Learned helplessness It's a state in which a person does no | Self Education
Learned helplessness
It's a state in which a person does not try to influence on the situation, even when he can do it.
Experiment
This phenomenon was discovered by American psychologist Martin Seligman in 1967 in a series of studies.
In the experiment Seligman participated three groups of dogs and each of them was placed in different cages. Animals from the first and the second groups received a light discharge of current through the floor, and the third one - the control group did not. The first group could turn off the current by pressing the button inside the cell. The second had no options: electric shocks stopped only when the dogs from the first group pressed the button.
Later, all the subjects were put in boxes with a partition, which can be easily jumped over(look at the picture below). Animals received electric shocks, and to avoid discomfort, they just had to jump to the other side.
Result
The dogs from the first and third groups quickly figured out what needs to be done and moved to a safe area.The dogs from the second group remained where they were shocked, whined, but did not even try to escape.
Conclusion
Seligman suggested that the dogs might not try to avoid an electric shock because during the experiment they tried to avoid it several times , but since it did not work out, they got used to its inevitability. In other words, the dogs "learned helplessness".
Later, other psychologists conducted a similar experiment in humans and the phenomenon of learned helplessness also worked .
How to get rid of the feeling of helplessness will be written in the next post.
Original source: Link
#experiments #psychology
