User:Hkhenson/Capture bonding

AFD-deleted article, userfied so more work can be done on it.

Capture-bonding is an evolutionary psychology term for the evolved psychological mechanism behind Stockholm syndrome. John Tooby (then a graduate student at Harvard University) originated the concept and its ramifications in the early 1980s, though he did not publish. .) The term is fairly widely used on the Web and has begun to show up in books.

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."

One of the "adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors," particularly our female ancestors, was being abducted by another band. Life in the human "environment of evolutionary adaptiveness" (EEA) is thought by researchers such as Azar Gat to be similar to that of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies. "Deadly violence is also regularly activated in competition over women. . . . Abduction of women, rape, . . . are widespread direct causes of reproductive conflict . . ." I.e., being captured and having their dependent children killed might have been fairly common. Women who resisted capture in such situations risked being killed.

Azar Gat argues that war and abductions (capture) were typical of human pre history. When selection is intense and persistent, adaptive traits (such as capture-bonding) become universal to the population or species. (See Selection.)

Capture-bonding as an evolutionary psychology mechanism can be used to understand historical events from the Rape of the Sabine Women to the hundreds of accounts of Europeans (mostly women) who were captured and assimilated into Native American tribes. Cynthia Ann Parker (1836 capture) is both an example of the mechanism working and it failing to work when she was captured again much later in life. Evolutionary psychology reasoning would lead you to expect that capture-bonding would be more effective at a younger age when there was more reproductive potential at risk. She did very well evolutionary terms because her son Quanah Parker had 25 children. Mary Jemison (1750 capture) was a very famous case. The last one (1851 capture) may have been Olive Oatman.

Partial activation of the capture-bonding psychological trait may lie behind Battered-wife syndrome, military basic training, fraternity hazing, and sex practices such as sadism/masochism or bondage/discipline.