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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Its somewhat surprising to me that people are still surprised by Stockholm syndrome.

First of all, we are primates, smart, vicious, highly social highly emotional animals. More like chimpanzees than bonobos. I bet Chimpanzees have stockholm syndrome up the yin yang. They don't call it that because 1) they don't range to Scandinavia and 2) they can't talk.

And talking! What a funny distortion! Hypocriticus Shmippocriticus! Brutality is just a label for force you wish people to be mad at. You don't need to look to NYPD to see us all falling under the heel of force, at airport screening, on the road when we see a police car, even for some of us when considering what words we put in our posts.

So yes, primates have evolved in a social structure where brutality is a useful tool and alliance is a useful tool and, surprise surprise, we have an affinity to ally with the effective, some of whom are brutal.

But being hypocriticus, we like to talk about it as though it "should" be otherwise. (Holding up my hand) -- talk to the genes.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Pretty much no one runs for mayor or city council on a platform of having independent organizations measure or police the police. Which tells you that few expect voters to support such changes. Which tells you that most folks know they are being dominated by police who can cheat with impunity, and (as voters) prefer that situation to imagined alternatives.This doesn't quite fit with my subjective experience. When I discuss police brutality with people, most of them deny there is a problem at all. They simply don't believe the police are dominating them.

I think the simpler and better explanation is that politics isn't about policy. People don't support the police because they approve of the policy being dominated, they support them to affiliate with a high-status profession. Because police work involves physical danger and protecting people it has high status in our culture. Voters vote in a "pro-police" fashion to affiliate with high status police. When they are told of police behaving in a low-status fashion (dominating) they use self-deception to deny it in order to avoid having their own status lowered. What policies the police actually pursue, be they dominant or egalitarian, doesn't enter the equation at all.

Needless to say, of course, this like most signalling behaviors, is unconscious and automatic. On the conscious level people genuinely believe that police misbehavior isn't a problem.

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