Learned Helplessness

Research

The first study of learned helplessness was conducted with dogs by Martin E. P. Seligman and Steven F. Maier in 1967. In this study, dogs were randomly divided into three groups. One group (the neutral group) received no electric shock. A second group (the escape group) received 64 electric shocks, which dogs could escape by pressing a panel located on either side of their heads. In the third group (the helplessness group), each dog received the same number and duration of shocks to those received by a dog in the escape group. However, whereas dogs in the escape group ended the shock by their own responses, dogs in the helplessness group could not control shock termination (which came only when the dog from the escape group delivered the required response).

Twenty-four hours later, all the dogs performed a new learning task (jump over a barrier to avoid electric shocks). Dogs in the helplessness group showed worse performance in the new task than dogs in both the escape and neutral groups. Specifically, dogs in the helplessness group seemed to accept the shock without any resistance and were unlikely to cross the barrier to escape from it. In addition, they were slow to learn to avoid the shock even when they discovered the contingency between barrier jumping and shock termination. Although they jumped over the barrier occasionally and in so doing stopped the shocks, they rarely jumped again on the next trial. Importantly, although dogs in the escape group were also exposed to aversive shocks, they showed no performance deficits in the new task. On this basis, Seligman and Maier concluded that lack of control rather than the mere exposure to aversive events produced the performance deficits observed in the helplessness group.

In 1975, Donald Hiroto and Seligman extended the study of learned helplessness to humans. In their experiment, undergraduates performed a series of concept formation tasks. In each trial of these tasks, two different geometrical patterns, each composed of five attributes (e.g., shape, color), appeared on each side of a card. Participants were asked to try to figure out which of five attributes (e.g., a star-shape figure) the experimenter had arbitrarily designated as the target attribute. In each of the trials, participants indicated whether the target attribute appeared on the right or left side of the card, and the experimenter told them whether their choice was correct or not. After the 10th card, participants indicated what they thought the target attribute was and were told whether they succeeded or not to learn the concept.

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