Consent and Coercion: The Power of Stockholm Syndrome
I’ve recently been doing some research on Stockholm syndrome for an article I’m writing and I’m more and more coming to the conclusion that the assumption that there really is something like Stockholm syndrome poses serious challenges to libertarian theory on a wide range of issues. In a nutshell, I’m afraid that the distinction between consent and coercion might not be as clear as most, if not all, market anarchists would like to think.
First, let me try to summarize what psychologists have to say about Stockholm syndrome. Prof. Ulrike Ehlert from the University of Zurich (who works in the field of cognitive behavioral therapy) informed me that many psychologists are unsure whether Stockholm syndrome actually exists because there is very little empirical data on the subject. When I told her that I see many similarities between the (alleged) workings of Stockholm syndrom and battered person syndrome, which is a “real” syndrome by psychology’s standards, she told me that this might very well be true.
In any case, Dr. Joseph Carver (whose bias I’m not sure of though his writings strike me as also displaying a cognitive-behavioral tilt) has a very interesting article called “Love and Stockholm Syndrome: The Mystery of Loving an Abuser” over at Counselling Ressource. In the article, Carver lists four factors which contribute to the development of Stockholm syndrome and which help explain why people in a physically or emotionally abusive relationship (such as a kidnapping or a destructive romantic relationship) sometimes develop very strong positive emotions towards their abuser:
It has been found that four situations or conditions are present that serve as a foundation for the development of Stockholm Syndrome. These four situations can be found in hostage, severe abuse, and abusive relationships:
* The presence of a perceived threat to one’s physical or psychological survival and the belief that the abuser would carry out the threat.
* The presence of a perceived small kindness from the abuser to the victim
* Isolation from perspectives other than those of the abuser
* The perceived inability to escape the situation
I think the second point about the perceived small kindness is crucial. Carver has the following to say about it:
In threatening and survival situations, we look for evidence of hope — a small sign that the situation may improve. When an abuser/controller shows the victim some small kindness, even though it is to the abuser’s benefit as well, the victim interprets that small kindness as a positive trait of the captor. In criminal/war hostage situations, letting the victim live is often enough. Small behaviors, such as allowing a bathroom visit or providing food/water, are enough to strengthen the Stockholm Syndrome in criminal hostage events.
In relationships with abusers, a birthday card, a gift (usually provided after a period of abuse), or a special treat are interpreted as not only positive, but evidence that the abuser is not “all bad” and may at some time correct his/her behavior. Abusers and controllers are often given positive credit for not abusing their partner, when the partner would have normally been subjected to verbal or physical abuse in a certain situation. An aggressive and jealous partner may normally become intimidating or abusive in certain social situations, as when an opposite-sex coworker waves in a crowd. After seeing the wave, the victim expects to be verbally battered and when it doesn’t happen, that “small kindness” is interpreted as a positive sign.
Thus, because the abuser puts his victims in a situation where they feel like they can’t escape, the victims will cling to any sign of hope and will thus focus on all the positive things the abuser has to offer. In addition to these four factors Carver also mentions that many victims of Stockholm syndrome suffer from cognitive dissonance because in many cases they’ve invested a lot into the relationship which turns out to be abusive. I guess this is only true of romantic relationships and not of kidnappings.
So, if we assume that Stockholm syndrome actually does exist and victims of an abusive relationship sometimes develop — irrational — positive emotions towards their abuser, at least one aspect of libertarian theory comes to mind which might be challenged by that assumption: libertarian opposition to any form of paternalism. Of course, there are many more aspects which might be affected by that assumption, but I’ll focus on this one.
Let’s imagine parents who lock up their child in the basement of their home and constantly insult, starve, torture and rape her. However, from time to time the parents show small signs of kindness. At the age of 21 the child is freed from captivity and the parents are forced to pay reparations. Because the parents are rich this isn’t a problem for them. In captivity the child has developed Stockholm syndrome, is deeply in love with the parents, and wants to go back to live with them.
