Capture-bonding
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Capture-bonding is descriptive term for Stockholm syndrome in Evolutionary psychology terms.
About 1980 John Tooby, then in graduate school, discussed the concept of capture-bonding with various other students--reportedly reaching the same conclusion Keith Henson did 15 years later about its evolutionary origin and widespread effects on humans and human societies. (Information from Leda Cosmides.)
From Sex, Drugs, and Cults [1] by Keith Henson
An evolutionary psychology explanation starts by asking why such a trait would have improved the reproductive success of people during the millions of years we lived as social primates in bands or tribes? One thing that stands out from our records of the historical North American tribes, the South American tribes such as the Yanomamo, and some African tribes is that being captured was a relatively common event. If you go back a few generations, almost everyone in some of these tribes has at least one ancestor (usually a woman) who was violently captured from another tribe.
Natural selection has left us with psychological responses to capture seen in the Stockholm Syndrome and the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Capture-bonding or social reorientation when captured from one warring tribe to another was an essential survival tool for a million years or more. Those who reoriented often became our ancestors. Those who did not became breakfast.
Tribal life was not very many generations in the past even for western people. Recent genetic studies in Iceland have found that many of the women who were the founding stock of Iceland came from England and what is now France. Some of them might have been willing brides, but some were probably captured and carried off in Viking raids only 40 generations ago.
Fighting hard to protect yourself and your relatives is good for your genes, but when captured and escape is not possible, giving up short of dying and making the best you can of the new situation is also good for your genes. In particular it would be good for genes that built minds able to dump previous emotional attachments under conditions of being captured and build new social bonds to the people who have captured you. The process should neither be too fast (because you may be rescued) nor too slow (because you don't want to excessively try the patience of those who have captured you).
An EP explanation stresses the fact that we have lots of ancestors who gave up and joined the tribe that had captured them (and sometimes had killed most of their relatives). This selection of our ancestors accounts for the extreme forms of capture-bonding exemplified by Patty Hearst and the Stockholm Syndrome. Once you realize that humans have this trait, it accounts for the "why" behind everything from basic military training and sex bondage to fraternity hazing (people may have a wired-in "knowledge" of how to induce bonding in captives). It accounts for battered wife syndrome, where beatings and abuse are observed to strengthen the bond between the victim and the abuser--at least up to a point.
