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…