2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Learned helplessness is a mental state in which a living creature does not feel the connection between efforts and results. This phenomenon was discovered by Martin Seligman in 1967.
It is worth saying that the end of the 1960s was associated with a significant change in approaches to human motivation. Until then, motivation was mostly viewed solely as the power of desire that influences our behavior. In the 1950s – 1960s, a cognitive revolution took place in psychology: cognitive processes began to be associated with information processing and self-regulation, and the study of the processes by which we cognize the world came to the fore. In the psychology of motivation, various approaches began to emerge, the authors of which discovered that it is not just the strength of desires and impulses, what and how much we want, but also what are our chances of achieving what we want, what it depends on in our understanding, from the willingness to invest in achieving a result, and so on. The so-called locus of control was discovered - the tendency of the individual to attribute his successes or failures to internal or external factors. The term "causal attribution" appeared, that is, a subjective explanation to ourselves of the reasons why we succeed or fail. It turned out that motivation is a complex phenomenon, it is not limited to desires and needs.
Experiment with the impact of current on dogs
This new wave of understanding of motivation fits well with the approach taken by Martin Seligman and his co-authors. The original goal of the experiment was to explain depression, which in the 1960s and 1970s was the main diagnosis of time. Initially, experiments on learned helplessness were conducted on animals, mainly rats and dogs. Their essence was as follows: there were three groups of experimental animals, one of which was a control - nothing was done with it. Animals from the other two groups were individually placed in a special chamber. It was designed in such a way that rather painful, although not dangerous to health, electric shocks were fed through the all-metal floor (then there was no active campaigning for the protection of animal rights, so the experiment was considered permissible). Dogs from the main experimental group were in such a room for some time. They tried to avoid the blows in some way, but it was impossible.
After a certain time, the dogs became convinced of the hopelessness of the situation and stopped doing anything, just huddled in a corner and howled when they received another blow. After that, they were transferred to another room, which was similar to the first, but differed in that it was possible to avoid an electric shock there: the compartment where the floor was insulated was separated by a small barrier. And those dogs, which were not subjected to preliminary "processing", quickly found a solution. The rest did not try to do something, despite the fact that there was a way out of the situation. Experiments on people who, however, were not shocked, but forced to listen to unpleasant sounds through headphones, gave similar results. Subsequently, Seligman wrote that there are three types of basic disorders in such a situation: behavioral, cognitive and emotional.
Optimism and pessimism
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After that Seligman posed the question: if helplessness can be formed, can, on the contrary, make a person optimistic? The fact is that we are faced with a variety of events, conventionally - with good and bad. For an optimist, good events are natural and more or less controlled by himself, while bad events are accidental. For a pessimist, on the contrary, bad events are natural, and good ones are accidental and do not depend on his own efforts. Learned helplessness is, in a sense, learned pessimism. One of Seligman's books was called Learned Optimism. He emphasized that this is the flip side of learned helplessness.
Accordingly, you can get rid of learned helplessness by learning optimism, that is, by accustoming yourself to the idea that good events can be natural and controlled. Although, of course, the optimal strategy is realism - an orientation towards sensibly assessing opportunities, but this is not always possible, objective criteria do not always exist. In addition, the pros and cons of optimism and pessimism are largely related to what professional tasks a person faces and how high the cost of a mistake is. Seligman developed a method of analysis that allows you to determine the degree of optimism and pessimism in texts. With colleagues, he reviewed, in particular, the campaign speeches of presidential candidates in the United States for several decades. It turned out that in all cases the more optimistic candidates always win. But if the cost of a mistake is very high and it is important not so much to achieve some kind of success as not to fail, then a pessimistic position is a winning one. Seligman says that if you are the president of a corporation, then the VP of development and the chief of marketing should be optimistic, and the chief accountant and security chief should be pessimists. The main thing is not to confuse.
Learned helplessness within the framework of macrosociology
In Russia, for 70 years, learned helplessness has been formed on the scale of the state: the very idea of socialism, despite all its ethical advantages, largely demotivates a person. Private property, the market and competition generate a direct link between effort and outcome, while the state distribution option breaks this link and, in a sense, stimulates learned helplessness, because the quality of life and its content do not fully depend on the efforts of the individual. Ethically, this may be a good idea, but psychologically, it doesn't work the way we would like it to. A balance is needed that will leave sufficient motivation to create and produce, and retain the ability to support those who fail.
New Research on Learned Helplessness
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Developing behavior control in children
In the 2000s, Seligman met again with Stephen Meyer, with whom he began research in the 1960s, but later he became involved in the study of brain structure and neurosciences. And as a result of this meeting, the idea of learned helplessness, as Seligman writes, turned upside down. After Mayer conducted a series of studies analyzing the activity of brain structures, it turned out that helplessness is not learned, but, on the contrary, control. Helplessness is a starting state of development, which is gradually overcome by assimilating the idea of the possibility of control.
Seligman gives an example that our ancient ancestors had practically no control over some undesirable events caused by external circumstances. They did not have the ability to predict the threat from a distance and did not have complex reactions to develop control. Negative events for living beings are initially, by definition, uncontrollable, and the effectiveness of defense reactions is obviously low. But as animals become more advanced in the process of evolution, it becomes possible to recognize threats from a distance. Behavioral and cognitive control skills are developed. Control becomes possible in situations where the threat is long-term. That is, ways are gradually emerging to avoid the negative effects of various phenomena.
Control has evolved relatively recently. The prefrontal zones of the cerebral hemispheres are responsible for those mechanisms that are associated with overcoming the negative effects of an unforeseen situation and provide the formation of superstructural structures that bring the regulation of our reactions to a completely new level. However, not only in the process of evolution, but also in the process of individual development, the development of control is extremely important. As part of raising a child, it is necessary to help establish a connection between his actions and results. This can be done at any age in different forms. But it is fundamentally important that he understands that his actions influence something in the world.
Impact of parenting on learned helplessness
Often a parent says to a child: "When you are an adult, I want you to be active, independent, successful and so on, but for now you must be obedient and calm." The contradiction is that if a child is brought up in a state of obedience, passivity and dependence, then he will not be able to become independent, active and successful.
Of course, a child has disabilities compared to an adult, but one should not forget that he must someday become an adult, and this is a gradual process. It is important, on the one hand, to allow the child to be a child, but, on the other hand, to help him gradually become an adult.
Gordeeva T. Psychology of achievement motivation. M.: Smysl, 2015.
Seligman M. How to learn to optimism. M.: Alpina Non-fiction, 2013.
Seligman M. The Hope Circuit. New York: Public Affairs, 2018.
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