Learned Helplessness
It always seems impossible until it’s done
Day 160 / 365
Physiology has not been kind to animals in the past when it comes to experiments. In one such experiment, Martin Seligman kept a dog in a box with an electrified floor. He would then ring a bell and then press a button which would administer a shock to the dog. After repeating the experiment a few times, the dog would start to get scared just by listening to the bell, even before it got shocked.
Now he repeated the experiment with a different dog. The box was different this time, and only half the floor was electrified. If this new dog could move to the other half, he would be safe from the shock. And soon enough through trial and error, this dog learned this and would move to the safe part as soon as it heard the bell.
Now, this is just classical conditioning, and there’s nothing much interesting going on here. What’s weird is the next part.
Seligman then tried keeping the first dog, the one which had been forcefully shocked with no way to prevent it, into the new box. Now, this dog had a chance to avoid the shock by moving to the safe half. But what Seligman observed is that the dog didn’t make any attempts to avoid the shock, it simply lay there and got through it. It’s as if because of his past experiences, the dog had lost all hope, and accepted that he was helpless. This phenomenon is called Learned Helplessness.
This story struck a chord with me, as I don’t think our behavior is much different than those dogs when it comes to feeling helplessness. Whether it is due to past experiences, or due to negative things we have been told by other people, we seem to find comfort in accepting defeat and feeling helpless. People have grown to fear to have any hope, hope that there’s a way out of whatever shit hole they are in at the moment.
But what if there’s a way out, a place you could reach where you’ll be free of your troubles if you just gave it a try. Granted that sometimes there are things that are out of our hands. But we tend to overestimate these and underestimate the things that we can actually do to take control of our situation and change it for the better.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Yesterday’s blog — How the Looney Tunes came to be