Biderman's Chart of Coercion

After extensive interviews with returned POWs, Biderman concluded that there were three major elements behind the Communist interrogators' coercive control: "dependency, debility and dread".

[2] 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 York Academy of Medicine.

The paper was an analysis of the psychological, rather than physical, methods used to coerce information and false confessions.

[1][3] Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton conducted similar research into the same Chinese methods; coining the term "thought reform" (now known as brainwashing) to describe them in the same issue of The Bulletin.

[2] In 2002, US military trainers offered an entire training class to Guantanamo Bay detention camp interrogators based on Biderman's Chart.

Several American prisoners of war at a Korean POW camp
Biderman's Chart of Coercion originated from Albert Biderman 's study of Chinese psychological torture of American prisoners of war during the Korean War .
Kneeling prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp with eyes and ears covered
The Chart of Coercion was used by American interrogators to administer the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in the early 2000s.