Learned helplessness

Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to believe that it is helpless in a particular situation. It has come to believe that it has no control over its situation and that whatever it does is futile. As a result, the human being or the animal will stay passive in the face of an unpleasant, harmful or damaging situation, even when it does actually have the power to change its circumstances. Learned helplessness theory is the view that depression results from a perceived lack of control over the events in one's life, which may result from prior exposure to (actually or apparently) uncontrollable negative events.

Learned helplessness is a well-established principle in psychology. It can be observed in the effect of inescapable punishment (such as electrical shock) on animal (and by extension, human) behaviour. Learned helplessness may also occur outside the laboratory, in everyday situations or environments in which people perceive (rightly or wrongly) that they have no control over what happens to them. Such environments may include repeated failures, prison, school, war, disability, famine, and drought. A similar example is that of those concentration camp prisoners during the Holocaust who refused to care or fend for themselves (so-called Muselmänner). Present-day examples can be found in schools, mental institutions, orphanages, or long-term care facilities where the patients have failed or been stripped of agency for long enough to cause their feelings of inadequacy to persist.

Not all people become depressed as a result of being in a situation where they appear not to have control. In what learned-helplessness pioneer Martin Seligman called "explanatory style," people in a state of learned helplessness view problems as personal, pervasive, or permanent. That is,

Personal - They may see themselves as the problem; that is, they have internalized the problem.
Pervasive - They may see the problem as affecting all aspects of life.
Permanent - They may see the problem as unchangeable.

The concept of "explanatory style" is related to the fundamental attribution error.

Foundation of research and theory[edit | edit source]

Martin Seligman's foundational experiments and theory of learned helplessness began at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, as an extension of his interest in depression, when, at first quite by accident, Seligman and colleagues discovered a result of conditioning of dogs that was opposite to what B.F. Skinner's behaviorism would have predicted.^[1]^[2]

A seminal experiment by Martin Seligman and Steve Maier was done in two parts. In part one, there were three groups of dogs in harnesses. The Group One dogs were simply put in the harnesses for a period of time and later released. Groups two and three consisted of "yoked pairs." A dog in Group 2 would be given electric shocks, which the dog could end by pressing a lever. A Group 3 dog was wired in parallel with a Group 2 dog, receiving shocks of identical intensity and duration, but his lever didn't do anything. To a dog in Group 3, it seemed that the shock ended at random, because it was his paired dog in Group 2 that was causing it to stop. For Group 3 dogs the shock was apparently "inescapable." The Group 1 and Group 2 dogs quickly recovered from the experience, but the Group 3 dogs learned to be helpless, and exhibited symptoms similar to chronic clinical depression.

In part two of the Seligman and Maier experiment, these three groups of dogs were tested in a shuttle-box apparatus, in which the dogs could escape shocks by jumping over a low partition. For the most part, the Group 3 dogs, who had previously "learned" that nothing they did mattered, just lied down passively and whined. Even though they could have escaped the shocks, they didn't try.

In a second experiment later that year, Overmier and Seligman ruled out the possibility that the Group 3 dogs learned some behavior in part one of the experiment, while they were struggling in the harnesses against the "inescapable shocks," that somehow interfered with what would have been their normal, successful behavior of escaping from the shocks in part two. The Group 3 dogs were immobilized with a paralyzing drug (curare), and underwent a procedure similar to that in part one of the Seligman and Maier experiment. A similar part two in the shuttle-box was also undertaken in this experiment, and the Group 3 dogs exhibited the same "helpless" response.

Other experiments were performed with different animals with similar results. In all cases, the strongest predictor of a depressive response was lack of control over the negative stimulus. One such later experiment presented by Finkelstein and Ramey (1977) consisted of two groups of babies. One group was placed into a crib with a sensory pillow, designed so that the movement of the baby’s head could control the rotation of the mobile. The other group had no control over the movement of the mobile and was only able to enjoy looking at it. After a period of time, both groups of babies were exposed to the crib with the power for them to control the movement of the mobile. It was discovered that the babies who had not learned that they had the power to change the movement of the mobile did not try or learn that they now had the agency to do so. The babies without the previous power had learned to be helpless in their previous situation, which now led to aftereffects of that lack of control.^[3]

A similar experiment was done with people performing mental tasks in the presence of distracting noise. If the person had a switch that would turn off the noise, his performance improved, even though he rarely bothered to turn off the noise. Simply being aware of the ability to do so was enough to substantially counteract its distracting effect.^{[citation needed]}

Not all of the dogs in Seligman's experiments, however, became helpless. Of the roughly 150 dogs in experiments in the latter half of the sixties, about one-third did not become helpless, but instead somehow managed to find a way out of the unpleasant situation in spite of their past experience with it. The corresponding characteristic in humans has been found to correlate highly with optimism; however, not a naïve pollyanna optimism, but an explanatory style that views the situation as other than personal, pervasive, or permanent. This distinction between people who adapt and those who break down, under long term psychological pressure, was also studied in the 1950s in the realm of brainwashing.

Extensions[edit | edit source]

The sociologist Harrison White has suggested in his book Identity and Control that the notion of learned helplessness could be extended beyond the realm of psychology to the realm of social action. Any social actor, for example an organization or a nation, could experience situations in which it would fail to act because it has experienced in the past recurrent stochastic failures.

Notes[edit | edit source]

↑ Seligman, M.E.P. and Maier, S.F. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74, 1-9.
↑ Overmier, J. B. and Seligman, M.E.P. (1967). Effects of inescapable shock upon subsequent escape and avoidance responding. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 63, 28-33.
↑ Finkelstein, N., & Ramey, C. Learning to control the environment. Child Development, 1977, 48, 806-819.

References[edit | edit source]

Finkelstein, N., & Ramey, C. Learning to control the environment. Child Development, 1977, 48, 806-819.
Overmier, J. B. and Seligman, M.E.P. (1967). Effects of inescapable shock upon subsequent escape and avoidance responding. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 63, 28-33.
Petersen, C., Maier, S.F., Seligman, M.E.P. (1995). Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-504467-3
Seligman, M.E.P. (1975). Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-2328-X
Seligman, M.E.P. (1990). Learned Optimism. New York: Knopf. (Reissue edition, 1998, Free Press, ISBN 0-671-01911-2).
Seligman, M.E.P. and Maier, S.F. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74, 1-9.