Now, would you allow the child to go back to the parents or would you force her to stay away from them? I guess from a libertarian perspective you could force the parents to stay away from the child because they pose a serious danger to her — just like I think you should be able to lock someone up who has repeadetly killed people in cold blood and shows no signs of remorse. However, if the child really wants to live with the partents there seems to be nothing a libertarian could do to prevent the child from going back to a life of abuse, torture, and rape. If the child in her seemingly right mind chooses to live with the parents we, as libertarians, should let her, just as we, as libertarians, would let a heroin addict or a depressed person kill herself.
Well that’s kind of a weird conclusion, to say at least, isn’t it? I don’t know about my libertarian readers but it certainly runs against my ethical intuitions, and lacking any other ethical theory that strikes me as convincing my intuitions are all I’ve got.
Now, I guess there are three objections libertarians could have against my claim that letting the child live with the parents is the libertarian thing to do. First, they could say that they have different intuitions and they don’t think that letting the child live with the parents is weird. Secondly, they could say that there isn’t such a thing as Stockholm syndrome. I guess libertarians of the Szaszian kind might say this. The third reaction, which isn’t really an objection to my claim, might be that Stockholm syndrome does indeed challenge libertarian commitment against paternalism, but since the above case isn’t one that we would expect to happen too often, it can be disregarded.
As might be expected, I don’t know what to say about the first objection. And at the moment, I also don’t know what to say about the Szaszian objection because I’m not familiar enough with Szasz’s thought. I’ve been meaning to read Bryan Caplans paper about him but I haven’t gotten around to do it yet.
I think, though, that the third reaction is mistaken and I’ll use the remainder of this post to try to explain why.
I think the mechanism at work with people who develop Stockholm syndrome can’t just be found in kidnappings or allegedly rare cases of domestic abuse. I think they can be found in a lot of human relationships, maybe even in a majority of them. Just watch your typical cop movie. Whenever there’s a police questioning there’s a “bad cop” and a “good cop”, the latter being responsible for small acts of kindness. Or read one of those guides by those pathetic pick-up artists: Don’t call the girl until a few days after you met her, i.e. make her suffer a bit before doing the kind act calling her. I think especially in romantic relationships our culture strongly encourages this type of behavior and I’m not even sure that there’s a clear bias towards one gender. And this “small kindness” scheme doesn’t even need to be conducted consciously. Imagine the poor, hard-working man whose poor wife is at his mercy because she’s completely dependent on his money and schedule. She might not run away from him if he ever starts abusing her because his previous acts of small kindness during those grim times together where they just barely made it through the day with very little time to spend together and hardly any money to spend for luxury goods made her love him more than ever. Or how about the boss who mistreats his employee. Even these employees might develop positive emotions towards their boss if she shows signs of kindness.
Wherever there’s a power discrepancy between two people and a one-sided or even mutual dependency there’s a danger of Stockholm syndrome.
This even means that, just through emotional abuse, the powerful party in an abusive relationship can make the weak party do things that she wouldn’t do if she weren’t emotionally abused. Thus without physically coercing the weak party the strong party can do what amounts to forcing the weak party into something.
Of course, what all of this can be reduced to is the question of human nature. Are humans always rational, autonomous creatures who are at all times, except when they’re physically assaulted, free to act according to their clear conscience? Or are their acts completely determined by their environment? In following Chris Sciabarra’s dialectical approach I’ll say that humans are neither atomic beings nor unconscious parts of an organic whole. Humans have a rational, autonomous side to them which some of the time allows them to make free choices. But those choices are always made within the boundaries of their given context — biological, cultural and psychological.
Our rational, autonomous side is what seems to make liberty and equality, or at least equality in its intellectually honest sense, possible. But the mechanisms of Stockholm syndrome pose a constant threat to liberty and equality because it follows that the “social anarchists” are right in one thing after all: liberty can only be achieved if we combat authority in all its forms. Only when two people of absolutely equal power interact is there no risk of Stockholm syndrome. But since absolute equality in power will always be an illusion, there will always be the risk of Stockholm syndrome. And whenever someone decides to abuse her power do we find a situation where it isn’t as easy to distinguish between consentual acts and acts of coercion.
