by Teaching staff
What is learned helplessness?
Definition
Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which a person, after repeated failures or negative experiences, believes that he or she has no control over the outcomes of situations and stops trying to improve or change them.
Below is an example of learned helplessness in the classroom.
Instructor: A teenager’s greatest fear, written throughout this text, is not fitting in. Jesse, you talked about acceptance. Now, to understand how this happens, what it looks like, and what it feels like, let’s do an activity. This is an activity that you can do yourself and does not place a burden on you; They are easy tasks. This is just to give you a feel for what we are going to go over.
Everyone, if you want, take out a small piece of paper. I’m going to distribute these papers; keep them face down. And please, don’t let anyone write about these; write on your own paper.
Does everyone have one? Now, if you want, do them one at a time. I’ll tell you when to do them.
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Instructor: Everyone, turn the paper over and do your own work. This is not meant to be difficult. These are anagrams; just do the first one. Go ahead and figure it out. An anagram is where you rearrange letters to make a word.
Once you’re done, I need to see your hand raised. Go ahead and we’ll wait.
Keep your hands up, please. Just do number one. Don’t continue.
Instructor: Alright, let’s move on to number two. Don’t worry about number one. Go to number two and solve it. Again, when you’re done, raise your hand.
Okay, everyone with their hands down. Let’s go ahead and do number three. For the number three, rearrange the letters and as soon as you’re done, raise your hand.
Here’s what you need to know: They gave you two different lists. This side of the room was given three words. The left side of the room was given this: “bat,” what would the word be? The second word was “lemon.” What’s the word, Brian?
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Brian: “Melon.”
Instructor: Correct. They were easy words. But here’s the kicker: Both sides of the room were given the same third word, which was “cinorama,” an anagram of “American.” However, his first two words on this side of the room were hopeless: they were impossible tasks.
Sorry, but here’s why we did this. I was able to induce something called “learned helplessness” on the left side of the room, very easily, in about five minutes. I want you to think about what happened to you, on the left side of the room, when you saw the right side of the room raising their hand because they had completed the task.
What happened to you during that time? Jory?
Jory: I felt stupid.
Instructor: You felt stupid. Well. What else?
joelle: I felt rushed.
Instructor: You felt rushed. Joelle?
joelle: He was even more confused.
Instructor: You were even more confused because it had already been resolved and you were still struggling. Chelsea?
Chelsea: I was frustrated.
Instructor: Frustrated. What happened when you got to the third word? Because I’m here to tell you that this side of the room is not significantly smarter than this side. It was a random assignment. So why did you find it harder with the third word, which was the same word? Brian?
Brian: My confidence skyrocketed.
Instructor: Exactly. What you experienced was a term called “learned helplessness.” How many of you have heard of that term before?
Instructor: The term “learned helplessness” is often used in academic literature. Jory, do you know what it means?
Jory: Basically, they fail once or can’t do something once, and then apply it to everything in the future. So all future tasks are biased by that.
Instructor: Exactly. And this is what I want everyone to understand. It is generally only used in academic research; You will see it in educational psychology books and school textbooks. But I’m going to challenge us to think about how learned helplessness can be applied to the social scene. Can anyone give me an example of what that might look like? Tasha?
Tasha: It’s like when a guy asks a girl out and they reject him, he’s not going to keep trying. Just stop asking.
Instructor: That’s right. Now I want us to think about the girls. we have talked about Reviving Ofelia here. Think about how this applies to friendships. Can learned helplessness be induced in friendships? It is difficult to establish and maintain friendships; It is a difficult process.
If a girl sacrifices her morals once to gain the approval of her friends or a guy, she’s more likely to keep doing it, right?
Instructor: And I’ll make this clear to be explicit: If Carl is victimized once in elementary school, is he likely to stand up for himself the next time?
Students: No.
Instructor: And what will happen next time? And the next one? What we know (and this is what we’ve been learning) is that girls have cultural pressure to remain silent. Girls have cultural pressure not to get angry and not use their voice. So if someone is victimized once (if Alison is victimized once), we can take the same concept of learned helplessness and apply it to social relationships.
So the moral of the story is that it’s important for girls to practice dealing with failure. Because our instinctive response, when we fail, is to shut down. And when you close yourself off, you don’t open yourself up to learning new ways of relating.
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