ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the main key issues of social actors involved in torture as they arise from literature. From the literature on social violence, it seems that a pattern of four psychosocial dynamics must be put into place in order to create a situation where torture is possible. The four dynamics are the internalization of an ideology, the obedience to authority, the systematic use of compartmentalizations at social, institutional, and psychological levels and the use of action as involvement. Focusing on group dynamics from situational perspective, in 1971 Philip Zimbardo designed a dramatic experiment to study the dynamics of prison. One of the classic and most astonishing studies demonstrating the dynamics of blind obedience is Stanley Milgram's. Milgram's intent was to produce an intense moral conflict for the participant in terms of whether to obey the experimenter, but the cost of continuing to harm a protesting victim, or to side with the learner but, in so doing disobeying the experimenter.
