> Sensing that their likelihood of survival was getting slimmer by the hour, Enmark took matters into her own hands. She called the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme, and begged him to let her and another hostage leave the bank with their captors. ‘I fully trust Clark and the robber,’ she told Palme. ‘I am not desperate. They haven’t done athing to us. On the contrary, they have been very nice. But you know, Olof, what I’m scared of is that the police will attack and cause us to die.’ Palme refused to let her leave, saying they could not give in to the demands of criminals. At the end of the conversation, Enmark says Palme said ‘Well, Kristin, you can’t get out of the bank. You will have to content yourself that you will have died at your post.’
If someone said this to you, would you be on their side?
> "Pop science" seems orthogonal to this concept -- it's like saying the concept of "jury of your peers" is pop science.
What? Pop science in this context means something that is widely believed to be rooted in scientific fact by the general public but actually isn't.
> But in hostage negotiation and rescue, keeping in mind that the hostages may not be sympathetic or cooperative with the authorities seems like a really great thing to keep in mind.
That's moving the goal posts dramatically. The whole point of this article is that stockholm syndrome does not have descriptive power because there are no scientific criteria to delineate what it is, when it's happening, or even if it's real. You can name things that don't exist, like dragons, but that does not mean people should be using dragons as an explanation for what they observe.