Death-Feigning Behavior in Humans and Its Links to Disease

The connection between death feigning and human behavior is a subject for future exploration. In this chapter, I will briefly introduce what is currently known about immobility in animals—that is, death feigning—and its relationship to human activity. In particular, I will provide an overview of how research on death feigning relates to Parkinson’s disease, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sexual assault, thanatology, and its potential applications to human industrial activities. Why do humans feign death? This question points to the possibility that, throughout the vast course of human evolutionary history, the behaviors of death feigning and immobility have persisted—not eliminated by natural selection—because they served as survival strategies.