Republican presidential candidates Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann said at Saturday 's foreign policy debate that they would renew the use of waterboarding , the controversial practice banned by President Barack Obama . `` I do n't see it as torture . I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique , '' Cain said . His comments were met with loud cheers of support from the debate audience . Bachmann , meanwhile , called the practice `` very effective '' and said Obama `` is allowing the ACLU to run the CIA . '' After the debate , Romney aides told CNN that he does not believe waterboarding is torture . But this issue does n't divide neatly along party lines . During the debate candidates Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman outright opposed the practice . `` Waterboarding is torture , '' Paul said . `` It 's really un-American to accept , on principle , that we will torture people that we capture . '' The next day both Sen. John McCain and President Obama criticized the pro-waterboarding rhetoric and reaffirmed their opposition to the practice . The United States has also been historically inconsistent on this issue . Although the use of waterboarding was widespread in the aftermath of 9/11 , in the aftermath of World War II the United States not only condemned but prosecuted and convicted a number of Japanese troops and officials for subjecting United States troops to waterboarding . So which is it : Illicit torture or an acceptable interrogation practice ? And how should we decide ? Recently my colleagues Mary-Hunter McDonnell , visiting assistant professor of law at Northwestern , and George Loewenstein , a behavioral economist at Carnegie-Mellon , and I examined the psychology behind how we evaluate enhanced interrogation tactics . Our experiments revealed several insights that can inform the debate on waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques . Most countries define torture in terms of pain severity . For example , the United Nations Convention Against Torture , of which America is one of many signatories , abjures the use of torture , which it defines as `` any act by which severe pain or suffering , whether physical or mental , is intentionally inflicted on a person . '' This means that , legally speaking , whether waterboarding is illicit torture or an acceptable interrogation practices depends on the amount pain and suffering waterboarding inflicts . Because most policymakers have never experienced waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation tactics for themselves ( Sen. McCain aside ) , they must rely on their inexperienced intuitions about how painful these practices seem . This task has become all the more difficult with the advent of enhanced interrogation techniques such as prolonged sleep deprivation , social isolation , and exposure to cold temperatures , which are designed to induce physical and psychological distress without inflicting enduring harm . Yet over the past 15 years , psychologists have discovered that people who are n't enduring a painful experience have a hard time estimating just how painful it is . This finding is known as an empathy gap , and it helps to explain why doctors underestimate their patients ' pain and why patients themselves underestimate how painful upcoming procedures will be . To test the idea that empathy gaps might distort the evaluation of torture policy , we asked people to evaluate common enhanced interrogation tactics like sleep deprivation , solitary confinement , and exposure to cold temperatures . Some participants ( the control group ) evaluated these practices under normal conditions , while others ( the experimental group ) made their judgments while experiencing a mild version of the pain associated with those techniques . These participants submerged their hand in ice water ( exposure to cold temperatures ) , felt social exclusion by being rejected by a group ( solitary confinement ) , and were tested at the end of a three-hour night class ( sleep deprivation ) . In each case the experimental group estimated the interrogation tactics to be significantly more painful , less ethical , and less acceptable as a practice than participants who made their judgments free of pain , as policymakers normally would . These findings suggest that policymakers ( and the concerned public ) suffer from a fundamental bias when evaluating waterboarding and other interrogation tactics . It appears that the legal standard for evaluating torture is psychologically untenable . Policymakers simply can not appreciate the severity of interrogation practices they themselves have not experienced , a psychological constraint that in effect encourages torture . Indeed , in several well-publicized incidents , public figures who denied that waterboarding was torture volunteered to experience it themselves , and almost instantly changed their minds . In combination , a range of empirical evidence points to the need for a more restrictive legal standard for evaluating the ethicality of interrogation techniques .
Three GOP presidential candidates say this is not a form of torture . So which is it : Illicit torture or an acceptable interrogation practice ? asks John Nordgren . Nordgren : People who do n't experience something ca n't know just how painful it is . People who have to undergo it see it as torture , Nordgren says .