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 [Page 425]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 to escape shocks by jumping over the wall in such devices, but Seligman and Maier found that dogs that had recently experienced unavoidable shock prior to being in the shuttlebox tended to passively accept the shock, even though they could easily escape it. In their classic study, they compared the performance of dogs that had previously received inescapable shock to those who had either received the same amount of escapable shock or no shock prior to being in the box. From this and many follow-up studies, they found that it was the uncontrollable nature of the event experienced in the previous task (rather whether it was desirable or undesirable or led to negative feelings) that was responsible for the dogs' passive behavior afterward.

Their findings sparked further research, using similar methods and using both rewards and punishments, that demonstrated that learned helplessness behavior could be observed in a variety of other species, including cats, fish, birds, gerbils, rats, cockroaches, and humans. Early helplessness research in humans was conducted in much the same way but used somewhat different procedures. Such research typically exposed participants to uncomfortable events (e.g., bursts of loud noise, unsolvable problems) that were either controllable or uncontrollable and then administered a different test task, which participants could control (e.g., solvable problems of another kind, avoiding annoying shock or noise by pressing buttons). The results of these studies were mixed: Sometimes researchers found that humans behaved very similarly to animals and would give up on the second task if they had a previous uncontrollable experience; other researchers found that humans would work even harder on the second task.

Subsequent research on humans has also shown that relatively simple procedures can reduce learned helplessness. Those designed to highlight the connections between a person's behavior and the outcomes, whether it is verbal instruction or giving experience with a controllable task, decreases learned helplessness. Similarly, prompting people to think of different explanations for their poor performance also lessens helplessness. Interestingly, boosting someone's selfesteem and improving their mood beforehand have also been shown to decrease helplessness. In general, research on learned helplessness was part of a broader trend in social psychology in the early 1970s that explored the importance of choice and personal control in optimizing performance and mental functioning. For example, Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin found that giving elderly people a choice of activities and responsibility for caring for a plant increased their well-being and lengthened their lives compared to a similar group who had no choice or responsibilities over the same things.

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