Suppose you are captured by a warring enemy. What is the best survival strategy based on gaining sympathy from your captors?
This is something I am interested in finding an answer to, and I suspect the result is not obvious. Conventional wisdom holds that you should find common ground, show similarity and appear human, to solicit empathy. For example, you might talk about how much you know about and respect your captives’ culture, music, sports teams and display human emotions of suffering or distress, longing for family etc.
However, it turns out that researchers believe that: “some emotions are considered unique to humans [(e.g., love, regret, nostalgia)] whereas others are viewed as common to both humans and animals [(e.g., joy, anger, sadness)]” and that the human emotions are reserved for the ‘ingroup’. When you are a captive, you are part of the ‘outgroup’.
I suspect that in the same way we pamper pets that we feed non-pet livestock, we further differentiate between pets and human members of our tribe. There is evidence that there are emotions that we consider uniquely human and we we will sometimes not consider “outgroup” people to be capable of those emotions.
When it comes to being a captive, it may be that the best strategy is to attempt to solicit the empathy someone would have for a pet rather than the outgroup, or livestock. To try to appear human or part of the ingroup might actually backfire. Although the following quote from a study on ‘infrahumanization‘ (ingroup vs outgroup as opposed to dehumanization which is ingroup vs animal) is ambiguous, it does hint at the possibility of that backfiring.
Jeroen Vaes. On the behavioural consequences of infra-humanization:
“They found that ingroup members reacted negatively to outgroup members’ attempts to humanise, offering less help and withdrawing faster than when the same uniquely human emotion was expressed by an ingroup member or when the outgroup member expressed a non-uniquely human emotion”.
I have a hunch that the best you can hope for, in the short term, as a captive, is the status of a pet. In the long term, however, what is the best strategy for joining a group?
Looking around I can’t find any decent studies which show tests of ingroup joining strategies.
This goes beyond the point of being held captive and can be generalized to modern society on the whole. How do we break past the ingroup/outgroup structure of race, politics or nationality and become human to those outside of our group? How do we gain legitimacy when the other ingroup views us as subhuman?
Thanks for the question – you have provided good material to contemplate.