Learned Helplessness
It creeps up on you
Years ago, I learned a concept that would later resurface in an unexpected way.
Martin Seligman and Steve Maier, two first year, psychology doctoral students, first used the term "learned helplessness" in an experiment in 1964 that shed light on how both animals and people react to unavoidable challenges.
Seligman and Maier gathered three groups of dogs and put them in separate cages. The first group simply sat in their cage. The second group was placed in front of a panel and then given electric shocks. These dogs could shut off the electricity if they pressed the panel with their noses. The third (and most unlucky) group was also given electric shocks, but they had no panel to press and no way to escape the pain.
After these dogs learned either that they could do something to get out of the shocks (the second group) or that they had no chance of avoiding them (the third group), each dog was placed, one by one, inside a box with two chambers separated by a barrier. The floor of one side of the box—the side the dogs were put into—was electrified. No matter where they stood on that side of the box, the dogs would get shocked. But the other side of the box was not electrified. A high-pitched tone was played to signal an approaching shock that travels through the floor of the half of the box where the…