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Learned Helplessness

Learned helplessness is a condition that is brought about by repeated exposure to negative stimuli. The result is that the individual learns that there are no options and no possibility for an escape from the negative stimuli. Helplessness exists when an individual's actions have no perceived positive effect on outcomes. Learned helplessness is when an individual learns the response of resigning oneself passively to aversive conditions rather than taking action to change, escape, or avoid them. This learning occurs through repeated exposure to inescapable or unavoidable aversive events. Research by Martin Seligman has shown that helplessness is prominent in humans and has emotional, cognitive, and motivational consequences. He discovered from his research that prior experience, lack of discriminative control, and the importance of outcomes are three factors that contribute to learned helplessness. The concept has been successful at explaining the response of members of a minority group to the pressures of living in an oppressive cultural milieu.

Applications to Understanding Responses to Oppression

Learned helplessness is an important psychological construct to assist in understanding the experience of a minority member living in an oppressive society. The negative stimuli in this situation are the perpetual onslaughts of the pernicious racism that is present in U.S. culture. It is important to point out that these negative stimuli do not need to be severe (e.g., lynching) to have their effect. It is the omnipresent, repeated exposure to oppression, oftentimes in the form of microaggressions, that can create learned helplessness. The recipient of these repeated assaults eventually comes to accept them and sees no other possible options. Institutionalized racism also influences personal behaviors and decisions made by minorities that lead to learned helplessness. This perceived lack of options makes the current social and economic power structure seem inescapable and unchangeable.

A related concept that contributes to the understanding of the dynamics of racism is the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution, also known as correspondence bias or overattribution effect, is the tendency to explain other people's behavior in dispositional terms, while underemphasizing situational influences. For example, if an African American tells a European American that he or she is unemployed, the European American may view the individual as lazy or unmotivated, ignoring that there may be a high unemployment rate or a lack of economic opportunity for the individual. The sociocultural and economic milieu in which an individual is living may create a state of learned helplessness (the unemployed African American has been denied economic opportunity for so long that he or she may come to accept it as an immutable condition), yet the outside observer explains this individual's behavior in terms of internal causes, such as pathological personality or lack of moral character.

Development of the Concept

In early 1965, Seligman and his colleagues, while studying the relationship between fear and learning, accidentally discovered an unexpected phenomenon while replicating Ivan Pavlov's classical conditioning experiment. Pavlov's 1905 experiment demonstrated that if a ringing bell or tone is repeatedly paired with a presentation of food, a dog will salivate. Later, upon hearing the ringing of the bell without the food, the dog will salivate. In Seligman's experiment, instead of pairing the tone with food, he paired it with harmless shock. The idea was that after the dog learned to associate the tone with the electrical shock, the dog would feel fear on the presentation of a tone and would then run away or attempt to avoid the shock in some way.

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