by TeachThe staff of thought
What is learned helplessness?
Definition
Learned helplessness is a psychological state in which a person, after repeated failures or negative experiences, believes they have 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, we’re going to do an activity. This is a personal activity and is not intended to tax you: these are easy tasks. This is just to make you feel what we are going to discuss.
Everyone, if you would like, take out a small piece of paper. I’m going to hand out these papers – keep them face down. And please, no one writes about this; 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 over the paper and do your own work. It’s not supposed to be difficult. These are anagrams – just do the first one. Go ahead and solve it. An anagram is where you rearrange letters to form a word.
Once you’re done, I need to see your hand raised. Keep going and we’ll wait.
Keep your hands in the air, 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.
OK, everyone hands down. We’re going to go ahead and do number three. For number three, rearrange the letters and as soon as you’re done, raise your hand.
Here’s what you need to know: You’ve been given two different lists. This side of the coin received three words. The left side of the room received 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 thing: both sides of the coin were given the same third word, which was “cinorama,” an anagram for “American.” However, your first two words from this side of the room were not solvable: they were impossible tasks.
I’m sorry, but here’s why we did this. I was able to induce something called “learned helplessness” in 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 raise their hands because they had completed the task.
What happened to you during this period? Jory?
Jory: I felt stupid.
Instructor: You felt stupid. All right. What else?
For Joe: I felt rushed.
Instructor: You felt rushed. Joelle?
For Joe: I was even more confused.
Instructor: You were even more confused because they had already fixed the problem 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, this side of the coin is not significantly smarter than this side. It was a random assignment. So why did you have more difficulty with the third word, which was the same word? Brian?
Brian: My confidence was shot.
Instructor: Exactly. What you experienced was a term called “learned helplessness.” How many of you have heard of this term before?
Instructor: The term “learned helplessness” is often used in academic literature. Jory, do you know what that means?
Jory: Basically, they fail once or can’t do something once, and then they apply that to everything in the future. All future tasks are therefore distorted.
Instructor: Exactly. And that’s what I want everyone to understand. It’s usually only used in academic research – you’ll see it in educational psychology books, in textbooks. But I’m going to challenge us to think about how learned helplessness can apply to the social scene. Can anyone give me an example of what this might look like? Tasha?
Tasha: It’s like if a guy asks a girl out and is turned down, he won’t keep trying. He just stops asking.
Instructor: That’s correct. Now I want us to think about girls. We talked Bringing Ophelia back to life here. Think about how this applies to friendships. Can learned helplessness be induced in friendships? Establishing and maintaining friendships is difficult, it’s a difficult process.
If a girl sacrifices her morality once to gain the approval of her friends or a man, she’s more likely to continue doing it, right?
Instructor: And I’m just going to say this to be explicit: If Carl is a victim once in elementary school, is he likely to fight back the next time?
Students: No.
Instructor: And what will happen next time? And the next one? What we know – and this is what we have learned – is that girls are under cultural pressure to keep quiet. Girls are under cultural pressure not to be angry, not to use their voice. So if someone is a victim once – if Alison is a victim once – we can take this same concept of learned helplessness and apply it to social relationships.
So the moral of the story is this: it’s important for girls to train themselves to handle failure. Because our instinctive reaction, when we fail, is to close our doors. And when you close yourself off, you don’t open yourself up to learning new ways to relate.
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