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Helplessness, Learned
Definition
Learned helplessness refers to a phenomenon in which an animal or human experiences an uncontrollable, inescapable event and subsequently has difficulty obtaining desirable outcomes, even when it is easy to do so. The term is often used to explain why people may display passive, helpless behavior or feel powerless in situations that are actually simple to avoid or change.
Background and History
Martin Seligman and Steven Maier discovered learned helplessness accidentally while conducting behavioral research on negative reinforcement with dogs. They set up a cage with two compartments separated by a shoulder high wall, called a shuttlebox, that allowed the dogs to escape a mild but painful electric shock delivered to the floor of one side by jumping to the other side. Typically, dogs easily learn ...
- Action Control
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- Moral Development
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- Psychological Entitlement
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- Self-Affirmation Theory
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- Self-Handicapping
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- Self-Reference Effect
- Self-Regulation
- Self-Reports
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- Self-Verification Theory
- Social Comparison
- Social Identity Theory
- Spotlight Effect
- Stigma
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- Terror Management Theory
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- Uniqueness
- Value Priorities
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- Action Identification Theory
- Actor–Observer Asymmetries
- Adaptive Unconscious
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- Assimilation Processes
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- Attribution Theory
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- Automatic Processes
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- Bad Is Stronger Than Good
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- Gambler's Fallacy
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- Hostile Attribution Bias
- Hostile Media Bias
- Hot Hand Effect
- Illusory Correlation
- Implicit Personality Theory
- Inference
- Integrative Complexity
- Interpersonal Cognition
- Justice Motive
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- Lay Epistemics
- Lowballing
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- Mimicry
- Mind-Wandering
- Misattribution of Arousal
- Moral Emotions
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- MUM Effect
- Nonconscious Processes
- Norms, Prescriptive and Descriptive
- Omission Neglect
- Person Perception
- Personality Judgments, Accuracy of
- Person-Positivity Heuristic
- Positive–Negative Asymmetry
- Primacy Effect, Attribution
- Primacy Effect, Memory
- Priming
- Projection
- Prototypes
- Recency Effect
- Responsibility Attribution
- Risk Appraisal
- Salience
- Satisficing
- Schemas
- Scripts
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
- Self-Reference Effect
- Self-Serving Bias
- Self-Verification Theory
- Shifting Standards
- Similarity-Attraction Effect
- Social Categorization
- Social Cognition
- Social Cognitive Neuroscience
- Social Comparison
- Social Impact Theory
- Social Projection
- Spontaneous Trait Inferences
- Spreading of Alternatives
- Subliminal Perception
- Subtyping
- Symbolic Interactionism
- Theory of Mind
- Thin Slices of Behavior
- Three-Dimensional Model of Attribution
- Transactive Memory
- Value Pluralism Model
- Subdisciplines
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