Liberty and equality are ideals that will never be attained in any meaningful sense. Of course, this doesn’t mean that liberty and equality can’t be ideals nonetheless or that this somehow justifies inequality, aggression or statism. As long as we hold that humans are born equal, there really isn’t any moral alternative to anarchism.
Or at least that’s what I think at this point of my examination of libertarian ideas. As is probably made clear by this rambling post I have far from reached any definite conclusions about whether libertarianism and the project of emancipatory politics can be rescued from its many pitfalls. As soon as my thoughts are a bit more fleshed out, I might talk a bit more about the implications of Stockholm syndrome for libertarian theory and analysis. Maybe I’ll also at some point summarize the argument I make in that article I’m writing, which unfortunately will appear in German and in which I attack the typical libertarian dualism of the state and civil society or the market. Though I guess if the point I make here about Stockholm syndrome is comprehensible, which I’m afraid it might not be, the falsehood of this dualism should be pretty obvious. Just think of what agents of the state do with their power and how the state’s (civil) victims might react to that. Oh and at some point I might also talk about the importance of Ayn Rand and about that bit about “social anarchists” being right after all. This has to do with the underlying causes of Stockholm syndrome such as lack of self-esteem and cognitive behavioral therapy’s approach to battered wife syndrome which includes raising the victim’s self-esteem.
But anyway, that’s it for tonight. Please excuse my very liberal use of language and proper (argumentative) structure. I tried to convey my basic point, which really are a lot of different points, as clearly as possible. Please feel free to comment and tell me if I succeeded.
Tags: equality, libertarianism, liberty, market anarchism, paternalism, stockholm syndrome
Immer drauf auf die staatsfromme Lumpenbourgeoisie! 
The Stockholm Syndrome is certainly a very interesting field of inquiry. From Carver’s article, you focus on the aspect of “kindness” – which is one way of looking at it. But I believe that his other points are at least as important. Often, people react to a perceived constraint in freedom of choice (Carver’s first point) by what is called “reactance” (a strong push against the perceived force). But if, as Carver says, there is a perceived inability to escape the situation, victims will suffer from cognitive dissonance: perceived discomfort vs. lack of alternatives (Carver explains it in a somewhat different context). So victims will try to ease this dissonance. Since, as Carver also says, there is only one further perspective available (that of the abuser), it is quite natural to adapt this only alternative view in order to ease the cognitive dissonance. As soon as the victim identifies with the abuser, the state of coercion is more easily coped with cognitively. The small act of kindness only facilitates the adaptation of the abuser’s perspective.
In the end, the probability of the occurrence of Stockholm Syndrome would be correlated to a person’s ability to withstand a cognitive dissonance (you raise the point of a person’s self-esteem). But in the end, I don’t think Stockholm Syndrome is as prevalent as you portrait it to be (simply because you discount the other relevant factors).
But I do think that you are quite right in saying that these insights of cognitive psychology shed an interesting light on libertarian theory. I’ve written about “political conditioning”
here: http://www.freilich.ch/blog/?p=445 and here: http://www.freilich.ch/blog/?p=478
My point being: Much of libertarian theory, or actually most of it, treats individual preferences as a given (see for example Mises). But psychology and the philosophy of free thought obviously go one step further by asking where these preferences come from, if they are actually a sign of free will, and whether they can be judged as “good” or “bad”.
A question that is very similarly to your question regarding the abused child (and one more common in libertarian discussion) is the question of whether libertarians should really let people form a “voluntary communist” community – knowing that communism will lead to scarcity, loss in wealth and probably some form of coercion.
