The phenomenon of learned helplessness is associated with passive, non-adaptive human behavior. Learned helplessness is a violation of motivation as a result of the subject's uncontrollability of the situation, that is, independence of the result from the efforts made (“no matter how hard you try, it’s still useless”). The phenomenon of learned helplessness was first described by American psychologists M. Seligman [Seligman, 1975] and S. Maier [Maier, 1967] on the basis of experiments on dogs when they are irritated by an electric current.
Then numerous studies discovered the existence of this phenomenon in humans. Hiroto [Hiroto, 1974] repeated the experiment with the exposure of subjects to an unpleasant loud sound, which could be interrupted by selecting a key combination on the control panel. According to Hiroto, two extreme groups of people emerged. One group (into which every third entered) did not fall into a state of learned helplessness at all. Another group (every tenth subject entered it) did not try to oppose anything to the growing noise, the subjects sat motionless near the console, despite the fact that they had been taught how to stop the effect of sound.
M. Zeligman [1997] notes that learned helplessness is formed by the age of eight and reflects a person's belief in the degree of effectiveness of his actions.
The researcher pointed out three sources of helplessness formation:
1. Experience of experiencing unfavorable events, ie, the inability to control the events of one's own life; at the same time, the negative experience acquired in one situation begins to be transferred to other situations when the possibility of control really exists. To uncontrollable events, Zeligman attributed grievances inflicted by parents (you can add, both teachers and educators of child care institutions), the death of a loved one and an animal, a serious illness, divorce of parents or scandals, loss of work.
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2. Experience of observing helpless people (for example, TV spots about defenseless victims).
3. Lack of independence in childhood, the willingness of parents to do everything instead of the child.
The relative stability of learned helplessness was confirmed by F. Finham et al. [Fincham et al., 1989] and M. Burns and M. Seligman [Burns, Seligman, 1989], and the latter of these authors believed that helplessness remains for life.
Later, Zeligman reformulated his behavioral approach to learned helplessness into a cognitive-behavioral one. In doing so, he proceeded from the views of B. Weiner [Weiner et al., 1971], who showed that the persistence of the subject in the face of failure depends on how he interprets this experienced failure - simply as a result of a lack of his efforts or as a result of circumstances over which he has no power or control. Seligman and colleagues [Abramson, Seligman, Teasdale, 1978] extended these views to explain why some people become helpless and others do not. It depends on which style of explaining failure the person has: optimistic or pessimistic.
According to I. O. Devyatovskaya [2005], the formation of “learned helplessness” among managers is facilitated by a high level of motivation to avoid failures (this coincides with N. Borovskaya's data on the lazy) and control over action by the type of orientation toward a state (according to Yu. Kulya).
Author: Ilyin Evgeny Pavlovich. From the book: "The Psychology of Will"