Biderman's Chart of Coercion
Biderman's Chart of Coercion, also called Biderman's Principles, is a table developed by sociologist Albert Biderman in 1957 to illustrate the methods of Chinese and Korean torture on American prisoners of war from the Korean War. The chart lists eight chronological general methods of torture that will psychologically break an individual. In spite of the chart's original Cold War application, Amnesty International has stated that the Chart of Coercion contains the "universal tools of torture and coercion". In the early 2000s, the chart was used by American interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. It has also been applied to the psychological abuse used by perpetrators of domestic violence. Origin Albert D. Biderman, a social scientist with the US Air Force, was assigned to research why many American prisoners of war (POW) captured by Communist forces during the Korean War were cooperating. After extensive interviews with returned POWs, Biderman concluded that there were three major elements behind the Communist interrogators' coercive control: "dependency, debility and dread". Biderman summarized his findings in a chart first published in the paper Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War in a 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New