Capture bonding

Capture bonding describes an person's or animal's psychological response to capture resulting in emotional bonds toward their captors.

In abnormal psychology, capture bond is a term used to define the bonding that in some instances develops between the captor and captive.^[1][2][3] The term stems from the 1973 case of a Swedish woman who became so attached to one of the bank robbers who held her hostage that she broke her engagement to her former lover and remained bonded, or in bondage, to her former captor while he served time in prison.^[2] In this traumatic situation, the victims became emotionally attached to their victimizers, and even defended their captors after they were freed from their six-day ordeal. This behavior came to be called Stockholm syndrome a term coined by the criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police during the robbery, and referred to the syndrome in a news broadcast. In the 1980s and 90s, the psychological concepts behind this abnormal behavior began to find analogies in the fields of abnormal psychology, wherein the term "capture bond" developed. In the 2006 book From Princess to Prisoner by Linda McJunckins, for example, the theory of capture bond is used to explain the behavior of a daughter who suddenly relinquished her freedoms as a college student to an arduous life as a slave among strangers.^[1]

Capture bonding is a descriptive evolutionary psychology term for the evolved psychological mechanism behind Stockholm syndrome. In the view of evolutionary psychology "the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors." ^[4]

One of the "adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors," particularly our female ancestors, was being abducted by another band. If life in those times was similar to that of some of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies, then being captured and having their dependent children killed might have been fairly common.^[5][6][7][8]

There are strong biological reasons to expect that war and abductions (capture) were typical of human pre history at least back to the time our ancestors escaped predation (at least to the taming of fire and perhaps as far back as chipped rocks).^[9] If such an extreme selective genetic filter was applied to a significant fraction of each generation, then the psychological traits behind capture bonding should be expected to be nearly universal, like talking and walking.

In 2001, Keith Henson, presented an evolutionary psychology explanation as to why such a trait as capture-bonding would have evolved in relations to the reproductive success of evolving people during the last 3.5 million years in which social primates lived in bands or tribes.^[10] One commonality that stands out from 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.

Going back a few generations, almost everyone in such tribes has at least one ancestor, typically a woman, who was violently captured from another tribe. Hence, the hypothesis has been put forward that natural selection has left us with psychological response to the capture process as seen with Stockholm syndrome and as in the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Subsequently, capture-bonding, or social reorientation when captured from one warring tribe to another, developed as an essential survival tool. Those who reoriented often survived to reproduce.

Thus, the evolutionary psychology explanation stresses the fact that humans have a lot of ancestors who gave up and joined tribes that captured them. This selection process, as is posited, accounts for the extreme forms of capture-bonding exemplified by Patty Hearst and the Stockholm syndrome. If humans have this trait, it accounts for the "why" behind everything from basic military training and sex-bondage to fraternity hazing. That is, people may also have a wired-in "knowledge" of how to induce bonding in captives. Captive-bonding thus 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.

In 2002, Henson used capture-bonding as an illustrative example of selected-in-the-stone age psychological traits in "Sex, Drugs, and Cults." ^{[11][12][13][14]} Henson has proposed that the partial activation of this psychological trait accounts for other mysterious human traits such as Basic training "a mildly traumatic experience intended to produce a bond" Battered person syndrome and fraternity hazing and similar initiation rites. The difficulty colleges have had in stamping out injurious hazing may stem from instinctual knowledge of how to induce bonding in captives. He also makes a case that the intense reward from sexual practices such as BDSM derives from partial activation of the capture-bonding psychological mechanisms.

In animal psychology, the theory of capture bonding is used to explain various situations of infanticide, such as in lion or gorilla social systems, where a new alpha male takes over the troop and in doing so kills off all of the offspring. The females then, invariably bond to the new male and reproduce a new litter with him. Evolutionary psychologist Matt Ridley, in his 2003 book The Agile Gene - How Nature Turns On Nurture, explains that infanticide is common among gorillas, as it is among primates. A bachelor male, according to Ridley, will infiltrate a harem, grab a baby, and kill it. This has two affects on the baby's mother, apart from causing her great, though transient, distress. First, according to Ridley, "by halting her lactation it brings her back into estrus; second, it persuades her that she needs a new harem master who is better at protecting her babies. And who better to choose than the raider? So she leaves her mate and marries the baby's killer."^[15] This is a form of pair-bond resulting from a tribe or troop takeover in which the females are, so to say, “captured” and converted into new reproducing brides.

• Abduction phenomenon
• Basic training
• Bride kidnapping
• Colonial mentality
• Institutionalization
• Kidnapping
• Natascha Kampusch