Capture-bonding

Capture-bonding is a hyothetical construct that proports to describe an evolutionary-based psychological mechanism. The term is exemplified by the behavior of Elizabeth Smart in Salt Lake City in 2003 or that of Patty Hearst when she was abducted in 1974. In both cases the victims bonded to their captors and resisted leaving them. The evolutionary origin of this psychological phenomenon, known as the Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding within this construct, is hypothesized to come from evolutionary selection. The hypothesis is that ancient humans, usually female, were being violently captured from one tribe by another. Those who had the psychological traits (posited to be a gene-based mechanisms) that led them to socially reorient after a few days (i.e., bond) to their captors survived to pass on the trait. Those who continued to resist, because they didn't have this trait, often may not have reproduced.

Deadly violence is also regularly activated in competition over women. Although human males are less polygynous than those of some other species, they still compete over the quality and number of women that they can have. Abduction of women, rape, accusations of adultery, and broken promises of marriage are widespread direct causes of reproductive conflict, while resource competition in order to be able to afford more women and children is an indirect cause as well as a direct one. pg. 16

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."

Capture-bonding as an evolutionary psychology hypothesis can be used to conceptualize historical events from the Rape of the Sabine Women to the accounts of Europeans who were captured and assimilated into Native American tribes.

See also

• Bride kidnapping
• Patty Hearst
• Stockholm syndrome
• Basic training
• Battered person syndrome
• hazing