The opposite of Stockholm syndrome is called Lima syndrome. In Stockholm syndrome, a hostage develops positive feelings toward their captor. Lima syndrome flips that dynamic: the captor develops sympathy, empathy, or even affection toward the person they’re holding. It’s a rare psychological response, and far less studied than its more famous counterpart.
How Lima Syndrome Got Its Name
The term comes from a hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, in 1996. Members of a militant group called the MRTA seized hundreds of hostages during a diplomatic event. Over the following days and weeks, the captors began releasing hostages voluntarily, apparently because they started to empathize with them. Many of the MRTA members involved were teenagers or young adults with little understanding of the political goals behind the operation. That combination of youth, inexperience, and weak ideological commitment seems to have made them more susceptible to seeing their hostages as real people rather than bargaining chips.
What Causes a Captor to Bond With a Victim
Lima syndrome is still poorly understood, and very little formal research exists on the phenomenon. But from the cases that have been documented, a few patterns emerge.
Age and inexperience play a role. Younger captors, or those who haven’t been deeply indoctrinated into a cause, appear more likely to develop empathy for the people they’re holding. When someone lacks strong personal convictions about why they’re committing a violent act, the emotional reality of controlling another person can overwhelm whatever justification they started with.
Time is another factor. The longer a captor spends in close proximity to a hostage, the harder it becomes to dehumanize them. Conversations happen. Personal details come out. The captor may begin to see themselves in the hostage’s situation, which can shift their emotional stance from aggression or indifference toward protectiveness. Friendly rapport between hostage and captor accelerates this process. Even small, humanizing interactions, like sharing meals or talking about family, can erode the psychological distance a captor needs to maintain control.
How It Differs From Stockholm Syndrome
The core difference is who develops the bond and from which side of the power dynamic. In Stockholm syndrome, the person without power (the victim) begins to identify with and feel loyalty toward the person who controls them. This is generally understood as a survival mechanism. The victim’s brain, under extreme stress, latches onto any small act of kindness from the captor and inflates it into genuine affection or trust.
Lima syndrome works in the opposite direction. The person with all the power begins to feel connected to the person they’re harming. Instead of the powerless party adapting to survive, the powerful party softens. The emotional shift in Lima syndrome can lead to tangible changes in behavior: releasing hostages early, providing better conditions, or even sabotaging the captor’s own mission. In the Lima embassy crisis, this is exactly what happened.
Stockholm syndrome has been studied and debated for decades, with well-documented cases and a body of psychological literature behind it. Lima syndrome, by contrast, remains on the fringes of psychology. There’s no diagnostic criteria for it, and documented cases are scarce enough that researchers haven’t been able to build robust models for why it occurs.
Why It Matters Beyond Hostage Situations
While the term originated in a hostage context, the underlying dynamic applies more broadly. Any situation involving a power imbalance, where one person controls another, can theoretically produce something resembling Lima syndrome. An abuser who gradually becomes protective of the person they’ve been mistreating. A prison guard who develops genuine concern for an inmate. A bully who begins to empathize with their target after spending time together in a different context. These aren’t hostage scenarios, but they share the same psychological core: prolonged proximity and humanizing contact can dissolve the emotional barriers that allow one person to mistreat another.
The concept also has practical relevance in crisis negotiation. Hostage negotiators understand that encouraging communication between captors and hostages can work in the hostages’ favor. The more a captor talks to, listens to, and interacts with the people they’re holding, the harder it becomes to treat them as objects. While negotiators can’t rely on Lima syndrome developing, they can create conditions that make it more likely, buying time and fostering the kind of personal exchanges that chip away at a captor’s resolve.
Why It’s So Rare
Most people who take hostages or hold power over others through force have strong motivations for doing so, whether ideological, financial, or personal. Those motivations act as psychological armor against empathy. A captor who genuinely believes their cause is righteous, or who views their victims as fundamentally different from themselves, is unlikely to soften. Lima syndrome tends to emerge specifically when that armor is thin: when the captor is young, uncertain, acting under someone else’s orders, or motivated by money rather than belief. That’s a narrow set of circumstances, which is why the phenomenon remains uncommon and difficult to study.