IMHO we simply don’t know enough about the formation of preferences to judge them, thereby I believe that taking them as given is the only viable option when agreeing on a legal framework. That is why in libertarian theory, one would probably let the child return to its parents, the depressed person kill himself, or the communists form a community. (This is not the first time that we find the libertarian “legal” theory, based on the NAP, lacking in ethical persuasiveness.)
On the other hand, libertarian theory still leaves plenty of options for non-coercive forms of influencing preferences (helping the child or depressed person, arguing with the communists, etc.). This would be one more instance in which Long’s Benevolence Principle would come to play.
[Just as an aside: If I just found the time, I would love to write some more on the implications of cognitive theory for libertarianism – I actually believe, that there is a strong argument to be made in favour of Agorism based on cognitive theory…]
Comment by Christian Hoffmann — July 8, 2008 @ 12:50 am
Thanks for your comment, Christian.
I’m not sure what you mean by my discounting the other relevant factors. Do you think Stockholm syndrome isn’t as prevalent because there is more to it than just the “small kindness” factor on which I focused? I don’t see how the syndrome could be less prevalent if the factors you talk about in your first paragraph should be paid more attention to.
I don’t think your example of “voluntary communism” is as drastic as mine. People who want to form such a communist community could be said to be economically illiterate, naive or even dumb. But it isn’t as clear that these people suffer from a condition which could be described as pathological as it is in my example of the locked up child.
Do you think we don’t know enough about that yet or that we’ll never know enough about it? Because I’ve come to think that much of libertarian theory might come down to the assumption of a Cartesian mind-body dualism. Mises, for example, admits to it in Human Action and libertarian ethics also seems to be grounded in this dualism (which is funny because Ayn Rand firmly opposed this dualism). I know that we’ve talked about the mind-body dualism in another context but reading more Wittgenstein since than has led me more and more into the direction of believing that this dualism is untenable. But I’ll have to do a lot more thinking to figure out how the possible falsehood of the mind-body dualism might pose serious problems to, let’s call it Misesian and Rothbardian theory. I do think, though, that the kind of atomistic individualism that can sometimes be found in the works of Mises and Rothbard is misguided and, more generally, I think there is something to the communitarian critique of liberal individualism. I don’t think, of course, that the positive claims communitarians make are correct or that the problems atomistic individualism faces is a threat to the whole libertarian project. Nevertheless, I think that Stockholm syndrome and its associated phenomena indicate that Austrian economics doesn’t end with Mises and political philosophy doesn’t end with Rothbard.
But as I keep saying, I’ll have to do much more thinking before I can formulate any coherent thoughts on this subject.
That’s certainly true. But for me it’s the first time that I can’t honestly discard it.
Yes. But a psychologist will tell you that it’s extremely hard to reason with someone who fell victim to, say, the battered person syndrome. These people will defend their abuser almost no matter what.
This sounds very interesting. I have an idea where this might lead you.
Comment by Matthias Jenny — July 8, 2008 @ 10:03 am
“I don’t see how the syndrome could be less prevalent if the factors you talk about in your first paragraph should be paid more attention to.”
Because it is less likely to witness the concurrence of all relevant factors than just coercion in combination with a “small kindness”. The latter though would usually not be enough to induce Stockholm Syndrome.
“But it isn’t as clear that these people suffer from a condition which could be described as pathological as it is in my example of the locked up child.”
Aren’t there many libertarians that denounce the concept of psychological pathology in general? In the end, the notion of pathology is just socially constructed. So one could consider Communistes psychologically deficient as well…
“Do you think we don’t know enough about that yet or that we’ll never know enough about it?”
I really don’t know. If I remember correctly, Mises opted for “yet” in Human Action. I don’t see any dramatic scientific breakthroughs, though…
“I think there is something to the communitarian critique of liberal individualism”
Based on my constructivist views, I have to agree. In my opinion, the individual cannot be conceived without society – and vice versa. But since “society” is not a conscious actor, it cannot pose any legal demands to the individual. Therefore, in regard to a legal theory, I do not see an alternative to individualism.
