At 03:11 AM Monday 5/2/2005, Keith Henson wrote:
[snipped for brevity]
That's not an experiment where the experimental procedure induces capture-bonding by confinement and abusive treatment.
Fortunately.
And as I pointed out, and you confirmed, such experiments have been done, even if they were done by those unfamiliar with today's standards of terminology or ethics.
Not exactly. The prison experiment was to get raw data relating to a prison situation. Prisons are *not* in our evolutionary background, pre agricultural people either rapidly bonded their captives into the local group or killed them. The experimental procedures were not designed to bring out this behavior. At best the prison experiment demonstrated part of the evolved behavioral sequence but aborted the resolution stage where the captive became a member of the band or tribe.
Normally experiments are done to test theory. Theory was sadly lacking in those days, and even today there is not a widely accepted theory for why humans act the way they do, though I think evolutionary psychology will become the accepted base for that theory.
Reinterpreting Zimbardo's experiment, it demonstrated that abuse of captives is an instinct, i.e., an evolved psychological trait of humans. As more of an informed guess than being able to cite studies, abuse probably causes the brain to release a flood of vasopressin http://nootropics.com/vasopressin/ and perhaps other brain reorganizing hormones including oxytocin.
So the instinct or evolved psychological trait of responding as the captives did in the Stockholm bank robbery has a corresponding instinct to abuse captives to turn on capture-bonding in them. (Though I am sure that the bank robbers had no intent of socially bonding their captives! :-) )
"Capture-bonding as an powerful evolved psychological trait in humans may account for the bonding in military basic training ("training is a mildly traumatic experience intended to produce a bond"), sexual bondage practices and fraternity hazing as well as battered wife syndrome, where beatings and abuse are observed to generate seemingly paradoxical bonds between the victim and the abuser."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
If someone has an alternate explanation for these varied but (I think) related human psychological traits I would love to hear it. Evolutionary psychology has got to be the most depressing way to think about our species.
Keith Henson
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