You could feel they had a script for how things had to go. First they scare you to try to get you to say things from which they can get a feel for how much you're worth, then they throw a high number (I guess based on the previous step), negotiation starts, the ransom delivery and finally release.
It reminded me of a book called "Never Split the Difference" by Chris Voss where he talks about his approach to negotiating hostage releases. The basic strategy is instead of saying "no" to the price, say some version of "How am I supposed to do that?" which communicates a willingness to negotiate but an inability to accept the price. The side effect is that it builds empathy as it sounds like you'd accept the price if there was any possible way of doing so.
The final move is to throw out a precise, random low ball offer like "$5,470" where it sounds like you've scrounged up all the money you can. The idea is that with kidnappers, time is money. If after a few days or weeks they don't get paid, the low ball offer sounds like better than nothing.
In some negotiations, he kept talking to them for months elegantly saying these empathetic "no" statements until they actually gave up and stopped guarding the captive.
It's a fascinating read that goes into other forms of negotiation too like salary discussions.
I imagine someone has to be quite psychopathic (or extremely greedy) to do kidnapping. I would imagine it is usually very traumatising for the victims, regardless of how friendly the kidnappers might seem.
It was quite surreal, I was even lectured by one of them about being out at night, that I should be more careful since there's "bad people" out there and I was lucky to get caught by some good ones (!). I guess that shows what their frame of mind is, or how they excuse the whole thing to themselves.