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 (Forward and backward navigation buttons only work on 4.0 browsers) Copyright © 1997, Jay Ligda. All rights reserved. Published by Humans in the Universe and Jay Ligda. Learned Helplessness
Learned helplessness is, as the name suggests, learning that we are helpless to affect or change our situation. This phenomenon was demonstrated in laboratory experiments. (While I don’t agree with the methodology of these experiments, it would be a mistake to "throw the baby out with the bath water" and ignore the lessons learned.) In this experiment, a dog was placed in a sealed box from which there was no escape. The dog was then subjected to mild electric shocks that it could not escape from. Dogs that were placed in an open box did not hesitate to escape. Eventually, the dog in the sealed box gave up any attempt to escape from the box and would lay down and except it’s fate—learned helplessness. In a further experiment, the same dog was placed in a divided box with a partition it could jump over to avoid electrical shocks. When the shocks continued, even though it could escape, the dog did nothing. It remained on the side of the container receiving the electrical shocks. On the other hand, a dog that wasn’t subjected to shocks before did not hesitate to jump over the partition to avoid the shocks. In the earlier experiment, the first dog had learned to be helpless and it believed itself to be helpless in this case as well. Are we like these dogs? Do we sometimes learn to be helpless even if there is a way to escape from our suffering? If so, it could also be possible to unlearn this helplessness, and take action to avoid any further suffering. If we have already learned to be helpless in a situation, we must be able to unlearn our helplessness.
(This work is a all or part of an original work first published/written for Setting Ideas in Motion newsletter.
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