Seligman’s Theory on Learned Helplessness, and how we are all Shocked Dogs Now

Have you ever heard of Martin Seligman? He’s a psychologist, and after a series of experiments on dogs in the 60s, he came up with a theory called learned helplessness, which is defined as the behavior exhibited by a test subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli that they cannot control. While neuroscience has since proved that the theory originally had it backward (the brain, in fact, assumes that it cannot control the situation and instead learns helpfulness and self efficacy), there is still much to be gleaned from this story and applied to the situation we homo sapiens sapiens find ourselves currently in…so let us begin.

It all starts in 1967. Martin Seligman is a precocious grad student at UPenn, fresh from Princeton, and working on his PhD. He is in the middle of a thesis and researching the behavior of dogs, research that would probably not be done today because it wasn’t very nice. But we aren’t here to judge…we are here to lurrrrnnn…so open your mind. Here we go:

First, he put three groups of dogs in harnesses. Group 1 dogs were put in a harness and then released. Groups 2 and 3 were placed in paired harnesses. In group 2, dogs were given random electric shocks (see…told you…not nice), which they could stop by pressing a lever. Then there was poor group 3 — these dogs were given an electric shock whenever the dog they were paired with in Group 2 was shocked, but the dogs in Group 3 could not turn off the shock with their lever, so to them, the shocks seemed random, uncontrollable, and unescapable.

Poor dogs.

Next, Seligman tested the same groups of dogs in cages that were divided into two compartments by a low barrier that was only a few inches high. One side of the cage had a floor that delivered shocks, the other side was shock free. Seligman put the dogs into the cages to see what would happen.

What do you think happened?

WELL…the dogs in Groups 1 and 2 quickly learned that jumping over the low barrier allowed them to escape the shock, and they did so.

Most of the dogs in Group 3, which mind you, had previously learned that nothing they did stopped the shocks, did not do that. Instead, they just laid down on the…