions either with or without the bracketed text (response options: strongly oppose, moderately oppose, slightly oppose, neutral, slightly support, moder-ately support, strongly support):

• A North Korean submarine sinks a U.S. Navy warship [fatalities condi-tion: killing all aboard].

• Pakistan sponsors a terrorist attack in India [fatalities condition: that kills hundreds of innocent civilians].

• China invades Taiwan [fatalities condition: and executes its top elected leaders].

The three items were combined into additive scales for the shorter items (Alpha = 0.80; M = 0.56; SD = 0.25) and the longer ones (Alpha = 0.83; M = 0.59; SD = 0.27), and the two scales were pooled for the entire sample.

Torture: “Currently there is a debate in this country about whether or not we should use torture when questioning captured terrorists. Here are some state-ments that people have made on both sides of this debate. For each one, please indicate whether you agree or disagree…We should use torture because it could lead to information that will save American lives” (response options: strongly agree, agree, slightly agree, neither agree nor disagree, slightly disa-gree, disagree, strongly disagree; M = 0.47; SD = 0.33).

Retributive: “Those who hurt others deserve to be hurt in return” (response options: strongly agree, agree, slightly agree, neither agree nor disagree, slightly disagree, disagree, strongly disagree; M = 0.59, SD = 0.28).


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Hawk1: Additive scale based on three items (response options: strongly agree, agree, slightly agree, neither agree nor disagree, slightly disagree, disagree, strongly disagree, with the relatively unpopular [< 8 percent] last two options recoded into a single “disagree” category for each item to provide a more nor-mally distributed scale; Alpha = 0.75; M = 0.55; SD = 0.26).

• Rather than simply countering our opponents’ thrusts, it is necessary to strike at the heart of an opponent’s power.

• Going to war is unfortunate but sometimes the only solution to interna-tional problems.

• The United States must demonstrate its resolve so that others do not take advantage of it.

Hawk2: Disagreement with the statement that “The use or threat of force sometimes creates more problems than it solves by creating hostility or fear on the part of the opposing side” (response options: strongly agree, agree, slightly agree, neither agree nor disagree, slightly disagree, disagree, strongly disagree; M = 0.35; SD = 0.26).

Humanitarian: An additive scale (Alpha = 0.65; M = 0.37; SD = 0.20) combin-ing four items. Two asked, “If you had a say in making up the federal budget this year, for which of the following programs would you like to see spending DECREASED and for which would you like to see spending INCREASED? How about federal spending on…(response options: increased a lot; increased some, kept the same, decreased some, decreased a lot)?

• people on welfare • foreign aid

The other two asked respondents to locate their position between two pairs of opposite policies, using a six-point numerical scale. These pairs followed a common preface: “Below are several pairs of statements. Please indicate which statement is closer to your opinion…”

• “U.S. agricultural surpluses should be given for free to the have-nots of the world.” versus “Countries needing our agricultural surpluses should pay for them instead of getting something for nothing.”

• “Protect the global environment even if that hurts U.S. economic growth.” versus “Protect U.S. economic growth even if that hurts the global environment.”

PS-medium and PS-high: The middle and top thirds of the sample in politi-cal sophistication, as measured by combining six equally weighted items (Alpha = 0.48): a self-reported measure of interest in politics and factual multiple-choice questions on the maximum number of terms a U.S. presi-dent can serve, the U.S. government branch that determines if laws are

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constitutional, Hillary Clinton’s position in government, the nation with the largest economy, and the UN Security Council’s purview. Missing data and “don’t know” responses were scored as incorrect answers. The resulting addi-tive scale was divided into thirds of low sophistication (reference category), medium sophistication (PS-medium), and high sophistication (PS-high).

Patriotism: An additive scale combining two items (response options: strongly agree, agree, slightly agree, neither agree nor disagree, slightly disagree, disa-gree, strongly disagree; Alpha = 0.88; M = 0.85; SD = 0.20).

• When I see the American flag flying, I feel great. • The United States is generally on the side of good against the powers of evil in the world.

Republican: A seven-point scale from strong Democrat to strong Republican, derived from a series of conventional branched questions: “Generally speak-ing, do you think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or something else? Would you call yourself a strong Democrat [Republican] or a not very strong Democrat [Republican]? Do you think of yourself as closer to the Democratic or the Republican Party?” (Not sure responses dropped; M = 0.46; SD = 0.36).

Conservative: “Here is a seven-point scale on which the political views that people might hold are arranged from very liberal to very conservative. Where would you place yourself on this scale?” (response options: very liberal, lib-eral, slightly liberal, moderate/middle of the road; slightly conservative, con-servative, very conservative; M = 0.54; SD = 0.28).

Supplementary Data

Supplementary data are freely available online at http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/.

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War and Torture as 'Just Deserts

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