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DECEMBER 9, 2021 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Dr. Deb
Stockholm Syndrome By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
I
n 1974, bank robbers took employees captive in order to be able to escape unharmed. Someone pushed the silent alarm, however, and police came immediately. The robbers made several requests of the police, all of which were granted – a getaway car, ransom money, and the release of a fellow convict. The police refused the last request, however, which was to allow their getaway with the captive employees. This led to a six-day standoff. What was strange to police and citizens was the warm connection that the hostages eventually formed with their captors. For example, one woman urged police not to shoot the men because “they have been very nice.” At another point, the gunman wanted to shoot one of the captives in the leg to motivate the police to take action to release them. The captive felt that was “kind” because it was “only” in the leg. What in the world happened? To understand this more clearly, let’s take a detour into the world of applied behavior analysis. Are you familiar with B. F. Skinner, the creator
of the “Skinner box”? Skinner was all about understanding the world of reinforcement. You may have heard of positive and negative reinforcement as well as punishment. But there are some interesting findings as to the level of control that reinforcement will have on behavior depending on the schedule in which the reinforcement is administered. So, to take a case we are all surely familiar with, a child nags a parent for some toy, treat, or late bedtime – whatever. The parent says “no” multiple times, but eventually, the parent is worn down and gives in. What just happened? The parent inadvertently put the child on an intermittent schedule of reinforcement. This means that sometimes the reinforcement is not administered and sometimes it is. What’s more, depending on how much sleep the parent got or how much stress at the office, the number of times the child has to nag for the desired treat may change before the parent caves. Now, guess what? Research has shown that this
manner of reinforcement makes it the hardest – the most difficult – to extinguish (stop) the whining and nagging behavior of the child! So much so that if the parent had been giving in right away, the very first time the child asks, and had done so for months, but one day took a parenting class and stopped cold turkey, the child would “get it” far more quickly (and therefore stop demanding the treat) than when the parent sometimes gives in early and sometimes late. Why is that? Because the child knows that if he persists, he will get it – eventually – in our case. But in the case where the parent gives in immediately, the child “knows” he will get it immediately. So if he didn’t get it, there is something wrong and he simply does not persist. This pattern has been replicated thousands of times in animals as well as humans. The research is over half a century in the making. So what happened with the bank robbery scenario? The captives were under the gun, quite literally, but every once in a while, the convicts were
“nice.” For example, at one point, one of the employees was feeling claustrophobic, so the robber said she could leave the vault where he had imprisoned them – on a 30-foot rope. She felt that was “very kind.” Intermittent reinforcement. There’s another part to this analysis. We always want to find a human connection to others because it makes us feel safer. The more the hostages could dig for and find the human being underneath the criminals, the better they would feel emotionally – even if it was not realistic. That is, the moments of humanity of the captors did not mean that they couldn’t or wouldn’t also hurt the bank employees; the employees simply denied that in their own minds. Furthermore – and this is a kicker – the more highly attuned to the captor’s mood the hostage is, the more likely the hostage will stay safe. In fact, the best outcome would come from completely disregarding one’s own anger at the situation – or at the captors – and make their hostage-takers’ will and wishes their own.