Comment by Christian Hoffmann — July 8, 2008 @ 9:59 pm
Ok, got it. Well I think I focused on the “small kindness” thing because that’s what’s crucial, imho. You find the other three factors everywhere to some degree but “small kindness” is only (consciously or unconsciously) exploited by certain people.
Yes, at least Thomas Szasz and his followers. But I’m not sure how convincing I find his arguments. It seems to me like it might be tautological or even question-begging (people have to be free thus there can’t be any psychological illnesses).
Yes, of course. But part of the communitarian critique of individualism claims (put in economic-libertarian terminology) that people’s preferences aren’t formed in peoples heads but have their roots in “society”. While this, as you say, wouldn’t imply that “society” should have rights, it does pose a challenge to libertarian ethics, imho. But as I said, I need to think this through some more.
Comment by Matthias Jenny — July 8, 2008 @ 10:10 pm
Great article, Matthias. I think you’ve articulated exceptionally well something that libertarians, if they are honest, always encounter: that human nature is our greatest virtue as well as our worst enemy. This is why it’s so important that we get our heads out of the theoretical clouds once in a while. We can develop ideas that are so abstracted from reality that we forget how fragile and vulnerable the human actually is.
Comment by Jeremy — July 17, 2008 @ 3:36 pm
@Jeremy:
Thank you!
That’s a crucial point. I’ve gotten many fresh perspectives on certain points in libertarian theory simply by living life.
Comment by Matthias Jenny — July 17, 2008 @ 3:42 pm
Perhaps it’s because I’m a Szaszian (by way of Caplan, though I guess I already leaned heavily that way) but if the pickup-artist example qualifies, it’s hard for me to take Stockholm Syndrome seriously.
I argued with Will Wilkinson over “false consciousness” here. Hayek and Galbraith argued about the source of people’s preferences long ago, so this is nothing new. The summary is that while it is true that our genes interact with our environment to produce our preferences, the end result is that VIRTUALLY NO PREFERENCES ARE SAFE FROM INVALIDATION. Let anyone with the desire to second-guess choices get their nose in the door and you will have completely abdicated your authority over yourself.
I took an extreme view of parent-child relations here.
Comment by TGGP — July 18, 2008 @ 7:20 am
@TGGP:
I guess I didn’t put that clearly enough: I don’t think pick-up artists’s “victims” qualify as victims victims of Stockholm syndrome. I just wanted to point out that the mechanisms at work with Stockholm syndrome can be found everywhere in society and thus there isn’t a clear cut boundary between the everyday life and such extreme situations as my locked-up child example.
By the way, could you point out to me where Hayek and Galbraith argue about the source of people’s preferences? That should be interesting.
Comment by Matthias Jenny — July 18, 2008 @ 11:31 am
[...] model may be applied to various aspects of human society from Strange Blue Planet, reacting to a blog entry by Mattias Jenny preparatory to his essay “Diffusion of reaction and obedience to authority” that I [...]
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[...] model may be applied to various aspects of human society from Strange Blue Planet, reacting to a blog entry by Mattias Jenny preparatory to his essay “Diffusion of reaction and obedience to authority” that I [...]
Pingback by Ken’s Weblog - Society is all about blind obedience — August 1, 2008 @ 6:21 am
I am not sure how valuable this is to you as I am still in high school – but I am currently working on a piece on the psychological validity of Stockholm syndrome and I feel as though you are overestimating the occurrence rates of the syndrome. In the essay, I have a few stats, like that the FBI’s Hostage/Baracade System (HOBAS) database analysis study which found that it occurs in as little as 8% of cases (Fuselier, 1999, p. 23). I am very interested though in finding some information on the occurrence rates of the syndrome since 1973 to see if it has increased with media attention!
Comment by Ella — June 20, 2010 @ 1:29 pm
Ella,
That’s very interesting data, thanks!
Comment by Matthias Jenny — June 24, 2010 @ 10:33 am